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This Chinese Policeman Built The World's Top Gay Dating App, Now He Wants More International Users

The story has been updated to reflect changes in the print version.

Portraits of naked young men hang along the stairs to Ma Baoli's office. Inside is a shirtless picture of Ma himself and the seven other founding members of Danlan.org, the most popular gay discussion forum in China.

Ma, who still goes by the alias "Geng Le" on the forum, had been a policeman in the northern Hebei Province for almost 20 years. He was forced to quit in 2012, when it was revealed that he had secretly moderated Danlan at night. "When I came out, my mother thought I had gone bad," he says. "At that time she thought gays were hooligans."

In just a few years things have changed. Social acceptance of homosexuality has risen rapidly in China. The younger generation--people born in the 1980s and '90s--is blase about it. In metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, gay bars are alive with crowds and music at night.

Ma Baoli, founder of Chinese gay social app Blued, poses for a photo in his office in Beijing.(Credit: Stefen Chow for Forbes)

In this environment the 38-year-old Ma's new career has begun to flourish. In 2012 he founded the company Blue City, evoking memories of the coastal city Qin Huangdao where he trained and worked as a policeman. That November Ma launched Blued, a dating application using smartphones' GPS capability to find gay men nearby. Danlan members were quick to try it out. Now Blued claims 20 million users, including 6 million abroad. That would put it beyond U.S.-based Grindr, which has so far attracted 5 million users globally. But the Analysys International consultancy of Beijing shows only 392,000 opening Blued's app more than once a month. That still beats a domestic gay rival, Zank, with 107,000. (Momo, a connection app for "straight" Chinese, registers nearly 38 million.)

The company's office is near Beijing's central business district, moved from an apartment in the city's suburbs. It now employs 90 people, who work out of a two-story studio sandwiched between avant-garde art galleries and fancy coffee shops.

Last year Ma raised $30 million in a funding round co-led by venture capital firm DCM, giving it a valuation of $300 million. This year he will probably start talking to investors for a new round that would value the company considerably higher, Ma says. International expansion is on his mind. The company launched an English version of the app in the Netherlands in February. It is also advertising in Brazil, Thailand and the U.S., with plans for Taiwan in the pipeline.

"The reason why we invested in Blued is that we don't have to worry about competition because it is clearly No. 1," says David Chao, cofounder and general partner at DCM Ventures.

Blued office in downtown Beijing

In June Blue City worked with e-commerce powerhouse  Alibaba  to send seven homosexual couples to get married in Los Angeles. Alibaba is among the first batch of Chinese companies paying attention to gays and lesbians in Greater China, whose purchasing power amounts to $300 billion, according to LGBT Capital, a trading arm of Galileo Capital of New York.

Ma's goal is a listing on the Nasdaq within the  next  five years. Blue City has no clear source of revenue for now. Next year it will launch premium membership services and start to sell online emojis, skin-care and fitness products, as well as insurance plans designed for gay men, according to Ma. The focus, however, will still be to attract more users, he says. DCM's Chao agrees, saying it is common for social networking sites to grow first and monetize later.

Ma is also recognized for his HIV/AIDS prevention work. He partners with local disease-control centers to educate gays and the public. Blue City also offers free HIV tests. Ma says he decided to work with the government in 2009, when several of his closest friends told him they were infected. Even then, "I had thought HIV only existed in books," he says. "I didn't realize it was such a serious problem."

The work helped him to win an audience with then-vice-premier Li Keqiang in 2012. Ma says he also raised discrimination issues with the premier. Last year Blued held an AIDS awareness event attended by officials from the Chinese Center for Disease Control & Prevention and the UNAIDS China office.

But the central government has no official line. Homosexuality was only decriminalized in China in 1997. In 2001 it was removed from an official list of mental illnesses. Now, Beijing's policy is usually summarized as "don't ask, don't tell," as the government largely ignores what is estimated as a population of at least 40 million, says Jacob Huang, corporate program coordinator at advocacy group Aibai. With no antidiscrimination law in place, those working at government agencies or state-owned enterprises, especially, choose to hide their sexual orientation.

"China has refrained from voicing its stance because the issue is a political one internationally," Huang says. "But it doesn't have a problem with LGBT companies, as long as they abide by the rules like everybody else."

The attitude of Ma's family's has also changed. He says his parents started to openly discuss their only son's business in 2013, when he received 3 million yuan in angel investment from Shanghai Zhonglu Group. Beijing's Crystal Stream Capital also committed an undisclosed amount. Today, Ma says, his folks call relatives whenever he gets interviewed or appears on television programs.

Asked when he thinks gay marriage will be legalized in China, Ma says probably in two to three decades. In the long meantime there's a lot of getting acquainted to be accomplished, and he has just the app to do it.

I am a Beijing-based writer covering China's technology sector. I contribute to Forbes, and previously I freelanced for SCMP and Nikkei. Prior to Beijing, I spent six months as an intern at TIME magazine's Hong Kong office. I am a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism,...

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