Digital intimacy in lockdown: crisis re-domestication of dating apps among Chinese single gay men during COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly reshaped everyday life, with long-term effects across multiple domains. While much existing scholarship has emphasised the negative consequences of the crisis, this article highlights its unexpected potentials by examining how single gay men in mainland China used Blued, the country's largest gay dating app, during lockdown. Grounded in domestication theory, we used in-depth interviews to explore how users appropriated these platforms under conditions of restricted mobility, and how such practices generated new understandings of digital intimacy and sexuality. Our findings reveal that dating apps, typically associated with casual hook-ups, were re-domesticated into three distinct functions during the pandemic: as a "sexual laboratory" for experimenting with desire; as an "emotional space" for coping with isolation and as a "community support network" for mutual help. These context-specific practices not only enrich the study of gay social media use but also prompt a broader reconsideration of how technology mediates sexual and affective life under conditions of crisis. Taken together, these findings suggest that inclusive pandemic preparedness must account for how everyday platforms can become informal infrastructures of care, information, and connection when mobility is restricted and offline services are disrupted.