#Gay hand signals code#

#Gay hand signals code#

The hanky code has most often been associated with gay and bisexual men, though it doesn’t belong to just them. Baby queers searching the internet for ways to find their people and send out lesbian vibes will learn that “the universal key chain signal for lesbians is the carabiner clip” and even straight people know it.

The beltside key ring is one of the most enduring sartorial symbols of lesbian culture, one of the few stereotypes of our kind that’s both inoffensive and true. One oft-repeated theory says a Village Voice writer once jokingly suggested that gay men should dispense with this binary key system and develop a more complex system to reflect a broader taxonomy of sexual desire, thus sparking the creation of the hanky code. People involved in the leather scene used to (and sometimes still do) wear their keys clipped to their belt loops based on their sexual preferences: on the right side to indicate that the wearer is a bottom, and left if she’s a top. This code followed the hanky code rules with keys hanging on the left indicating top, or keys on the right, bottom. In addition to gay and bi men, lesbians would also wear their keys hanging on a chain from their pockets to indicate top or bottom. In many cases, they provide a way of making an initial connection. They are self-labelling devices, material imbued with meaning, intended to provide enough information for cruising parties to determine the likelihood of an erotic match. Since we’d just started doing business with them we didn’t want to return the order, so we had to think up a way of selling all these extra dozens of bandanas…the hanky code took off like a whirlwind and spread internationally…we worked together deciding which colours were going to represent what.”įlagging is a way of communicating basic information without needing to speak. “We had gotten an order in from a bandana company and they had inadvertently doubled their order. Selby described the circumstances that led up to the publication of an initial list of coded colours: S Leather was still based in London UK, well before there was a retail outlet in San Francisco. They worked together at this time, developing many of the products that are today considered classics of leather style. S Leather and Ron Ernst and Pat O’Brien of Leather ‘n’ Things. The code is generally believed to have been ‘officially’ launched in 1972 by Alan Selby of Mr.