Before it was art: a statement on origin, custodianship and consent

Why this exists

This project did not invent a language. It is translating one that already existed — coded, risked and lived by people who are not its authors. Before any of these artworks are sold, that language is owed an honest account of where it came from, and who still holds it. This page is that account.

The work is built from a real, documented system of survival communication. That gives it its authority — but only if the history underneath it is told straight, sourced properly, and offered back to the people whose history it is. Authenticity here isn’t a tone of voice. It’s a paper trail.

Where the code came from

Coloured bandanas were practical, everyday kit for cowboys, railroad engineers and miners across the 19th-century American West. Gay folk history in San Francisco traces an early coded use of bandana colour back to the Gold Rush era, when men dancing together at square dances — short of women partners — used a blue or red bandana to mark which part, traditionally male or female, they would dance.

The system gay and bisexual men actually wore in bars and on the street is a 20th-century invention. Around 1970 in New York, cruising men were already using which side they wore a set of keys on to signal top or bottom; a Village Voice writer is widely credited with the joke that a coloured handkerchief would do the same job more discreetly — and the idea spread.

The system expanded into something close to what is recognisable today in San Francisco around 1971, when The Trading Post, a store selling erotic goods, began assigning meanings to handkerchief colours and printing cards explaining them. Alan “Daddy” Selby, founder of Mr S Leather, said that he and his partners at Leather ’n’ Things built out the code further in 1972, after a supplier accidentally doubled a bandana order — turning a stock problem into a new vocabulary.

By 1980, Bob Damron’s Address Book — the standard national guide to gay venues in the US — was publishing an annual chart of meanings. Larry Townsend’s The Leatherman’s Handbook II (1983) is the version historians generally treat as the most complete record, and the photographer Hal Fischer had already treated the system seriously as a semiotic code in his 1977 work Gay Semiotics.

There was never one single authority over this code. It was built, argued over, and revised in real time by the people using it. That is the point — it is a living system assembled by consensus and use, not handed down by any one author. This project does not get to be that author either.

What it was for

This code was not styling. It was built in decades when being openly gay could end a job, a tenancy, a custody case, or a freedom — and when direct speech in the wrong place carried real risk. Coded signals like this existed because they had to.

The danger did not stay in the past. In 1987, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London — one of the oldest surviving queer venues in the country — was raided by police wearing rubber medical gloves, ostensibly as a precaution against infection, while eleven people were arrested, including the performer on stage that night. UK historians cite the raid as characteristic of how gay venues were treated through the AIDS crisis: visibility itself read as a hazard to be policed.

That is the distance this project is actually measuring. Not from one bright moment to another, but from a system built to avoid being seen, to a body of work built specifically to be seen — on a wall, in a window, in a back pocket again. The gap between those two states is the subject. It is not yet history; it is recent enough that the people who lived it are still here to be asked.

Who still holds this history

This project treats the following as the standing authority on this material — not as background research, but as the institutions and communities this work is accountable to: the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, built and governed by the community it documents; the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, the archive of the city where the modern code took its most documented early form; and the UK Leather Archive at Bishopsgate Institute, London, the relevant UK repository.

Alongside the published record: Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics (1977), Larry Townsend’s The Leatherman’s Handbook II (1983), Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk’s Gay by the Bay (1996), and Jordy Jones’ biography of Alan Selby, The Mayor of Folsom Street (2017).

What this project claims — and doesn’t

Each artwork translates the code’s colour-and-position grammar into a standalone piece of contemporary art. The work does not claim to have invented the code, to own it, or to speak for the leather or wider kink community. Every historical colour and meaning used is cross-referenced against the documented record above, not invented or approximated for effect. Where we have added new codes — the 136 HankyCode Originals — they are marked as ours and dated 2026.

The concept itself is not new opportunism. It was developed at university for a 2000 degree show, and is being returned to now — over fifty years after the code’s first documented appearance — as a considered body of work, not a trend response.

An open hand

Where this account is incomplete, told from too far outside, or simply wrong, the people who lived this history are the ones positioned to correct it — and that correction is wanted now, not later. The studio is seeking advisory input from the Leather Archives & Museum, the GLBT Historical Society and the UK Leather Archive, and will credit and consult rather than simply cite.

That is the basis on which this work asks to be taken seriously: not as a celebration borrowed from a community that built something out of necessity, but as a piece of contemporary art that knows exactly whose history it is standing on — and says so, in public, first.