The Kinky Journey of Former Colorado GOP Star Brad Jones

Once upon a time, Brad Jones was among the hottest figures on Colorado's conservative scene. Starting in the early 2000s and for the better part of a decade, he riled up the libs on a regular basis, most memorably by way of Face the State, a news blog that advanced its rightward agenda through the use of facts and more than a modicum of fun.

Today, Jones is focusing on a different kind of hotness. He's left politics behind in favor of Meet Kinksters, a dating app aimed at folks who want both an adventurous sex life and a long-term connection.

"There are millions of people worldwide who are becoming self-actualized in their sexuality and comfortable with their sexual needs, and society is also becoming more accepting of people identifying and expressing their sexual side," says 39-year-old Jones. "But there really isn't anything on the market that treats sexuality as a serious consideration in a committed relationship."

The journey that took Jones from bright young GOP hope to founder and chief technical officer of a startup aimed at folks who don't want to stop at the missionary position has taken plenty of zigs and zags. But he's never been known for charting a predictable course.

Jones grew up in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., and visits to Colorado during high school as a member of the Boy Scouts inspired him to enroll at the University of Colorado Boulder "sight unseen," he recalls. "And I quickly learned that if you were right of socialist there, you were pretty unique."

CU Boulder's student government proved to be "a gateway drug into becoming chairman of the college Republicans at the time," he continues, "and we had the good fortune to really make the most of a lot of earned media. We did an affirmative-action bake sale that got a lot of national coverage and other things that probably wouldn't raise an eyebrow now. But I also cut my teeth across the student-government debate table with the people who are running Colorado now. Leslie Herod was very involved, and so was Joe Neguse. It was a very unique time to be politically active, regardless of your ideology."

After graduating, "I first landed in former secretary of state Scott Gessler's basement, sleeping on a futon and trading labor for a place to stay by getting his house in Boulder ready to sell," Jones reveals. "But he finally got tired of me stinking up the joint and introduced me to the state tort reform coalition, the Colorado Civil Justice League. That was my first job out of college, and after that, I worked as a consultant for some small campaigns — which transitioned into working on Face the State."

To understand why such a website was needed in 2007, Jones advises "getting into a time machine and visualizing a very different Denver. The city had two daily newspapers, and blogging was very different; it was on the upswing as a medium, but not regarded as a place where you could do serious journalism. So Face the State became a platform for news aggregation, but also for investigative journalism that forced a conversation around state and local politics through a free-market, limited-government lens."

He acknowledges that "we exhibited a selection bias for our stories, but once we decided which stories to cover, we endeavored to be fair about it." He also employed respected, award-winning reporters such as former Westword staffer Jared Jacang Maher to make sure the work was solid — an approach that won Face the State respect and journalistic accolades, including a 2009 Best of Denver award for Best Political Blog.
Quality is no guarantee of survival, however, and despite attempts to branch out with an affiliated radio network and a short-lived print publication (The Capitol Call, which was distributed alongside The Colorado Statesman), Face the State folded in 2011. "I could wax poetic about what went wrong with the business model," Jones says. "But in regard to timing, there was an explosion of, one could say, kissing-cousin media outlets that came in our wake: Breitbart, Daily Kos, Huffington Post. It wasn't because of us, certainly, but I think we were just a little too early, among other things."

After the smoke left by Face the State cleared, Jones worked as an independent web consultant for several years before taking a position as CTO for Fruition, a Denver digital design and marketing agency. But the timing of this gig proved problematic, too: "My first day was March 1, 2020 — and starting a new job three weeks before the shit hits the fan in a pandemic isn't something I'd recommend."

Even before the Fruition job finally ended in May 2021, Jones had begun to make some major life changes. "I sold my house in Denver in July of 2020 and went full-time in a 43-foot fifth-wheel RV the next January," he says, adding that these days, "I spend my summers in Lake City, which nobody has ever heard of — it's just south of Gunnison — and work part-time as a paramedic, helping in the busy season."

In addition to relocating, Jones launched Meet Kinksters, a concept "I'd been kicking around in my mind for a long time," he says — one that emerged "out of lived experience and a dissatisfaction with the products on the market. I really began to understand my own sexual identity in my early thirties, and found it difficult to express my whole self on the existing dating apps. I either had to go onto vanilla apps and try to telegraph that my sexual desires were important, or I had to go on to hookup apps and indicate that I wanted something more than a hookup. That's how the idea of Meet Kinksters was born."

With major assistance from lead investor Andrea Jacobson, a Denver accountant in private practice, Meet Kinksters landed in Android and Apple app stores last December, with a web version that doesn't require downloading recently joining the cyber-family. Thus far, Jones says, the app has attracted just over 4,000 registered users, "including a sizable number of people in Denver and Colorado, because we have sponsored some events, including a Kink Denver party at Tracks."

Still, he readily concedes that the user base of Meet Kinksters "needs to be orders of magnitude larger for it to be successful. But one of the dirty truths of the dating industry is that many upstart apps flood their rolls with fake profiles, and I simply refuse to lie to my customers. I believe my members deserve to be treated as people who are seriously looking for a relationship — whatever that means to them."

Another new feature is expected to be operational on the app soon: the ability to verify users' identities, as well as to ensure that they aren't on any sex-offender registries. "This is an industry first," Jones contends. "Many people attempt to search information about their online matches, but they often don't have enough information to do so confidently. So we're flipping the script. It doesn't prove that someone's safe; that's not possible. But it allows you to lead with the fact that you're proactively demonstrating you care about your match's safety and comfortability in meeting you."

Jones is currently overseeing a WeFunder campaign to help beef up Meet Kinksters' resources — a task that leaves him little time to think about politics. "I'm a pretty die-hard libertarian who isn't even registered to vote," he admits. "How times change." But while he's sure "any PR consultant would encourage me not to talk about politics in the same breath as business," he's willing to outline the reasons for his disaffection from the organization to which he once pledged fealty.

"The Republican Party in 2023, with rare exceptions, is morally and intellectually bankrupt," Jones maintains. "So what would they have to do to appeal to people like me? Give up the culture wars and focus first on principles of limited government, personal responsibility and economic opportunity, and drop the really unimportant social issues that divide the country."

He stresses, "My users are welcome regardless of their political affiliation. But I will say, as someone who is running a business that is rooted in the free expression of your personal identity, that I can't support a worldview that condemns people for simply being who they are."

Whether they're kinky or not.