The code didn’t stop in 1979: the HankyCode Originals

What an Original is

Every code in the collection is one of three things. Historical: worn in San Francisco leather bars from 1972 and recorded in the Damron chart (1980) and Townsend’s Leatherman’s Handbook II (1983). Extended historical: documented later, in the bar charts and community lists of the 1980s and 1990s. Or a HankyCode Original: a word that did not exist in the code, written in 2026 on the same grammar.

There are 136 Originals. Each has a unique colour, a left-pocket word, a right-pocket word, and its own page that says, in the first line, that it is new. We never let an Original pass for history. That is the deal that lets us stand next to the real thing.

Why the language needed to go on

The 1970s code was a survival tool built by gay and bisexual men to say, without speaking, what they wanted. It was extraordinary at that. It had nothing for who a person was — no gender, no orientation, no way of being in the world — because in 1972 those words were not the ones that got you into trouble; the acts were.

Fifty years on the situation is reversed for many people. The acts are speakable. The identities are the part that still takes courage. So the Originals move the code from what you do to who you are: aftercare, the holder and the held; the guide and the curious; a gender grid of thirty; codes for the people who run the room and the people who read it.

How an Original is made

An Original starts as a word that keeps coming up and has no colour. It gets a colour that no other code owns — every colour in the collection clears a difference threshold from every other, so no two read the same on a wall. It gets two pocket words, one for each side, written short enough to run across the top of a print in the standard type. Then it goes through the same gates as every other code: the words gate, the typography gate and the quality gate. Only then does it get a reference number and a page.

Originals are also the codes most likely to change. The 1970s code was revised in real time by the people using it; we keep that habit. If a word is wrong, tell us, and the Master changes.

If one of them is you

That is what they are for. Hold the colour. See how it sits. Send it to the person you want to read it. And if the word you need is not here yet, the language is not finished — it never was.

If you are working out who you are and want a person rather than a print, the Support page lists people who listen for free.