The intimacy we're actually looking for
Part of a series on queer connection.
Published on June 15th, 2026
For those who haven’t read the previous pieces, this one is part of a series on what came up over the last two months of conversations with queer women, trans and non-binary people about connection.
Talking about queer connection with people eventually led to talking about apps. And the more these conversations went, the more it became clear to me that apps were highly tied to the need people have for intimacy.
That’s the word that kept showing up, in different shapes. Intimacy as the thing the apps promise and rarely deliver. Intimacy as the thing we lost when messages replaced moments. When projecting replaced doing. When defining replaced freedom.
What intimacy actually means here.
It’s not just sex, though it can be. It’s not just romance either, though it can be that too.
Intimacy can be a slow evening in someone’s kitchen, talking about nothing. It can be sharing something you love with someone who’s curious about it. It can be a walk by the canal on a stressful week. It can be the pleasure of being physical with someone. The fun of it.
It can be platonic, romantic, friendly, sexual, all of those at once, none of them clearly. What matters is that it feels real. That it reminds us we’re not alone in our own lives.
These moments do something more than just pass the time. They make us feel whole in our identity. They connect us to someone else and, in the same movement, to ourselves. A version of ourselves we don't always have access to during the rest of the week.
“Please try to connect me with genuine people.”
That came up over and over in the survey, in those words or close ones.
Nothing was ever really built from us.
Gay men built something to spontaneously access intimacy together. Their apps were built around the way they were already meeting each other in real life. They had a culture, they had codes, they had a kind of intimacy that was already theirs, and they put that on a screen. I would have a lot to say about the outcome, but the structure reflects something that existed.
We've (we = queer women, trans & non binary people) never really had that. Nothing was built from us, from the way our desires actually move. Our intimacy isn't shaped like a category. It changes, it overlaps, it refuses to sit still. Friendship slips into romance. Someone who was almost a lover stays a friend for ten years. We can be incredibly close to someone in ways that stay completely platonic. That's how a lot of us actually live.
What the apps got wrong.
But the apps we ended up on assume the opposite. They want us to know what we want before we've met. They assume intimacy is built through online words first, before doing anything together. While, for most of us, it works the other way around. The doing comes first, and the closeness follows. You’re in each other’s lives for a few hours, and something happens or not. The closeness comes from being together, not from optimizing for what we’ll become. Apps failed us, they forgot the whole point: connecting people so they can live things together.
And it’s worth saying: that closeness doesn’t have to last. A single afternoon, an evening, a night that doesn’t lead anywhere afterwards, all of that counts. Wanting intimacy doesn’t mean wanting a relationship. Sometimes the moment itself is the whole point.
One respondent put it simply: “Chances to connect feeling very pay-to-win rather than authentic.” The apps turned connection into a transaction, when what people are actually after is the opposite. Something that resists the format entirely.
The Thursday night thing.
There’s a moment most of us have had. It’s Thursday, your friends are busy, you walk past a bar, you see two people laughing, and you think: I want something to happen for me too now.
We all do something different with that moment. I heard many people telling me: “this is the kind of moment when I redownload an app, I swipe, I exchange three messages, and by the time anything could have happened, the Thursday is gone. I order food. I go to bed.” Others scroll their phone, give up, stay in. Others sit with it. The shape of the giving up changes. The moment itself is the same.
We’ve never really had something that lets that Thursday actually turn into something. Not because we don’t want it. As queer women, trans and non-binary people, we don’t always recognize each other. The chances of bumping into someone on the same wavelength, on the same night, are slim.
This is where technology actually makes sense. Not as a replacement for real life, but as the thing that stays in our pocket and that could offer us continuity. Nobody just built that for us. The evening never turned into anything.
So.
Maybe the question isn’t which app to use, or whether to use any at all. Maybe the question is what we’re really after, as queer people living in big cities. The answer kept landing on intimacy. In all its forms.
The kind of intimacy that happens when two people end up in the same room and stay for a while. We’re good at it. We’ve always been. We just need a way to find each other in the first place.
Pulp is being built with that in mind. More soon.
Pulp is built with the people it’s for. If any of this landed and you feel like sharing your thoughts, I want to hear from you.
Naomi