The beltside key ring is one of the most enduring sartorial symbols of lesbian culture, one of the few stereotypes of our kind that’s both inoffensive and true. Baby gays searching the internet for ways to find their people and send out lesbian vibes will learn that “the universal key chain signal for lesbians is the carabiner clip” and even straight people know it. When Pharrell Williams wore a sparkly yellow carabiner on his pants at the 2015 BET Awards, comedian Fortune Feimster joked that he’d picked up a lesbian’s keys. Kate McKinnon’s clichéd lesbian character in 2015’s Sisters has a whole collection of carabiners to her name. [...]
Both fashion and function are integral to the origin story of the key ring as lesbian flagging device. The style stems from the history of butch women being attracted to the masculine aesthetic of blue-collar jobs, and being shunted into such jobs because they didn’t fit the gender molds of the other career tracks—stewardess, waitress, secretary—available to women in generations past. (Lesbians were also more likely to have jobs in general in previous eras, as they didn’t have male spouses to breadwin and demand kept homes.) Without strict dress codes, women who worked as custodians, postal workers, and mechanics could stretch the boundaries of accepted gender presentations. They also needed easily accessible keys. [...]
Another root of the lesbian key ring tradition connects to kink culture and gay cruising. People involved in the leather scene used to (and sometimes still do) wear their keys clipped to their belt loops based on their sexual preferences: on the right side to indicate that the wearer is a bottom, and left if she’s a top. One oft-repeated theory says a Village Voice writer once jokingly suggested that gay men should dispense with this binary key system and develop a more complex system to reflect a broader taxonomy of sexual desire, thus sparking the creation of the hanky code.
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