Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
As digital media become deeply embedded in everyday life, sexual minority men's self-presentation and identity negotiation increasingly unfold through mobile dating applications. This study investigates how Hong Kong sexual minority men navigate self-presentation and well-being on Grindr within intersecting cultural and political frameworks. Based on 16 semi-structured interviews, the analysis integrates the concepts of imagined audience and the minority stress model to examine how users negotiate visibility and safety amid Confucian family ethics, Christian sexual morality inherited from the colonial past, and the globalized politics of LGBTQ+ identity. The findings reveal that users employ blurred photos, coded expressions, and strategic self-presentations to balance familial obligations, religious norms, and global queer expectations, and that these strategies carry significant psychological costs. The analysis is guided by the framework "platform-mediated minority stress," illuminating how platform affordances and governance mechanisms, including geolocation, filtering functions, and content moderation, translate intersecting moral and cultural regimes into individualized forms of psychological tension and identity management. This study extends the minority stress framework into the domain of digital platforms and offers a new lens for understanding queer digital life in postcolonial, hybrid global cities.
Ye et al. (Thu,) studied this question.