The Hanky Code: Signalling Before Anyone Could Say It Out Loud

For about twenty years, a coloured square of cotton in the back pocket of a pair of jeans did work that now requires a profile page. The hanky code is the best-documented example of how a criminalised subculture communicated before it could speak plainly, and one of the worst-documented in terms of where it actually came from.

Keys before handkerchiefs

The system did not appear from nothing. Gay leather culture in the 1960s and early 1970s already used a left and right convention, worn with a set of keys hanging from a belt loop: keys on the left indicated one role, keys on the right the other. That practice is documented in the bar culture described in the era essay for 1946 to 1969, and the hanky code inherited its logic entirely.

The addition was information. Keys told a stranger one binary fact. A colour could specify an interest, and a colour plus a side could specify an interest and a role in a single glance across a crowded room.

The origin story that will not die

Two accounts circulate and neither holds up.

The first credits a newspaper columnist, usually placed in San Francisco or New York around 1970, who suggested in print that men should wear coloured handkerchiefs rather than keys because it would save time, and whose joke was adopted in earnest. Versions of this story appear in nearly every published account of the code. The underlying article is never quoted, dated or reproduced. It may exist. Nothing in the secondary literature demonstrates that it does.

The second traces the practice to the California Gold Rush, where at dances with almost no women present men are said to have worn blue or red bandanas to indicate whether they would lead or follow. This is repeated with confidence and has no contemporary documentation behind it. It survives because it supplies the code with a nineteenth-century pedigree, and a practice with a long history feels less like something a few men in a bar made up.

The likely reality is unremarkable. An existing left and right convention was extended by adding colour, probably in more than one city at once, and nobody recorded the moment because nobody involved thought it was history.

The lists

What can be documented is the proliferation. From the mid-1970s, bars and leather shops printed cards listing colours and meanings, and the lists grew rapidly. Early versions ran to a handful of entries. Later ones ran to dozens, covering interests of considerable specificity, and they were not consistent between cities or even between shops.

The specific mappings are easy to find elsewhere and are not the interesting part. What matters historically is the shape of the thing. The lists expanded well past the point of practical use, which tells you they had become a genre in their own right: partly a reference, partly a joke, partly an advertisement for the shop that printed them. Actual working use was probably confined to a small number of colours that everyone knew, with the rest functioning as folklore about the code rather than as the code itself.

What it was for, and why it stopped

The system solved a specific problem under specific conditions. Homosexuality was criminal or recently decriminalised across most of the jurisdictions where the code was used. Being explicit in public was dangerous, and being explicit in a bar was only marginally safer. A signal had to be simultaneously visible to the right reader and invisible to everyone else, and it had to work at distance, in low light, without conversation. A coloured cloth does all of that, and it can be removed in a second.

It also did something the community’s later symbols do not. The flag discussed in the history of the leather flag, unveiled in 1989, is a public statement of belonging addressed to everybody. The hanky code was the opposite: a private statement of specifics addressed to almost nobody. The shift from one to the other is a reasonable measure of what changed between the 1970s and the end of the 1980s, a period covered in the era essay for 1970 to 1989.

The decline had two causes. The AIDS epidemic closed a great many of the bars where the code functioned and thinned the population that used it. Then the profile field arrived. As described in the era essay for 1990 to 2009, an online profile lets a person state interests in words, at length, before meeting anyone, which is what the hanky code was approximating with a limited palette and no vocabulary.

What survives is the memory of it, worn at leather events as a citation rather than a signal. That is a reasonable end for a code whose entire purpose was to say something without saying it.