Between sexuality and professionalism: Experiences of gay workers at Blued, a Chinese gay social app company

Abstract

Recent scholarship on gay social apps has largely focused on the experiences of their users. In this article, we take a production-side approach to examine the politics of sexuality and professionalism in Blued, a Chinese gay social app company. Based on ethnography at the company and in-depth interviews with its workers, we found that workers at Blued actively weaved their sexual identity into their professional identity. Also, its CEO made use of workers’ personal memory and collective hope as a motivating rhetoric, transgressing the boundary between the private and the public. Nonetheless, the collapse of the private–public division is not total, because such division was continuously re-established by the company’s corporate external positioning and workers’ pragmatic consideration of their career prospect. The case of Blued reveals a highly dynamic relationship between sexuality and professionalism, which sometimes reinforce and sometimes negate each other.