New dating app hopes to “strengthen the LGBT+ community” by letting you block HIV-positive guys

This just in: There’s a new gay hookup, er, dating app on the market and it claims to be far superior to all the others.

Taimi was developed by a group of anonymous tech guys from Silicon Valley who set out to create “the safest gay dating & social media” after allegedly facing “unspeakable discrimination at the workplace because of their sexual orientation.”

“Their careers slackened off because of the sexual orientation,” the company says in a statement. “Thus, they decided to create Taimi as a tool to strengthen the LGBT+ community.”

Taimi is a play on the words “tame me”. The company says it wanted to create a tamer dating app catered to gay men looking for more than just a meaningless one-night flings.

In addition to offering “bank level security” and popup reminders about taking PrEp pills, the app also boasts other “health-related filters.”

What kind of filters, you ask?

HIV status filters, of course!

That’s right, folks. In its efforts to “strengthen the LGBT+ community”, the developers have still managed to find a way to keep people divided by stigmatizing HIV.

Sigh.

Related: Coming Soon: An HIV Filter On Grindr???

Of course, the idea of including an HIV filter on gay dating apps is nothing new. Grindr floated the idea back in 2016 and received a ton of backlash for it. And last year, the app DaddyBear faced a wave of criticism for flat out discriminating against poz guys.

Many have argued that such filters not only continue to stigmatize HIV by creating a digital quarantine of sorts, but the filters provide a false sense of security.

In a HuffPost op-ed published last year, blogger Alex Garner went so far as to call filtering men by HIV status “an act of ignorance and fear” and is a “bad strategy for staying negative.”

“It’s bad science and simply doesn’t work to eschew poz guys while taking risk with guys who might think they are negative,” he wrote. “Someone may believe they are HIV-negative but actually be undiagnosed as HIV-positive and have a very high viral load.”

He continued, “We can avoid the facts or we can choose to educate ourselves about the latest science. We can filter poz guys or we can engage in meaningful conversations with one another about HIV.”

“We can create more and more barriers to keep us apart or we can choose to bring people together to improve our health and strengthen our community.”

Word.

Read more from Source: New dating app hopes to “strengthen the LGBT+ community” by letting you block HIV-positive guys

Share

About Gay Today

Editor of Gay Today