Meditations on The Hanky Code- Essay

The Hanky Code is a language whose roots have been eaten by time. The world it was created for no longer exists; A pre-AIDS dreamscape rife with prepositions no longer in use. To be with someone then was different. The Hanky Code’s linguistic family lives on in that look they give you across the bar. But those long lost colors and their fantastical connotations died with 100,000 of our elders, except there is no quilt for lost words.

At the start of things, the Hanky Code was one-half joke. It helped these homosexuals to know tops from bottoms, left from right, but the color coding came later, little adjectives. Those who loved BDSM found each other through the use of black handkerchiefs tucked into the left (top) or right (bottom) back pocket. Fisting tops sported red bandanas into their left back pockets, drag queens wore lavender on the right. What started with utilitarianism became a cultural signifier as well as a tool. As the language spread, more colors were given significance and more jokes were made about the growing hyperspecificity of cruising in this way. At one point in the early 1980’s, Queens Quarterly (“The Magazine For Gay Guys Who Have No Hang Ups”) claimed puce bandanas indicated one was interested in discussion of pre-Minoan art.

This extinct (or at least extirpated) language carries on the great homosexual history of satire. At my best and quickest wit, I feel the blood and genetic material of these linguistic ancestors trickling into me. I know these people through sepia, I watch them survive a virus, hate crimes, and compulsive heterosexuality as I flip through grayscale images in a textbook too small untouched. Determined to survive, they parodied their own precarious semiotics, giggling as they imagined new colorful words to describe the ways their bodies moved through space and the many ways they loved.

I can't hear their laughter now, but at times I like to imagine it. The sense of humor inherent in a language hunted into unuse, untranslatable syllable, a sensation that lives in you and me and all others who survive, an echoing scream laugh inside our ribs, unexpressed in daily life and saved for nights in, caring for one another.

At its best, the code was based on equals. Everyone involved had to be flagging a color to engage in the language together. It became an extension of the body on some sticky hot night along a bridge or somewhere secret where the language was whispered, a limb covered until just the right moment. And many times there were no words exchanged, just touch, just illegal sensation, symmetry. I know something about you, and that is enough. I may never see you again, but I will always know what it felt like to have your hand in my back pocket.