Hunter Biden Claims Closeted Republicans 'Break' Gay Dating App Grindr 'Everywhere They Go'

Hunter Biden claimed that the gay dating app Grindr crashes during Republican conventions and gatherings because of an influx of deeply closeted conservative politicians —“the closetocracy”— using the platform.

On the October 6 episode of the “Howie Mandel Does Stuff” podcast, Biden discussed what he sees as political hypocrisy in Washington, D.C.

Biden noted that conservative conventions see such a massive surge in local Grindr traffic from attendees that the app's servers have actually gone down.

The 56-year-old Biden alleged that a network of closeted Republican officials operates in Washington. He argued that the internal conflict of hiding their identity causes these politicians to direct anger outward, often voting for anti-LGBTQ+ policies.

“Literally they break Grindr everywhere they go at the Republican convention,” Biden said.

Grindr's executive leadership and location data do confirm that major political conventions cause a massive, undeniable surge in local app activity.

During the September 2026 Republican gathering in Dallas, Tx., internet users pointed to spikes on Downdetector as proof of a crash.

A Grindr spokesperson clarified that third-party sites like Downdetector rely heavily on unvetted, self-reported user complaints and social media traffic.

“While these rumors are common, the claim is false,” a spokesperson told Lead Stories following outage reports in Dallas in September 2026. “Grindr has not experienced outages connected to the Republican National Conventions or other large events. Third-party sources that often make these claims rely on unreliable data such as self-reporting, while Grindr reports outages directly on its status page.”

Grindr's internal status logs and official Grindr Status Page showed full functionality and no recorded operational outages during the dates of these conventions.

Grindr CEO George Arison publicly confirmed a "significant spike in usage" in the Milwaukee, WI, area during the 2024 Republican National Convention.

Independent data reported a 166 percent increase in local Grindr activity.

Local users also reported an influx of "blank" profiles (profiles with no photos or names), which typically indicates closeted individuals or people seeking high discretion.

At the 2016 RNC in Cleveland, OH, Grindr data showed user traffic near Quicken Loans Arena surged by 66 percent to 120 percent during convention week.

Late-night hosts seized on the speculation, however, with Jimmy Kimmel joking in September, “Grindr had outages in Dallas, just like it did at their convention in Milwaukee in 2024. And of course, there was a huge spike in Cleveland in 2016. It seems there is a lot of man-on-man action at this convention. And not just J.D. Vance humping Trump‘s cankle; a lot of people. It’s amazing."