A Gay Hookup App Introduced Me to My Barber. 9 Years Later We’re Still at It

When I moved into my first apartment in Astoria, Queens, in 2015, I had to rebuild my neighborhood essentials from scratch. That meant takeout across various cuisines, quality iced coffee, cheap laundry, and a barber. The barber thing mattered the most. Barber loyalty is important to me, as it is to many other men—so much so that it borders on legally binding. Growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, my dad, my brother, and I all went to the same Italian barber, Mario, for more years than I can remember.

Later, when I started exploring the city on my own, I’d go to Astor Place Hairstylists, a New York institution, and wait for a seat with my guy, Benny. If he was working, I was there. If he wasn’t, I went home and came back at a different time. Trying a new barber has always felt reckless to me. A drink order can be wrong, and delivery can disappoint, but a bad haircut follows you into mirrors for weeks.

Moving to a new borough complicated that. I was newly out, newly living on my own, and newly figuring out what kind of gay man I was going to be. At first, I followed my former roommate Mike’s lead to his barbershop of choice, where a very nice Spanish barber started giving me a hard part shaved in with a razor. At the time, I thought it looked incredible. Looking back, there are photos I would prefer to stay buried for life.

A little later, once I had settled into

A little later, once I had settled into the apartment, I found myself on Scruff. For the uninitiated, Scruff is like Grindr’s slightly calmer cousin (let’s not pretend it’s akin to LinkedIn). You log in to a grid of nearby hairy men and a few headless torsos, most with the same and very obvious sex-related intentions. Somewhere in that grid was another Sean, spelled the same way, which I chose to interpret as a sign of trustworthiness.

He was handsome, bearded, about an inch or two taller, and had a smile that suggested meeting him wouldn’t end with me starring in a top-rated Netflix crime documentary. We chatted. There may have been flirting. I was still fresh enough out of the closet that a man messaging me back felt like I was doing something right. But instead of asking for nudes, he told me I should come get a haircut.

Sean worked at Otis & Finn in Long Island City, an LGBTQIA-owned and operated barbershop that felt much more aligned with the person I was becoming than the hard-part situation I had accidentally wandered into. It also felt potentially mortifying. Was I really going to meet a guy from a sex app in broad daylight, sit in his chair and let him play with my head (the one above my shoulders) for 40 minutes while we both acted like this was standard customer service?

Yes. Yes, I was. Sean remembers the initial

Yes. Yes, I was. Sean remembers the initial weirdness during our first meetup too. “It’s always sketchy meeting someone online for a ‘professional’ service,” he says. He knew we’d chatted, but he also had a job to do. As he put it, nothing more could exactly happen in the chair when “to my left was a straight man and next to him was a lesbian.” Still, he admits he thought I was cute.

But once I sat down, whatever flirtation existed took a hard left into something else. “I realized it was more in the friendship zone,” he says. “You didn’t need or want a hookup. You just needed someone to chat to, to give you honest feedback.”
The cut was good, but the conversation was better. I quickly became a regular. I kept making the two-mile walk from Astoria to Long Island City every two weeks, even though my hair could survive much longer than that.

(The issue is that it puffs out on the sides, and I have never once trusted myself to fix anything with clippers. With my hair, money is no object.)
Sean was still newer to barbering when we met, the same way I was still new to being out. He kicked off his time at Otis & Finn as an apprentice in 2018, while still holding down a 9-to-5. He’d initially wanted to become a therapist, before deciding working for free for years before getting paid wasn’t exactly the path he wanted.

That led him to another kind of chair,

That led him to another kind of chair, one he’d stand behind instead of sitting in, where people talk through their lives while he makes them look better. Over the years, I followed Sean through several different versions of his career and of my own life. First, there was the original Otis & Finn location. I vividly remember getting a cut there right as COVID was starting to spread, the only customer in the shop, because a global pandemic was apparently not enough to keep me from a sharp fade.

Then the city (and the world) officially went into lockdown, and my hair and I suffered in silence. It grew into a puffed-out, tangled mess, while my beard got too long, too patchy, dotted with way too many colors at once. Sean and I still messaged through it. We sent memes, talked virtual dating, and he even gave me instructions for cutting my hair myself. “You have a set line from the hair on the top of your head to the hair on the sides,” he told me.

“Just take it up to that line with a half or one,” which may as well have been directions to land a plane. I told him that as soon as appointments were allowed again, I was making one every week to make up for all our time apart. “Haircut separation anxiety,” I called it. Once reopening finally seemed within reach, he was just as direct. “Your name better be the first fucking one,” Sean said.

Do not disappoint me. When things slowly reopened

“Do not disappoint me.”
When things slowly reopened around late June 2020, sitting in his chair again—now at a separate Otis & Finn location in Court Square—felt like a small return to civilization. I showed up to my first cut in months in a tie-dye crop top and a mask, embarrassingly excited to be back. He eventually left the shop post-pandemic, deciding to cut hair out of his apartment.

I followed him there, naturally, then again when he moved into a new apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Now, I’m his favorite customer at Pretty Dapper, his own shop that opened its doors in 2024, where I book my appointments weeks out, like I’m trying to see a specialist for a rare cancer I’ve diagnosed myself with online. Sean knows changing locations can cost a barber clients, even if the move is only a few blocks, so the fact that I followed him through four locations is, to him, both meaningful and slightly concerning.

“That shows a level of trust in our relationship that is a rarity and a curse,” he jokes. “Because how do I get rid of you?”
There’s no way to pretend a haircut isn’t at least slightly physically weird. A man is standing inches from your face, studying your hairline, and occasionally maneuvering so close that his crotch grazes your arm like it’s just standard business practice.

The whole setup asks for a level

The whole setup asks for a level of trust we rarely acknowledge unless something goes wrong. Dipesh Patel, LCSW, says a haircut can create a “side by side” kind of closeness. You’re physically near someone, but you aren’t locked into direct eye contact, which can make conversation feel less exposing. The routine matters too: same chair, same person, same rhythm. Over time, he says, “many years of haircuts combined can become quite a social biography.”
In my case, Sean has gotten nearly a decade of chapters.

He’s seen me get let go from jobs and, when money was tight, has quietly discounted cuts or not charged me at all. He’s watched me become more independent, find more of my gay tight-knit circle, and become somewhat of a fitness aficionado. I’ve shown up to an appointment after running a few miles looking like I’d been hosed down. I’m fairly certain I’m the only client he allows to use his blow dryer before the haircut appointment starts.

He’s heard about every man I texted too much and every date we categorized by geography or defining trait: Jersey City Will, Little Bo Peep or just Iverson. Oh, Iverson. He can tell what kind of appointment it’ll be before I fully sit down. “If it’s more of a higher octave ‘Hiiiii,’ I know you’ve had a good two weeks,” he says. “But if it’s a ‘Hey,’ then I know I’m going to have to strap in and hunt someone down.”
I should note that I do have an actual therapist.

His name is Josh, and he gives me

His name is Josh, and he gives me professional support. That usually involves guiding me toward my own conclusions like a patient, emotionally responsible adult. Sean gives me the chair version, or what he calls “actual friendship advice.”
Josh helps me see things on my own terms. Sean tells me if Venmo requesting a man who ghosted me is self-respect or a desperate cry for help.

There’s value in both of them, to be clear, and Patel makes the distinction carefully. “A barber can offer perspective and emotional relief,” he says. “A therapist is responsible for helping create deeper and safer psychological change.”
For Sean, the trust isn’t one-sided. After cutting hair for nine hours a day, he says he often goes home with “zero percent battery,” and that some clients see a more energized side of him than his own partner does.

He hears a lot during the day, and he takes his clients’ privacy seriously. His fiancé knows some of them, but Sean says he still doesn’t repeat what they tell him. “It’s not my stories or secrets to tell,” he says, “so I don’t.”
Part of why I think our relationship works is that Sean and I are both gay men, which means I don’t have to translate the high stakes of a haircut before a date or a strange gay-coded response from a man I like.

Patel says shared identity can create a foundation

Patel says shared identity can create “a foundation of cultural fluency and trust,” adding, “being understood without having to explain yourself is its own form of intimacy.”
Sean has seen every era, from several blond phases to a brief silver Danny Phantom–esque moment to the time he talked me off the ledge of a buzz cut that would’ve done violent things for my head shape.

There’s also my long-running insistence that I invented his clients’ post-cut mirror selfies and am owed royalties. He’s shaped parts of my grooming routine, too, mostly by realizing I owned neither the right tools nor enough shame about it. For one birthday, he bought me my first blow dryer, a gift I didn’t know I needed until it arrived and I started using it. “And I don’t buy blow dryers for everyone, I’ll have you know,” he said.

Our bond makes more sense when I remember that this is someone who has watched me change in real time. Sean says the biggest shift has been confidence. “When I met you, you still hadn’t really found who you were. You now know who you are, what your current limits are, and you also know your worth and will shut down a red flag, even before I have to call it out.”
Theoretically, I could walk into a different shop if I wanted.

There are plenty of competent barbers in New

There are plenty of competent barbers in New York. But finding someone who can cut my hair isn’t the same as finding someone who knows which version of me just walked in. Patel says loyalty to a barber can feel so personal because the relationship isn’t only about preferences or technique. “They remember what we were going through when we wanted a buzz cut, or a blond dye job,” he says.

“Finding another competent barber might be easy; however, trying to replace the feeling of being understood is more difficult.”
Patel says one of the more distinctive parts of gay life is that a connection can begin with one possible outcome and become something else entirely. “Sometimes an interaction that begins with the possibility of sex or romance reveals a different kind of compatibility,” he says.

“Not every meaningful relationship between gay men needs to become romantic or sexual.”
I joke that Sean is the longest relationship of my life, but the joke only works because it’s basically true. And wouldn’t you know—I already have my next appointment booked.

Source: www.gq.com