Keep watching this space (original) (raw)

Yesterday, the posting “Watch this space”. I’m still away meeting a writing deadline, and I have a medical appointment too. So this posting is another Mary, Queen of Scots notice that I am Not Dead Yet. Meanwhile, I offer you, as entertainment and for Gay History Month, a recent Daily Jocks ad featuring a rainbow bandana worn as a sexual-advertisement hanky (on the right, or receptive / subordinate, side):

(#1) Take me, I’m yours

(_OED_3 (June 2022) takes bandana to be the primary spelling; _OED_2 had bandanna, and for a long time that was my orthographic practice. But it’s clear that bandana is now far and away the most common spelling.)

Plus its use as an actual bandana (here in a unusual, but pectorally satisfying, barechested deployment):

(#2) I pulled my harpoon from my sparkling rainbow bandana…

In related developments (not illustrated here): rainbow bandanas as headbands and as dog bandanas.

Meanwhile, none of my sources on the meaning of colors for gay hankies says a thing about rainbow bandanas. Of the six colors in the Pride rainbow (R O Y G B P), only three seem to have been used with any frequency as hanky colors:

R for fisting; Y for watersports, light B for oral sex, dark B for anal sex

(Some sources on the other three say: O for anything (on left) / nothing (on right), G for hustling, P for piercing. Completely out of my experience, though I have seen black for S&M, and heard of brown for scat. You would have thought that one of the characteristically gay-signaling colors, like pink, lavender, or purple, would have been pressed into service to convey (generally) servicing a penis — wanting mine serviced (on left) / wanting to service one (on right) — but no. The elaborated hanky code is, or was, more an exercise of imagination than a practical scheme of communication.)

This entry was posted on October 7, 2022 at 4:55 am and is filed under Clothing, Rainbow, Rainbow clothing, Signs and symbols. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.