I got my first hint that the drug culture in my new neighbourhood was different the first time I invited a man over.
It was your standard Grindr set-up: he was hot and nearby, and we were both free. His messages were somewhat muddled. He arrived about 20 minutes later than agreed, which was annoying, given that he appeared to be coming from a friend’s place a mere 100 metres away, but again, he was hot.
We chatted a bit, but we seemed to grasp at the very edges of one another’s meaning. The sex was lacking – he was clearly suffering from performance anxiety. We paused, and he asked if he could smoke.
Now, I’d just moved into a rented flat, and I wasn’t sure the landlords or my neighbours would take kindly to smoking on the premises. I asked whether he meant a cigarette or weed.
‘Tina?’ he said, sheepish.
Ah: well, if I wasn’t sure about smoking a cigarette in here, meth was probably right out.
Now I was the awkward one, bumbling that I’d prefer he didn’t, if that was okay by him. He didn’t push the matter. The energy was gone, and we decided to call it. He disappeared from Grindr not long afterward. He seemed sweet.
Drawn on the map by the A-roads linking Vauxhall, Oval and Stockwell stations, the Tina Triangle forms the core of what might be the gayest neighbourhood in London: the wider borough of Lambeth had the city’s highest proportion of LGBT residents in the 2021 census, and of a normal Sunday afternoon on Grindr, I counted 454 profiles that had been online in the past hour, and all within a kilometre of my flat.
