
Shelby Criswell
In the film Cruising, Al Pacino’s character, detective Steve Burns, is investigating murders within the gay community of New York City in 1980. In a scene where he enters an adult store, the camera cuts to a display of bandanas and then Pacino’s face—wide-eyed, gaze locked. He can hardly take his eyes off them as he asks the store clerk about them. Without batting an eye, the man rambles off various explicit sexual acts, associating each with a color of bandana.
“Flagging,” as it’s known, or the “hanky code,” is a means by which the gay community has historically signaled to each other, not just their participation within the group, but also specifically what that participation entailed. Many of the references are fairly graphic, so I will trust the gentle reader to Google them if curious. Just know that throughout time, marginalized communities have relied on symbols, subtle social cues, nonverbal signs, môdes of dress, etc. in order to communicate with one another and hold a sense of solidarity within the group. It often seems that greater need for protection in the face of greater threat usually correlates with more of these symbols being shared, whereas a greater sense of safety often sees a downtick in such forms of communication, perhaps because they are deemed less necessary. Flagging as a form of queer semiotic communication used to be a more widely understood phenomenon, but in the age of apps like grindr and legalized gay marriage, it has all but gone extinct with many younger queer people never having heard of it.
Like many aspects of gay culture, the history of the hanky code is poorly documented and hotly disputed. Most people refer to an article written in the Village Voice in the ’70s that referenced wearing your keys on the left or right hip to indicate top or bottom roles respectively. The journalist joked that wearing colored bandanas to indicate sexual preferences might be easier and more comprehensive. Shortly after that, reference cards began popping up all over the gayborhood showing which colors referred to what, with the left pocket indicating a dominant interest and the right pocket indicating a submissive role. Others, meanwhile, take the history much further back, citing the accepted convention at all-male square dances during the California Gold Rush of the 1840s: Men who took on the feminine roles used a red handkerchief, while those who took the masculine role wore blue. Although the origins are murky, flagging became a common part of gay culture in the ’70s.
In the 1980s, Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford brought hanky code into mainstream awareness by incorporating it into his stage persona and was often seen wearing a red bandana in his left pocket. Incidentally, Halford is also credited with introducing leather and fetish aesthetics into metal music, and many metalheads refer to Halford’s coming out publicly as a pivotal moment in their own coming out story—or at least in helping them understand and accept gay people.
Although the hanky code as we know it is fairly modern, queer people have been signalling to each other for as long as we’ve been around. Notable author and socialite Oscar Wilde, for example, famously brought a tendance Parisienne to London society in the 19th century when he began wearing a green carnation on the left lapel to signify his identity. Wilde, of course, would eventually be tried and imprisoned for being openly and publicly gay. A proper Victorian acceptance of gay people, as long as they weren’t too public about it, had prevailed as the status quo; figures such as Wilde challenged the decorum and faced serious consequences for such disobedience. Wearing a green carnation was subtle enough to probably not risk violence or persecution for most people, but just obvious enough to make a public statement of solidarity with other gay people.
The poet Walt Whitman also invoked a floral motif to signal gay identity in his poetry, this time the sweet flag, a flower said to have phallic connotations. Lavender flowers have also historically been associated with queerness, as well as the color lavender itself. In Japanese, the word bara (薔薇), meaning rose is used pejoratively to describe a gay man, similar to the term pansy—yet another flower used as a slur for a gay man in English-speaking countries. Still, symbols used to nonverbally communicate queerness can often be simple and innocuous: A carabiner used to clip keys to your belt loop, the notorious lesbian manicure or Converse sneakers and a shaved head on someone assigned female at birth. Sometimes, these coded symbols have origins in urban legend rather than any real, authentic queer expression—such as the silly idea in the early-’90s that an earring on the right ear was a signifier of gayness. This has always felt more like a straight people response to queerness than something gay people did. Sometimes, we even reappropriate symbols used to persecute us, such as how queer punks in the ’80s reclaimed the pink triangle—a symbol Nazis used to brand us during the holocaust—as a symbol of queer audacity and radical liberation. Reappropriating the terminology becomes an empowering move.
And though such actions have always been of value within queer communities, they feel particularly vital right now. In 2025 alone, there have been no less than 588 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in state legislatures across the country, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In New Mexico, at least, all seven of those bills were defeated, but as society seems to be turning its back on us yet again, perhaps it’s time to revive the hanky code. Maybe we can even evolve it a little to reflect contemporary needs. What would a newer, more inclusive, more intersectional hanky code look like? If we’re going to steel our defenses against the coming onslaught, we have to look to historical examples of how to buffer ourselves in solidarity, without sacrificing our identities.