Left pocket or right pocket? How the hanky code works

The rule

Left pocket gives. Right pocket receives. That is the entire grammar, and it was read across a bar before anyone said a word.

A coloured handkerchief in the back left pocket told the room what you were offering. The same colour on the right said what you were looking for. Two people, two pockets, one colour: a match. The colour named the subject; the side named the role.

It sounds simple because it was built to be. In a dark, loud room in 1972 you could not have a conversation about what you wanted. You could look. So the code was made to be looked at — bright cotton against denim, at exactly the height a glance lands.

Where the rule came from

The left/right convention did not start with handkerchiefs. Around 1970 in New York, men were already signalling top or bottom by which side they wore a set of keys. A writer at the Village Voice is widely credited with the joke that a coloured handkerchief would do the same job more discreetly — and the joke spread.

San Francisco turned the joke into a system. In 1971 The Trading Post, a store on the edge of the leather scene, began assigning meanings to bandana colours and printing cards that explained them. Alan “Daddy” Selby, who founded Mr S Leather, said that he and his partners at Leather ’n’ Things built the code out further in 1972 after a supplier accidentally doubled a bandana order. A stock problem became a vocabulary.

By 1980 Bob Damron’s Address Book — the national guide to gay venues in the US — was printing an annual chart. Larry Townsend’s The Leatherman’s Handbook II (1983) recorded the fullest version. Nobody owned it. It was argued over and revised by the people who wore it, which is why two charts from two cities never quite agree.

How to read a print

Every HankyCode print is one colour, one side. The coloured half is the pocket. If the left half of the sheet is coloured, it is the left-pocket print: the giving side. If the right half is coloured, it is the right-pocket print: the receiving side. The word across the top is what that side means.

The figure stands across the divide on every print, and since September 2026 the figure carries the colour: on the white half the silhouette is filled with the code colour, on the coloured half it is white. The colour of the piece becomes part of the body. That is Rule 17 in our Master, and it is a hard rule for every print.

Two prints of the same colour, hung left beside right, are “the pair” — the way two people stood when the code did its job.

What the pockets do not mean

The pockets never meant good or bad, strong or weak, more or less. Giving and receiving were two halves of the same act, and most people had both colours in a drawer. Many of the 2026 codes make that explicit: on a gender-grid print the left pocket is who you are and the right pocket is who you are drawn to — the same colour, two directions.

And nothing here is a test. If you don’t know which pocket you are, that is fine. The quiz on the home page is five questions with no right answers, and it is happy to be wrong.