Plant Flagging and the Queer Ecology Hanky Project
Purple on neon pink, Katie Kaplan’s “Femme Poison Power” is a handkerchief screen printed with imagery of, in the artist’s own words, “a dense thicket of plant allies.” For Kaplan, the work challenges the idea that feminine expression is “frivolous, weak, and passive.” In the natural world, “adornment is not superficial,” Kaplan writes. “Decoration and beauty are methods of communication, power, and survival.” Strategically placed in one’s back pocket, the hanky enables its wearer to engage in “plant flagging.”
Kaplan created the object as part of the Queer Ecology Hanky Project (QEHP), displayed this February at Pittsburgh's Irma Freeman Center for Imagination. Organized by Pittsburgh-based artists, studiomates, and friends Vanessa Adams and Mary Tremonte, QEHP takes advantage of the persistent history of the hanky code to, in their words, “explode it.” Questioning the norms that govern our lives, QEHP taps into an older form of queer communication to rethink human relationships with the planet, land, and other species.
Queer Ecology Hanky Project exhibit. Image courtesy of Vanessa Adams, with permission from the artists.
In the 1970s, some gay men in San Francisco and New York used a "hanky code" to signal what kind of sexual activity they were looking for while cruising. As described in The Leathermen's Handbook II, certain hankies signaled common activities: dark blue for anal sex; light blue for oral sex; red for fisting; black for S&M. A hanky on the left signaled a desire to top, while a hanky on the right signaled an aim to bottom.
Apochryphally invented by gay retailers looking to sell off unpopular bandana colors, the hanky code was always partly ironic. The code gradually became so elaborate that few could keep up with it, with hanky colors sometimes signalling rather niche practices. As Hal Fischer’s tongue-in-cheek 1977 photobook Gay Semiotics reminds readers, handkerchiefs “are also employed in the treatment of nasal discharge and in some cases may have no significance in regard to sexual contact.” Still, the hanky code was at once sincere and humorous, a complex and creative code of desire—albeit one rooted in the ideal of the hyper-masculinized gay clone.
The AIDS epidemic dialed back the use of hanky codes but also ushered in a broader radical rethinking of identity, desire, and belonging. AIDS activism helped bring queer theory to the forefront, further questioning normative notions of health, families, citizenship, and the environment. As literary critic Michael Warner wrote in 1993, being queer means constantly challenging “the common understanding of what gender difference means, or what the state is for, or what 'health' entails ... or what a good relation to the planet's environment would be. Queers do a kind of practical social reflection just in finding ways of being queer."
This type of social reflection shaped how the QEHP formed. Tremonte has lived in Pittsburgh since college and credits a previous job at the city's Andy Warhol Museum with coalescing her love for print culture. Adams, meanwhile, grew up in New Orleans, and realized after their first two years of college that they were interested in science, just not from the perspective of a scientist.
During a mushroom walk in the woods last year, Tremonte and Adams’s frequent casual brainstorming turned decisive. They decided to organize a show that would bring together the intersecting circles of their lives—printmaking, queer spaces, and amateur mycology—by using printed hankies to explore themes of queer ecology. They issued an open call with no fee to participate, even offering to print the hankies of artists who didn't have access to necessary equipment. They asked only that all hankies conform to standard bandana sizing: 22 inches square.
In the end, 95 artists submitted nearly 2,000 hankies. Across immense variety, many of the hankies share an aesthetic sensibility: a punky intricacy born of combining scientific illustration with DIY culture. They not only build from the older hanky code but also tap into the field of queer ecology.
Queer ecology rethinks heteronormative relationships to the natural environment and to non-humans that permeate mainstream biology. Engaging with queer ecology means seeing both sexual and scientific taxonomies as the products of ideology rather than absolute fact. “It’s important for LGBTQ people to see how we have a long legacy of existence and there’s nothing strange about it—if we continue to build rebuild our relationship w nature we'll see how much white supremacy and heteronormativity have duped us,” says artist Bekezela Mguni in an interview with Lady Science.
Many of the hankies offered doorways into this process of unlearning. Artist Corinne Teed’s white-on-gray screen-printed hanky depicts spotted salamanders' "rigorous summer schedule of gay nightlife in vernal pools"—gatherings in which male salamanders masturbate one another. A biologist in the audience of an artist talk given by Teed commented that she had been studying the salamanders' behavior for decades, but it had never occurred to her that the salamanders might be experiencing pleasure rather than engaging in a sexual act related to reproduction.
Hanky by Corinne Teed. Courtesy of Vanessa Adams, with permission from the artist.
That unlearning also gives way to celebrating queer communities. Mexico-born, Pittsburgh-based printer Andrea Narno’s linocut hankies feature symbiotic relationships—between snails and the plant Volvulopsis nummularium as well as yucca moths and yucca plants—that challenge the idea of nature as cutthroat and competitive. “If the plant didn’t leave space for the insect to take refuge, neither would survive or exist,” says Narno in an interview with Lady Science. “I also see those relationships in my community, in the knowledge we share and the affinities that bring us together.”
Organizer Adams’s hanky features pitcher plants, meanwhile. Speaking to Lady Science, Adams says these plants “thrive in nutrient deficient soils—creating visions for resilience and blossoming and thriving in our own currently complicated landscape.”
Artist Mguni’s image of swans in love under the full moon celebrates growing up queer. Mguni says, “people in our community are often told we should be ashamed, like the ugly duckling, when all along we’ve always been beautiful.”
Hanky by Bekezela Mguni. Courtesy of Vanessa Adams, with permission from the artist.
Other hankies flag for solidarity in queer questioning of how we inhabit planet earth. Artist Chemlawn's hanky depicts freshwater mussels of the Ohio River Floodplain, moving away from the ideology of Manifest Destiny and instead toward "Manifest Reversal" and the revival of the floodplain's ecosystem. This process also signals the affinities between watersheds and trans bodies, building on Cleo Woefle-Erskine’s call to embrace “evolving expressions and categories of being.”
Celebrating growth and evolution, the hankies also use ecology to broaden the idea of kinship—a common theme in both queer communities and theory. Artist Jacq Groves’s black hanky, for instance, is screen printed with yellow slime molds. Slime molds aren’t animals, plants, or fungi; they reproduce sexually and asexually. Like a non-human corollary to queer, non-binary folks, they "refuse to fit into strict biological terms," Groves writes. "Most importantly though,” they add in their artist’s statement, "slime molds' ability to form community reminds me of [how] queers aggregate through the world, creating vast interconnected communities with complex communication signals."
Trans indigenous artist Syr Reifsteck’s hanky, titled “can we hold our changes together?”, goes a step further in celebrating other-than-human kin. Reifsteck printed their hanky using anthotype—using photosensitive material from plants, in this case fig, peony, borage, and beets—and cyanotype, which takes advantage of reactions with sunlight to create a rich, blue color. “As a trans Indigenous person, these beings mentor me in my own waning, waxing, and shifting,” Reifsteck writes in their artist’s statement. “This print too will change as it meets the light, fluttering, and shifting like my own relationships to these kin and to my own self.” In the corner of the hanky are the words, “Make Kin.”
Hanky by Syf Reifsteck. Courtesy of Vanessa Adams, with permission from the artist.
Queer ecology not only reveals the sheer breadth of relations, sexual activities, and desires that exist in the natural world but also allows new possibilities to emerge. In an interview with the Sydney Environmental Institute, environmental studies professor Cate Sandilands explains that "a queer ecological perspective insists on the future as a matter of cultivating flourishing, multispecies relationships."
“Plant flagging” isn’t necessarily about soliciting a tryst, then. It can signal an alliance between multispecies femmes: an approving glance at a rose’s thorns or a nod to the ornamented, venomous defenses of a Venus flytrap. It can generate momentum for re-thinking how to live on earth. It can build chosen families.
At the Irma Freeman Center, “The show became its own queer ecology,” Tremonte says, speaking to Lady Science. The first room of the exhibition displayed hankies by local artists, along with some of Tremonte and Adams’s favorites. In the smaller back room, the organizers strung the rest of the hankies chromatically on clotheslines, switching out the gallery ambiance for one of abundance and fertility. They also scheduled programming that activated the space beyond an art show: a "scrappy & meditative & feminist & anticapitalist" mending workshop, a linocut workshop led by Narno, a queer craft fair. The show closed with an early-evening dance party in the back room, amidst the rainbow of hankies.
"There's power in studying science as an amateur,” Adams adds. “We can look at it from the perspective of queer magic, if that's what we want."
Image credit: Pink and brown slime molds, fruiting bodies of Lycogala epidendrum, known as wolf’s milk by Benny Mazur, 2007 (Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 2.0)
