Flagging

Pride Flag Fetishism and The Hanky Code

A piece about Pride flags, in March? Humor me.

On an unseasonably warm day in New York City recently, I killed some time before an appointment, sitting outside in tiny Giuseppe Verdi Park, at 72nd and Broadway. There’s a really beautiful ornate Belle Epoque apartment building at that intersection, and I noticed that, over the lovely dome of its tower, they were flying the Progress Pride flag. I shuddered. Ugh. I find that flag sinister. Yes, I, an actual gay man, find that flag disturbing.

I can hear you: Sinister? Really? Drama Queen. To which I say: Yes. Yes. and Duh! But seriously—I am continually baffled by this fervor for ever-expanding acronyms and pride flags so busy and confused, they look like Pucci prints. What exactly are we proud of here? What is the Progress Pride flag saying, actually? The rainbow part I’m familiar with. I wrote about its history and significance in another essay. Plastered over that we have a chevron incorporating the white/pink/blue Trans flag colors—but, wait—if the Pride flag already represents LGBT, then Trans is already included as the T, so why this additional emphasis? What makes this specific representation of something already implied progressive? Anybody..? The Progress Pride flag also adds to the redundant chevron brown and black stripes—for BIPOC people, one assumes. Would that be just LGBTQIA2S+BIPOC, or any BIPOC?

Some of the many Pride flags

Guys, you know, Gilbert Baker designed a rainbow flag for Gay Pride because all the colors of the rainbow are meant to represent all colors and kinds of people. Actually, the colored stripes stood for things like LIFE and HEALING and SPIRIT, things all humans share. But then, Pride used to mean let’s all live together as equal humans in the world. We wanted to just live our lives alongside straight folks. We wanted to belong, not segregate ourselves. Why would we do that? We’d been driven underground, forced to live lies and to find each other in the shadows. The whole point of the parade—which began as a liberation march, lest we forget—was to walk proudly in the sunshine as ourselves. And why are we adding brown and black stripes to the rainbow, as if there were colors left off? Is there a caucasian LGBTQIA2S+ stripe? Like peach, or ecru? What about Asians? How did we devolve from symbolism to skin tones?

It seems to me that this flag is not about Pride at all, it’s about the display of allegiance to a set of ideas and political values that has less to do with inclusion and more with exclusion of anyone who isn’t LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC, making the out group cisgender, heterosexual, and white. Oh, you mean, like my parents. Whom I came out to in 1984 and who accepted me and embraced my ex-partner of 16 years and loved me for myself? People like that?

I loathe the word “cisgender” and never use it. The term appeared in 1994, and started showing up in dictionaries in 2015. It’s a newly coined word, no matter what some smug Zoomer tells you about it having always been the term for the opposite of transgender. Cis comes from the ancient Romans, and was used by their military as a prefix meaning “on this side.” Say, of a river. The aforementioned acronyms and their associated banners are, therefore, a sort of line in the sand. You straight white heteronormative people on that side, and the rest of us on this side—that is, unless you declare yourself an “ally” and join the cool kids under the Ally Pride Flag! This banderole consists of a background of black and white horizontal stripes (suggesting prison pajamas out of Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock) with another sort of rainbow striped, chevron-shaped “A” slapped on top. It’s hard to tell what the symbolism is (aside from the “A", for “ally”, which, I don’t know about you, inevitably brings to mind Hester Prynne), but regardless, why is this flag necessary?

We have amazing organizations like PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) which volunteer, encourage families to accept their LGBT kids, and do good works. PFLAG always marched with us in Pride parades, in unity under the rainbow flag. Their “allyship” was never in doubt just because they weren’t waving the proper, symbolically encoded pennant. And who designed these garish flags? I hope it wasn’t a homosexual. Tsk. So busy.

I have to say that I find all of these flags reminiscent of the old Hanky Code. For the uninitiated (and I use that term with a knowing wink to leather daddies everywhere), here’s a little background on the Code.

The Hanky Code (note the chevron…)

There was a time, before hookup apps and video chat rooms, when gay men, who were forbidden to be open about themselves and to pursue connections with each other openly, developed coded languages in order to signal their sexual identities and interests to each other. Oscar Wilde wore a green carnation in his buttonhole—a signal of homosexual inclinations. In the 1970s and 1980s, certain modes of dress and hairstyles, the wearing of an earring in the right, as opposed to left ear; even the use of a certain fragrance signaled one’s “membership” in the tribe: for the record, it was Halston Z-14, a very strong, distinctive men’s cologne. In the leather/kink community, this kind of signaling became, like most things, highly fetishized. Enter The Hanky Code. The ritual of “cruising,” in leather bars and clubs, was a kind of jungle ritual where men circled each other, checking each other out, employing stares, smiles, and winks to indicate sexual interest. The Hanky Code took things next level by introducing a color coded fetish language in which one wore a bandanna tucked into the back of one’s jeans—on the left if you considered yourself Top/Dominant, and on the right if you were more Bottom/Receptive. The color of the bandanna indicated an interest in a specific sexual act: dark blue for intercourse, light blue for fellatio, yellow for—you guessed it—”water sports.” That would be piss play for the uninitiated. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I think you get the idea. The Hanky Code was all about signaling, not only one’s preferences, but what one’s role would be in a hypothetical sexual encounter. It’s basically hanging out a fetishistic shingle: this is what I’m into, and see me as the top or bottom in the potential sexual encounter. My leather friends may bristle, but I see a kind of gender binary being suggested as well: a yin and yang if you will; the dom and the sub, alpha and beta, the sadist and the masochist, active and passive. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The point I’m making is that the ritual of colorful rags in pockets, literally referred to as “flagging,” has always been less about declaring one’s identity and more about establishing one’s role in a fantasy; an alternative reality. Butch sex cosplay, if you will. Avatars as drawn by Tom of Finland.

The Hanky Code itself became a fetish, in which one might wear multiple bandannas on left and right—a sort of “one from column A, two from column B” sex menu, as ‘twere. Hankies went beyond colors to patterns, like paisley (into boxer shorts), and materials, like mosquito netting (into outdoor sex) and—my personal favorite—silver lamé (for star fuckers!). Oh, the endless creativity of gay men.

This kind of fetishism and role play is plainly at work in the concoction, not only of the many Pride flags, but the infinite absurdities of things like neopronouns, and avatar identities like demigirl and womanflux. Things get dangerous, I think, when this sort of performative fetishist identity play is taken so seriously that it threatens societal acceptance of sexual orientation. My being gay is neither a choice nor a fetish—it’s the truth of who I am and whom I love. I and others before me fought to be accepted by the greater society, and we succeeded because we emphasized the similarities we share with straight people rather than the differences. We maintained our own culture, our traditions, our tribal expressions and sexual lives, for the most part, outside the mainstream culture. And that was okay. I assure you, it really was. Gay Pride Day always had a subversive, queer element. There were always displays of kink and go-go boys and drag queens and dykes on bikes. These images were all that conservative outlets would run on the evening news, and there’s always been a more conservative faction of gay people who push back against the outrageous and hyper-sexual elements of Pride, feeling they make everyone look bad, and alienate straight people.

Marching in a Pride parade in 2008 (when I had abs)

I never quite felt that way. I always believed that if we are to be truly OUT and PROUD of it, we need to embrace the more “out there” people among us, and support not only their first amendment right to self expression, but the risk they take by not blending in. I defend that kind of courage. In the ‘80s, when I got activated during the AIDS crisis, there was a big surge of radical queer activism protesting against the silence of the government and the erasure of the suffering of gay people. The slogan was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Today, it’s “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.” Sorry, I’m not okay with that.

You can give every kink, every baroque notion of gender, every bizarre fetish, every intersectional queer identity its own flag. Have at it. But don’t kid yourself that by making a banner and planting it in the town square that you’ve taken territorial ownership of that space—that you’ve “colonized the colonizers;” that you’ve established a new protected niche class of human, deserving of respect, and consideration, and resources. I often scoff at the idea of an LGBTQIA2S+ community. There’s certainly an LGBTQIA2S+ population. But a community?

The Oxford English Dictionary Historical Thesaurus defines community thus: The fact of having a quality or qualities in common; shared character, similarity; identity; unity.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: what do I, as a gay man, have in common with an asexual person? Why would I need to align politically, or in any other way, with an asexual person (not that there’s anything wrong with that)? The presumption of an alliance between gay men and asexual people as members of a unified community of “shared character, similarity or identity?” I find that baffling—unless one buys into that line in the sand suggested by the Progress Pride flag. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to interpret that as: we sexual deviants and dysfunctionals on this side, and you “normal” people on that. Yeah, no. I didn’t take beatings in high school, and march on Washington in the ‘80s and ‘90s for that.

You can break up what was, at one time, a community of sorts—certainly a strong voting block, a powerful civil rights lobby and a valuable consumer base—into a circus sideshow of fetishistic intersectional identities, and scream it in everyone’s faces—but that does not foster any kind of community. It destroys community. And it turns the greater community of Americans—the mainstream which we fought and died to be a part of openly—more and more against us. We’re coming for your children…?? Really?? How many of the gay men reading this essay were—as I was—sexualized before reaching adolescence? Yeah. Leave the kids alone. Fly whatever freak flag you want to fly—you do you—but that’s not me, and damn it, leave the kids alone!

You know, I always predicted that the more accepted we became in the mainstream, the more our cultural traditions would be diluted, adopted by the rest of society, rendered bland and mundane. I was prescient. Rainbow displays of cheap merchandise at Target. They say the two most endangered businesses in America are book stores and gay bars. Nowadays any rando can paint his fingernails black and get a septum piercing and declare himself—sorry, themself—”queer.” Congratulations, LGBTQIA2S+ “community:” we’re officially just as boring as everyone else.

The thing I never quite anticipated was the way the movement has gone as maniacal as it has, to the point where those ostensibly protesting oppression have become utterly insufferable and oppressive themselves. It’s one thing to be outrageous; it’s another to be an actual walking outrage. I find myself frequently disgusted and deeply saddened by that which purports to speak for me as a gay man. Then again—being “cis” and caucasian and well, let’s face it, old—I guess the “G” in the LGBTQIA2S+ doesn’t include people like me anymore. Unless there’s a special flag for old white gay guys I’m unaware of. Hey, I have an idea!! I say a stripe should be added to the Progress Pride Flag just for us, so we feel included and welcome in the community. I vote for silver lamé.