Under the Gaydar

Under the Gaydar

Ten years ago, Henry Badenhorst helped a friend find a date online - and the idea for Gaydar was born. But with success came scandal - and the tragic death of his long-term partner. Here, the man behind the world's biggest dating site reveals what makes him click Interview Patrick Strudwick

Patrick Strudwick
The Observer, Sunday 28 June 2009

Henry Badenhorst has certainly been a quiet revolutionary. As Gaydar, the website he co-founded 10 years ago, became the world's most successful online dating site, Badenhorst remained silent. The site has transformed the way people relate to each other on and offline, an influence reaching far beyond its original ambition of hooking up single gay men. But apart from Badenhorst's regular namechecks on gay power lists - he tends to vie for position alongside the likes of Elton John, Ian McKellen and Evan Davis - we know almost nothing about him.

He's had his reasons to keep quiet. Gaydar has hardly lacked for publicity - on the contrary, it has been a godsend to media scandal stories. When Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten was found to have engaged in a sex act with a rent boy "too disgusting to describe in a family newspaper" - as one paper noted - it was Gaydar that was implicated as the place where they'd met. When Labour MP Chris Bryant was found pictured on the internet sporting nothing but his pants, that was Gaydar, too. And when Boy George was convicted for falsely imprisoning a male escort earlier this year, it emerged that he had found the escort - you guessed it - on Gaydar. But through all the success and infamy, Badenhorst has remained publicly mute. Especially, since Gary Frisch, the co-founder of the site and his former life partner, died after jumping off his eighth-floor balcony in a drugs haze in early 2007.

Now Badenhorst is finally ready to speak, but not before a preliminary off-the-record chat in a central London hotel. I pass the test, it seems, because I'm invited to his office: Gaydar HQ. Not the chrome Soho penthouse one might expect, but a characterless 60s office block set back from a residential side street in Twickenham, southwest London, not far from the rugby ground. At first I struggle to hear him. He speaks in such a gentle voice that I have to lean in to make out what he's saying.

He starts at the beginning of the Gaydar story. "It was June 1999," he recalls. "We (he and Frisch) had a Dutch friend called Frank who was single and said: 'I need a boyfriend - can you help me?'" Frank didn't have time, it seems, to visit bars so, recalls Badenhorst, "we put him on Excite , which had a dating section where you could upload a picture. But it took two weeks for him to get a response, so we said that we were sure we could create something specifically for the gay market." By November the site had launched.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/28/gaydar-henry-badenhorst