Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Back in the days when Miss Poubelle was a fresh young thing on the market, she picked up one of those little cards that listed the hanky code. As a newcomer to the gay scene, she felt obliged to learn what various kinds of "flagging" meant.

Some of them were pretty easy to remember. Yellow for piss and brown for shit were obvious. Black is for SM because of black leather, she supposes. But who was the old queen who sat around and decided that robin's egg blue means "69"? Or that light blue means "blow jobs"? She was relieved to find that in fact almost no one ever seemed to use the hanky code, and in the cases where they did, there were really only about four or five colors that were at all likely. She believes that she has seen people actually wearing gray (bondage), red (fisting), navy blue (fucking), and yellow.

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So as a practical matter, there's not much point in trying to memorize these codes, but they are a funny sideline in the history of gay men's attempts to communicate with each other. Miss Poubelle was interested to learn that there are over 2000 web pages that list some version of the hanky code. The most elaborate versions signal 75 to 85 distinct preferences.

In the oldest, most classic version of the code, a handkerchief worn in the back right pocket shows a bottom and the same handkerchief in the left pocket shows a top. This has always presented a problem for the "69," which by its very nature has no top and bottom roles, and Miss Poubelle was amused to find in some versions of the code that a robin's egg blue hanky worn in the right pocket means "anything but 69."

The use of the right pocket to mean "I dislike" or "I don't want" is relatively unusual in the hanky code. The only other instance seems to be orange. Worn in the left pocket, it is supposed to mean "anything, anytime." But there are three dialects when it comes to orange right. In some versions orange right also means "anything, anytime"; in others it means "anything (so long as I'm bottom)"; and in still others, it means "nothing." It is not clear to Miss Poubelle why someone uninterested in sex would bother with a hanky to begin with, but it takes all kinds.

Another odd use of the right/left distinction is also seen in versions of the code where the color of the hanky is supposed to indicate one's profession. Worn on the left, medium blue, rust, or the skull-and-crossbones indicate that you are respectively, a cop, a cowboy, or a pirate. (Wouldn't the eye patch and parrot be enough to let people know?) Worn on the right, these colors are said to indicate that one is seeking a partner of this sort. (Good luck!)

Some of the code is of admittedly limited utility-- if you're a drag queen, do you really need to wear a lavender hanky to let people know? Isn't the mascara enough? If you are fat, do you need to wear apricot so that people can tell? And given the lighting in most gay bars, god help the fag who confuses mauve (navel licking) with maroon (cutting with razors).

Miss Poubelle agrees with the sensible people at the Windy City Bondage Club who are trying to revive the somewhat neglected art of flagging. They advocate just ten colors: black, gray, orange (anything/nothing), red, yellow, navy blue, light blue, hunter green (daddy/boy), camouflage (military), and pink (tit play/dildos). Of course, if that fails, we could always settle for talking.