Why I built LezFindr

I was sixteen when my family found out I was gay. It happened because a friend wanted me to skip school. I said no, so she called the front office pretending to be my mom. The substitute that day happened to know my mother, so she called her, and my mom went through my room. Then she showed up at school and came apart on me. She drove me to Target and accused me of being on drugs, of sleeping around, all of it. When she made a comment about what was on my computer, I finally just said it: “Mom, I'm gay, not a drug addict. I have straight A's. My friend breaks one rule for me and this is what you do?”

She unraveled. She called the families from the Christian school I used to go to and told them to keep their kids away from me. A few days later my whole family cornered me in my own house. They told me I would be raped by old men, that I would die of AIDS, that I would burn in hell forever. It was spiritual blackmail, and it went on for a long time. My brother decided I couldn't stay with my parents, so I was sent to live with my sister. I spent a stretch pretending to be straight. When they found out I had a boyfriend, they kicked me out.

There is a part of this I did not understand until much later. I was not born into that family. They adopted me. They were pro-life, and someone had called out the hypocrisy of telling other people not to give up their kids while never adopting any themselves. So they adopted two of us, me and a boy named Nathan. When Nathan's birth family fought to get him back, they let him go and kept me. I think, in their way, they believe they love me. But the truth is that I was a point they were making, from the very beginning.

I went to my friend Brandie's house crying, and she and her mom took me in for a few weeks. Then Wendy took me in. My friend Nate, who was older than me and also had nowhere to go, moved into the spare room with me. I had a job at Taco Bell, so I paid a hundred, maybe two hundred, in rent, and in return they fed me, they loved me, they took care of me. Wendy was the first to step in, and she used to say I was just like her kid, even though she is only four years older than me. Later there was Jeromey, and Drake, and always Wendy, steady the whole way through.

Almost every one of the people who caught me was a queer woman. Sapphic women became my family. That is not a line for a website. That is my actual life.

In my twenties, after some years in Seattle, San Francisco, and Sacramento, and after meeting my partner DJ, I landed back in San Luis Obispo. DJ and I have been together nineteen years now, and I am lucky to have him. Our place was always full. Backyard parties, movie nights, every kind of friend. When Grindr came out, all of us downloaded it, and it kept starting the same conversation: why is there nothing like this for women?

We talked about it constantly. What we kept coming back to was a wingwoman in your pocket, something that answered the question every woman in that group was tired of asking. Is she into women? Is she even an option?

I had just started building simple Android apps, so I figured I could build this one. News flash: I could not, at least not then. But I believed in it enough to fund it. We went through a lot of names. We tried Scizzr and ran into a conflict with a paper in West Hollywood building the same thing (it's defunct now). Fingr was too crass. We landed on LezFindr.

The first version did not make it. A small team came together and then fell apart, and I was bankrolling it more than building it, so it was fragile from the start. We pulled it from the market. Around then, the team behind HER talked to us about buying us out, email list and all. I said no. It was not the right fit, they were headed a different direction, and I did not like the idea that women should get exactly one app when, as a gay man, I had a dozen to choose from. I told anyone who would listen that LezFindr would come back, and that this time it would stay.

It took years. From 2020 to 2023 I rebuilt it on my own, one mistake at a time, and got a working version onto the App Store by the end of 2023. In 2025 it finally came together. I had learned enough to build it properly, from the ground up, on a custom backend made to be fast, secure, and built to last.

I built it in the open, with the people it is for. I would go to DJ's drag shows and ask queer women to try the app and tell me what they actually wanted. In almost every group, more than one woman would say, a little quietly, “honestly, sometimes I just want to hook up.” Those are my people. So are the friends of mine who have been married for decades. Both are welcome here. Sometimes you have to say the quiet part out loud, and that was the moment I knew I was building the right thing.