This is hilarious.  From the Washington Post…

It was with some trepidation that we opened a most interesting card, which announced on a blue-jeaned cowboy’s belt buckle something called the "5th Annual VOLPAC ’06 Weekend" in Nashville on April 21-23.

Problem was you had to unbuckle the cowboy’s pants and look inside to see what this was all about. Seemed a bit too "Brokeback Mountain."

VOLPAC is Senator Frisk’s grassroots leadership committee.  I’d have loved to have seen the look on the grassroots face as it unbuckled the cowboy belt.  But wait…it gets even better… 

The back of the card shows the cowboy from behind with a red flowered handkerchief sticking out of his right pocket. Wait a minute — wasn’t there something about how this used to be some kind of code in the gay community years ago? A way to signal each other in crowded, noisy bars?

So we checked the GayCityUSA.com’s Hanky Codes. Sure enough, there it was in the chart explaining what they mean: red hanky in right pocket. Oh, dear.

…but not entirely out of step with Karl Rove’s way of doing business though, as Ron Suskind found out one day outside of Rove’s office… 

Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes early, just in time to witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ’s famous browbeating style, is becoming legend but is seldom reported. Rove’s assistant, Susan Ralston, said he’d be just a minute. She’s very nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where a few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open door to Rove’s modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.

Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. "Come on in." And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour.

So…I mean…maybe Frist really meant to put a red handkerchief in that cowboy’s back pocket.  The right pocket would have been right.

Which…brings me to something I’ve wanted to vent about for years.  Beg pardon for a moment…

I fucking hated that handkerchief code!

Thank you.  (whew!)  That felt good…

See, before there was a code, back in the 1970s, there were only cute longhaired gay guys who discovered how really tantalizing it was to hang a bit of that kerchief us longhairs had all been tying around our hair out the back pockets of our jeans.  There was no code, just a little something to draw the other guy’s attention to the fact that you had a really nice ass and make him all hot and bothered.   Jeans were low around the waste, and tight around the hips and thighs, and a few good designer brands had just started to come out, that really accentuated a guys natural attributes.  Ah…those were the days…  And then some idiots decided to make a goddamn formal code out of it, with right being "active" and left "passive" and various different colors for various different kinds of sex (and a lot of stuff I don’t really consider to be sex at all…but then I’m like that…).

So besides making it impossible to wear that really nice red bandanna you liked so well, because you thought red was just a sexy color, especially when hanging provocatively down around a nice tight set of denim curves with maybe a wee bit of skin showing just above the belt line, it also formalized a rigid set of sex roles, which just don’t work for some of us…maybe most of us.  I do not identify as either "active" or "passive" and in fact I find the terms mildly idiotic.  Sex isn’t something one person does to another…it’s something you both do together.  These terms just don’t make sense to me sexually.  If you’ve ever found yourself in the sack with someone who turned out to be an "aggressive bottom", then tell me please who was the active and who was the passive partner.  It might make sense in a given moment, but not as a state of being and not even as a descriptive term for fucker verses fuckee.  And I don’t get "top" and "bottom" either, as terms of identification.  I mean…I do…but neither one of them is me.

But there are only two back pockets in a pair of pants, and damn if putting your kerchief in one of them suddenly meant you were one thing, and putting it in the other meant you were the opposite thing.  And I guess you have to be a painter to appreciate how imprisoning it feels to have colors suddenly confined to particular sex acts.  ARRRGH!!!  I Hated it!  And as I said, I like the effect of a red bandanna over blue denim.  Well…boy was that one spoiled for me when I looked up the code.  Ugh!

It was all just cheerful spontaneous gay male sexuality for a brief moment in time.  And then they had to fuck it up.  I went and looked up the Hanky Code again and there are 76 X 2 possible ways to identify your sexual preferences listed there, and back in 1979-’80 when things started getting really crazy, I saw guys wearing several kerchiefs at a time in their back pockets.  Then they started hanging little plastic cupie dolls and stuffed bears off their back pockets.  I don’t even want to know.  Nothing ever stays simple and sexy in this culture.  And no…I don’t mean gay culture, I mean American pop culture.  It’s like we have to hype everything, even the simple joys of life.

Young man on a skateboard – circa 1977
Copyright ©  2006 by Bruce Garrett. All rights reserved.

Eye candy of the late 70s, before the Reagan years and the rise of the religious right, and the gay panic set in among young heterosexuals.  Yes, believe it or not there was a time when even a straight boy felt perfectly fine showing off his body to the girls like that.  But the kerchief in his pocket means he’s probably gay because even before the code that was mostly a gay thing.  It’s color does Not correspond to any code…so don’t even go there!  He’s just being sexy.  There was a time when you could just do that and all it meant was you were trying to bother the other gay guys.  It was a lot more fun when that was all it meant.