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Speaking of parties, The Verge typically refrains from covering the White House Correspondents’ Dinner week, often dubbed “Nerd Prom,” as it tends to be a bit too much insider celebration for the average reader. This year, the event took a bizarre turn when it was abruptly canceled due to an attempted shooting, yet the media circles continued their festivities. However, one event caught our attention — Grindr’s party, described by Joe Hack, Grindr’s head of global government affairs, as organized by “a midsize tech company that happens to be gay.” Held the night before the dinner, it stood out for various reasons. In today’s climate of renewed LGBTQ anxiety, why did a gay dating app, often associated with hookups, decide to host a gathering for Washington insiders? Why choose this peak social season and enable media coverage?

As always, if you have any tips or insights, please send them to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com.

Had someone remarked that lobbyists for a publicly traded tech firm were orchestrating a cocktail event just before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, it might not have garnered much attention. But when Grindr sent out invitations, the buzz in Washington was palpable: Grindr, the “gay dating and hookup app,” was hosting a party? This curiosity even led TMZ to interview Hack and dispatch their Congress reporters to seek Republican viewpoints. The Advocate detailed the scramble within LGBTQ circles for a coveted invite, while writer Josh Barro lamented his inability to RSVP in time. The Onion humorously speculated about the “poppers lobbyists” expected at the gathering. DC was abuzz with the hope that this would be a party unlike the usual Washington fare.

Despite the anticipation for something wild, the reality was quite the opposite. Washington insiders, whether Republicans or Democrats, are typically too cautious to step out of line socially, wary of being caught by a colleague, superior, or even James O’Keefe, who hinted at sending an undercover agent to the event. By midnight, the most daring act I observed was a single, restrained kiss. Otherwise, the night’s daring might have been limited to discussions of jumping into the pool in full attire — but only if cameras were put away. “Please, god, I hope someone jumps in,” a Washington Post reporter murmured, while a colleague captured images of the few who dared to dip their toes into the water.

Nevertheless, this was the Grindr party — the highlight of Nerd Prom, and everyone from journalists to senior officials, politicians, publicists, staffers, lobbyists, and influencers had been vying for an invite all week. For once, the tables were turned: a tech company hosted an event to wield influence in Washington, yet it was Washington pleading for entry. By 9 PM, when I showed up, the line stretched out the door, with even the well-connected in black cars being directed to the street’s end. “We’re at capacity,” the PR team informed me, engrossed in their iPads, leaving me to wonder if they were cleverly creating a sense of exclusivity.

It turned out that the party was at capacity. I just had to do some aggressive name-dropping to get in and go past the foyer.

There’s a general slate of high-end fancy places that party planners fight over for the week— Meridian House! The Four Seasons! The French ambassador’s residence! — but this unassuming Georgetown mansion, built in 1840, was new to the scene. In 2022, a luxury real estate group purchased the mansion for just under $9 million, gutted the 11,000-square-foot Federal-style interior, and reopened it in late 2024 as a high-end rental aimed at the modern, discreet billionaire or Saudi royal: soothing beige walls, designer statement chandeliers, massive tables for huge floral arrangements and pyramids of boxes of burgers and french fries. But the gardens. Oh, the gardens. Somehow, over the past two centuries, the owners had carved out a full half acre of real estate in Georgetown and transformed it into a lush paradise of wandering pathways among boxwoods and trees, burbling fountains and marble statues, terraces enclosed in hedges, hidden greenhouses, and a swimming pool behind ivy-covered walls about two stories tall.

And the gardens were packed with hundreds of DC’s “power gays” (as UnHerd’s John Maier put it) from across the political spectrum, all of whom had been working in Washington for decades and knew the traditional party spots, but had never known this mansion even existed until now.

Not that it was a party strictly for the power gays, mind you — but their allies had to be powerful and connected, too. “I had 10,000 people message me about this,” Hack told me (a straight woman) once I got in. The intrigue over a Grindr party may have done a bit of the heavy lifting, but this was supposed to be just a cocktail party, just one stop on the Friday evening party circuit between the Washingtonian party at the Four Seasons and the UTA event at Isla. Except people weren’t leaving. It might have taken five minutes to get a glass of wine, to say nothing of a made-to-order espresso martini, and getting up the stairs required too much crowd navigation. They wanted to stay, even when the liquor ran out well before midnight.

“Obviously there’s a huge number of Democrats in this country who have done a lot of incredible work on behalf of gay rights, and we work very closely with them,” Grindr CEO George Arison told me, yelling over Daft Punk blasting on the outdoor speakers. “But there are also plenty of Republicans we work with as well, and they are both on the Hill and in the administration. It is a fact that there are a lot of very powerful gay Republicans in this administration. If you probably add up them in total, they have more power than gays have ever had. I mean, one of the four most powerful people in the world right now is a gay man.” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — the gay man who “runs the economy,” as Arison described him, laughing — had been invited, and though he didn’t attend, Shane Shannon, one of his senior officials, did show up, according to Hack. In Washington insider terms, that’s basically tacit approval.

When he started planning the event, Hack, a political strategist who’d worked the WHCD circuit for two decades straight, made a deliberate choice: Grindr would not partner with a media organization for the event, bucking the trend of companies collaborating with news outlets for a proper celebration of the free press pretext. Instead, Grindr was celebrating the First Amendment right to freedom of expression, which does count as a pretext to slot the party into Nerd Prom week — but also, Hack emphasized, allowed Grindr’s priorities to take center stage. “I wanted this to be clear that this was our event. I didn’t want to dilute that attention.”

Several Washington outlets published articles focused on Grindr’s political priorities, in the very staid way that Washington outlets tend to do. Vanity Fair reported that Hack, a Republican and former chief of staff to Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), had built Grindr’s relationships with House Republicans to shape the App Store Accountability Act, which placed the responsibility for age verification requirements on the app stores rather than the apps themselves. Politico noted that Grindr had “poured $1.6 million into its influence operation since it registered to lobby federal lawmakers in April 2025,” and was now working on a slate of hard policy issues beyond the App Store Accountability Act: kids’ online safety within the national AI framework, IVF and surrogacy access, and its biggest goal, federal funding for HIV prevention. (Hack told me that they were about to announce the hiring of his Democrat counterpart.)

But there was more to the party’s objectives than the lobbying disclosures. Without a second brand involved, Grindr had full control of the party’s atmosphere and how to present itself. It was Grindr’s decision to host the party in this mansion, to opt for burgers and oyster shuckers over passed canapes, to curate the guest list and select their invitees and set the tone of the evening: somewhere between networking event and tie-loosening “having a good time,” as one Republican told me, but well short of anything that could give conservatives ammo in the culture wars.

In short: Grindr was a good political partner for Democrats and Republicans, even in Donald Trump’s administration. And while several big names did show up to the party — Don Lemon, Ken Martin, David Urban, Keith Edwards, Jon Lovett (who ribbed the alcohol situation on Jimmy Kimmel Live the next day) — the vast majority of people at the party were arguably more important to win over. It was senior political staffers, journalists, lobbyists, advisers at interest groups, pollsters, and everyone with some hand in drafting the laws before the electeds vote on them.

Was it typical quote-unquote allyship? Not in the public sense, and don’t expect Trump officials marching hand in hand with the progressive caucus during Pride. But Hack emphasized that while Grindr was “in many ways, just another midsize tech company that happens to be gay,” company leadership felt an urgent responsibility to protect their user base. The upfront way to do that was through policy wins and shaping laws, but he also felt like Grindr had to go one step further than other dating apps: “It’s also a moment where you see a lot of corporations stepping back from their commitments to our community.”

Implicit in his statement was a painful reality: After a decade of advances, LGBTQ rights are slowly being eroded across the country. Several Republican states are petitioning the US Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Funding has been stripped from health services for LGBTQ Americans. The federal government is quietly eliminating benefits for same-sex couples. And if certain online safety laws pass and the anonymity of the internet disappears, the possibility of a Grindr user being outed and punished for expressing their sexuality is all but a given.

And that is what the politicking is for. “We feel, I think, even more of an urgent need to have a seat at the table,” said Hack. “There’s an old saying in Washington: that if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu.”

The boys were also there: