I’ve always been extremely skeptical about the concept of gay-themed social networking. Mostly, this is because services that describe themselves as gay social networking sites are, almost invariably, tools for facilitating casual sex. For instance, here are the front pages of Gaydar, a British site, and Manhunt, the American juggernaut of internet hookups:

As Manhunt articulates rather clearly with the above photo, “gay social networking” generally means “twinks finding older bears to feel them up and fuck away their low self-esteem.”

And then there’s something like Grindr.

First of all, any gay man with an iPhone (so, all of us) who says he hasn’t installed Grindr at least once is lying. We all have. And then most of us uninstalled the app 20 minutes later and deleted the .ipa from iTunes to erase all evidence. I speak from personal experience on this matter.

Anyway, Grindr combines the insatiable collective libido of the gay community with Sims-style heads-up omniscience about the sexuality of others in a way that most people can’t help but find fascinating. Discovering, in seconds, that the man across from you in a Castro Street Starbucks has a six-pack and a ten-inch cock is at once disturbing and endlessly amusing; you get to know people around you intimately, without actually having to know them at all.

(It’s worth noting that, apparently, the next frontier in Grindr is women pretending to be the naked torsos of horny gay men. Because apparently gays can’t even be trusted to arrange clandestine hookups for themselves anymore.)

But, again, we end up at the same result: gay social networking reduces to sex.

There are a handful of exceptions. For instance, American site DList bills itself as “a social network for gay guys and their friends,” with advertisements elsewhere describing it as “a sexy, messed up Facebook, but hotter.” When I visited earlier today, the following came up, which I think encapsulates the DList experience quite nicely:

Yes, if you’re a crazy scenester in New York City, you probably do belong on DList. And odds are, if you try hard enough, you can find one of the other four members of the site who isn’t cruising. And you can talk about Of Montreal and the best rice pudding in SoHo. But, having used DList for ten minutes (long enough to gather evidence for this post; not quite long enough contract any STIs), I get the impression that most of the headless, hairless torsos of DList members are gathered in the pursuit of, again, casual sex.

The whole situation really does begin to seem hopeless, until you ask the basic question: what is the market for a gay but basically nonsexual social networking site? If I’m not looking to get fucked, what appeal does interacting with gay people online offer, versus interacting with anyone else? And, considering I swore off online forums years ago, there isn’t even a place in my life for that.

Enter Thingbox.

At the outset, its concept doesn’t seem to be vastly different from that of DList. But, crucially, where Thingbox has differentiated itself — and what has kept me on the site for two months now, despite being in a relationship and not remotely (sexually) interested in any of the people I’m meeting — is that it developed a culture where facilitating casual hookups isn’t the dominant order of business. There’s a collective recognition, amongst Thingbox members, that even as you might be a horny, lonely single man in London, Thingbox isn’t the most effective venue to get your rocks off. And that recognition creates a space for conversation that isn’t totally objectionable.

I have to qualify my endorsement of Thingbox in a few ways:

First, it’s not some de-sexed intellectual playground for Oxbridge gays. There are more than a few naked torsos, and if you scratch the surface, there’s more than enough smut to go around. On any given day, you’re as likely to see a discussion of peanut butter cheesecake brownies on the front page as you are the somewhat infamous thread, “Would you fuck the previous poster?” (both of which were on trending at the time of this posting). Of the few hundred groups you can join, two of the most popular are “Bears” and “Stupendously Large Cocks.” And, as if this weren’t enough, every day or two fashion blogger BryanBoy posts the sordid details of his thoroughly unsafe sexual encounters for everyone to read. And, like the wraparound sunglasses he often wears, they’re not pretty.

The people on Thingbox are, by and large, also the people with Gaydar or Eurowoof profiles. But, on the whole, I’ve found Thingbox members to be more articulate, better informed, and somewhat more intelligent than your baseline internet gay.

Second, the reason I think Thingbox is so successful is also one of its biggest pitfalls: namely, there’s a pretty standard character profile for a Thingbox member, and the various people you interact with don’t deviate terribly far from it. Thingbox is, without a doubt, the cult of the skinny, bearded scenester with tattoos and lots of body hair. Between 90 and 100 percent of posts are sarcastic, bitter, or self-deprecating. The number of members over the age of 35 can be counted with two hands, and possibly one or two toes. The number of nonwhite members is comparably low.

The upside of the Thingbox dynamic is that, generally, you can find interesting things to talk about with people you’ll likely find interesting. A self-selecting community of educated, city-dwelling British gays is almost necessarily going to have some convergence of areas of interest. The downside, of course, is that at times, it seems like a bit of an overly-preening echo chamber.

Two months in, though, I find myself thankful that I joined. No one I’ve met on Thingbox is someone I would necessarily want to meet for drinks in London. But it made me realize that there is something useful about being able to discuss gay issues in the company of like-minded gay men. It’s possible that this is just the undercurrent of horny intellectualism of Thingbox meshing well with the way my brain works; but, at the very least, it’s an encouraging instance of a moderately successful not-entirely-sexual gay social networking site. And, in a world of Guys With iPhones and Craigslist casual encounters, that has to count for something.