After fifty years, reclaim it.

A colour in a back pocket, worn to be read across a bar. This is where it came from, who wrote it down, and why it didn’t stop — and why, fifty years on, it is yours to wear again.

The code

The hanky code is a system of coloured handkerchiefs worn in the back pocket to signal, without a word, what someone was looking for. The side mattered as much as the colour: left pocket gives, right pocket receives. Around 1970 in New York, men were already signalling with which side they wore their keys; the handkerchief was the discreeter version. In 1971 The Trading Post in San Francisco began printing cards that assigned meanings to colours, and in 1972 Alan “Daddy” Selby and his partners at Leather ’n’ Things built the code out further after a supplier accidentally doubled a bandana order. By the end of the decade it had been printed on bar cards, sold in leather shops and argued over in every city that had a scene. The studio’s full account is the Statement on Origin and Custodianship.

Who wrote it down

Three documents anchor the record. Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics (1977) photographed the code as a language and put it in a gallery. The Bob Damron Address Book carried a chart from 1980 that travelled in a million jacket pockets. And Larry Townsend’s The Leatherman’s Handbook II (1983) recorded the fullest version of the code as it was actually used. Where a colour on this site is marked “Historical”, it appears in those sources. Where it is marked “Extended historical”, it appears in the later bar charts and community lists of the 1980s and 1990s.

Why it had to be a code

It was a code because it had to be. Being legible to the right person and invisible to the wrong one was the point, at a time when the wrong person could cost you your job, your flat or your freedom. In London, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern raid of 1987 — police in rubber gloves — is the reminder that this was not ancient history.

The stages

Where the archive lives now

The physical record is held by the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco and the Bishopsgate Institute in London. We cite them, we link to them, and where we can we consult them. The codes belong to the communities that built them; our prints are a specification of the record, not a claim on it.

Why it didn’t stop

The 1970s code had words for what people did. It had almost none for who they were. In 2026 HankyCode added 136 Originals on the same grammar — colour, pocket, word — so that a gender, an orientation or a way of being in the world can be worn the way the old codes were. The full 1970s code, written the way it was written, is kept for adults in the archive, behind an 18+ door.

Checked against the Statement on Origin and Custodianship (June 2026) and the Timeline 1970s–2026 · sources listed above · last built 2026-09-18