TEXAS HATTERS IN LOCKHART, Texas, is located just off Highway 183 to Austin, and staffed by a fourth-generation of hat makers; starting with Marvin Sr., the Gammages have made hats for all from Willie Nelson to Hank Williams, Ronald Reagan and Prince Charles. Joella Gammage, her son Joel and husband David today ensure that Texas Hatters is full to the brim with cowboy hats in every colour and style, and that each customer is welcomed with banter, smiles and expertise in abundance.

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Joel Aaron Gammage: My friend has a hat that is in between a top hat and a bowler. He wears that hat so much, people call him Country Slash. He’ll even wear it to the swimming pool! He’s an I.T. guy during the day, and a base player at night. I think the right hat has the tendency to bring out the inner character of a person. Your attitude changes. Cock your hat to the right a little, and all of a sudden you’re ready for a fist fight or a poker game. You know, guys don’t have as many facets of articles of clothing as women. You have your cowboy boots, belt buckle, and hat – whatever style.

There’s a historical side to the cowboy, the vaquero, which dates back to Mexican history. In its origin, hats were sombreros. We adapted them to a Western-European style. If we go back to traditional cowboys, your work was signalled by your hat. Depending on what your place was on the ranch, your brim was shorter or longer. It’s very similar to English culture. A tall hat was a symbol of stature.

In my grandfather’s day, hats were black or brown and that was it. There was only one way to wear a hat. My grandfather changed that. Today, hats are becoming more statement pieces. The functionality changed quite a lot. In the actual ranching community, it’s to protect yourself from the sun. But we wear it a lot still because it’s so ingrained. When you walk into a grocery store in a hat, you’ll grab people’s attention. You kind of just want to call that person ‘Sir,’ and treat them differently.

Joella Gammage Torres: I’m third generation. My dad and my grandfather worked together. My father proposed to my mother with a hat and a poem. It was a ladies high roller, with a telescoped crown, and the poem was something to the effect of: ‘Texas crown for the queen of my heart.’ How could she turn him down, right?

We’re in Lockhart, Texas. Prior to that we were in Buda, and before that we were in Austin. When we moved here, people who thought we went out of business thirty years ago in Austin found us because Highway 183 was their favourite road to take to Houston. There is a cattle auction down the road. When cattle prices are good… ‘Sold my cattle, I’ll buy a hat!’ But we get everyone: from what people call hipsters, to politicians and businessmen, fashionable ladies, everything.

The anatomy of a hat? First of all, the important lesson, would have to be that the crown is the part that sits on your head, and the brim is the part that sticks out. A lot of people get that reversed, which I don’t understand. Hats are made from straw or felt, or both. Leather hats exist, but we never made them. For the creases in the hat, there are some styles that can be done with a preformed block. We have quite a few of those, that are seventy-five to one-hundred-and-fifty years old. But primarily we soften the material and then we use our hands to do the creasing.

To make a hat, we have about a two-week waiting period, but if we had to walk one through, it takes a full day. Everything is by hand. We don’t start with something round on the top and flat on the brim and then put a crease in it. We make the hat from scratch, we do all the finishing and sewing here, we don’t use glue, all the ribbon trim is by hand. My dad said, quality is like buying oats. If you want good clean oats, you need to pay a fair price. If you want oats already run through the horse, that’s a little cheaper. We make every hat as though we make it for the most important person in our lives.

Our most popular hats hail all the way back to my dad’s time in the business. He made hats for Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ronnie Van Zant and Donnie Van Sant. There’s fans all around the world that want their hats just like them. The Ronnie Van Zant is similar to what I have on right now, only it’s a solid felt, with a rattlesnake belt on it. There’s a Stevie Ray Vaughan on that stand right there, with the ‘Do Not Touch’ sign. Both styles actually have an oval telescope crown. It’s creased inward and then comes back up, which is why we call it a telescope. And then the Stevie has a flat, bolero-type brim, and the Ronnie has the opposite: a pencil-rolled edge on the brim and then kinda rolled up cowboy-style.

The Gus hat is also very popular, it’s another one my dad created. If you’re familiar with Lonesome Dove, my dad created the styles for that mini-series. The Gus has a centre crease that runs from the front to the back, so it’s lower in the front, and two creases on either side of that so it looks like three fingers ran down the centre of the crown. It has curls on the side of the brim, as though you grabbed it with both hands. We call that a cowboy curl. The most iconic hat that came out before the Gus was probably the one James Dean wears in Giant.

Cowboy hat styles do evolve. Wider brims were really popular in the Forties, then in the Fifties they went a little bit shorter. I think part of it was people got cars. In the Seventies, all the crowns were really tall, like six inches, and really short brims. Today it is completely the opposite. Right now short crowns are really popular with a small dent, as if it fell off, and a really wide brim, barely curled on the side. Most of the colours are basic: black, silver buckle, straw coloured. But a lot of the guys and gals are going for brighter coloured brims now. They say, ‘I want you to notice that I have a style of my own.’ So they’ll put red, purple, or turquoise ribbons on the edges. As well as rhinestones now and then.

Each style also evolves according to who’s creasing it. There’s a design behind you called the horse shoe, it looks like a horse stepped on it. My grandfather would say that looks more like a mule shoe, because that’s how he did it. Everybody has their own hand. It’s like trying to copy some of the master painters, you can’t get the stroke exactly the same. [My husband] David has his style, I have mine. Often, when someone orders a hat from David or [my son] Joel, they have to be the ones that finish it up for them. And vice versa, the customer will recognise – that’s not how Joella did my last hat.

Joel is actually the most experimental. He went through this long phase of… particularly ladies that were interested in getting hats from him. And he’ll tell you, it drove me crazy! I like to think symmetrical, and everything he did was asymmetrical, kind of the Picasso of hat making. Technically they were still cowboy hats, but they were definitely a blend of Western fashion and high fashion.

Joel: In Austin you can pull anything off. You can walk down the street with butterfly wings, pink sunglasses and a miniskirt, and it would be fine. But if you would go to West Texas, and more traditional communities, you might get looked at a little funny. There’s still some traditional farmers and ranchers out there, but they are getting rarer, because you get a cultural shift where people want the modern standard that they see on TV, they want to live past the means they grew up with. For my family’s business, there was a need for somebody – after my grandfather died – to adapt to a variety of different cultures that come from the Austin community. You don’t notice it right now, but my accent will definitely change when I speak to other people. Before I got married, I went out dancing all the time, and I would wear a lot of hats, and sell a lot of hats. Now I do car shows and festivals and events and stuff. I was in the music scene already, so I wanted to bring that scene to Lockhart.

My personal favourite hat is a modified high-roller. If you’re familiar with the Ronnie Van Zant 38, it’s a telescoped crown, with a cylindrical shape and a curled brim. That’s one of the signature hats that I used to wear a lot. I called it my lucky hat. Whenever I wore it, people talked to me.

David A. Torres: I’ve seen wills being written up about hats. People come in here with their dad’s hat, which [my wife] Joella’s grandfather made, and they want it fitted to their size. Sometimes we’ll write down – made for so-and-so, passed on to so-and-so. In the twenty-nine years that I’ve been here, I’ve seen a hat pass on to the third generation once. Once I saved a family from not talking to each other, because two grandsons were fighting and both thought they had right to the hat. They didn’t want the money or the land, because the hat was a status symbol of an elder. They asked me to make another one just like it. I made an exact copy. I put them side by side, I knew which one was the original one, but then they got shuffled and I couldn’t tell which one was the real one. They both came and both offered money to me to let them know what the real hat was, but I honestly couldn’t tell them. They both have his hat over the mantelpiece.

Joella: There used to be drugstore cowboys, or urban cowboys. Someone who doesn’t actually work with cows, or on a farmer ranch, but dresses the part to attract women or men. Real cowboys looked down on them, but not so much now. We have a new generation of teenagers and twenty-somethings that do the rodeos. They raise their animals as children, and take them to shows. They’re real cowboys, but I’m always surprised when they come in here because they wear jeans other than Levi’s or Wranglers. They’re not wearing the traditional Western-style shirts. They’re wearing belts with fur and rhinestones, and headbands with rhinestones. But they’re not pretend, they’re the real thing, but their new style really surprises me. And they’re straight.

As a woman – not as a hatter – when I see a man in a cowboy hat, provided that he looks like a cowboy, not in shorts and flip-flops, I think: ‘That is a real man.’ I don’t know if it’s cultural, bred into us, but my mind goes to – he probably rides a horse, and deals with cattle, all those little-girl fantasies.

Joel: When I think about what a cowboy is, defining it in the traditional sense is almost impossible. There’s fewer and fewer ranches and farms. I’m one of the few people in my generation that actually decided to stay involved in my family’s business. And if you do manage to find a traditional cowboy, in certain communities, they might close their doors to you just because they’re afraid someone might want to come develop on their land. It’s gotten that serious; development has changed so much, there’s cotton fields and oil fields all over Lockhart, polluting all these areas. Places that have been cotton fields for a hundred years are now bought and sold for mass-housing production, so they’ll just become sub-divisions. And for whatever reasons, maybe that family needed the money, but it’s all changing everywhere.

To me, the definition of a cowboy is carrying on the heritage of, ‘When you say something you mean it. When something’s broke you fix it. When something ain’t broke you don’t mess with it. You preserve it.’ What a cowboy is to me, it’s maintaining integrity, and being able to stand behind what you say.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s editor-in-chief and founder. 

ALL THE COLOURS OF the rainbow; all the colours of the earth: years before Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow flag, the most recognised symbol of gender and sexual minorities, some were already flagging. Simple squares of woven, printed, cotton cloth, bandanas (aka hankies) were worn wrapped around biceps or tucked into the back pockets of denim or leather pants and even occasionally tied around a boot. These bandanas, their colours and placement, left side or right, became the key material element in a system of coded messages signalling an individual’s sexual proclivities, tastes and kinks: the ‘hanky code.’

Bandanas are traditionally used as neckwear or as headwear. They are protective, decorative, hygienic and concealing as well as signifying. Worn around the neck so that it can be quickly and easily pulled up around the mouth and nose, the bandana evokes cowboys, railroad engineers and miners. It is protective gear for blue-collar workers and middle-class outdoor enthusiasts. It can be worn wet or dry and is suitable for use as a low-tech particle filtration device in dry and dusty climates and dirty conditions. But it can also conceal identity, suggesting highwaymen, train robbers, revolutionaries, street artists, gangsters, and antifa – among others. Tied to a stick, it’s a romantically nostalgic suitcase for what were once called hobos.

Bandanas had a long history well before they were adopted as coding devices in the mid twentieth century. The etymology of the word ‘bandana’ runs through Persia and the Indian subcontinent. Bandhna means ‘to tie’ and bandhnu is ‘tie-dye’ in Hindi. Bandhana means a ‘bond’ in Sanskrit. This last association and the related bandhnati (‘he binds’) is easily reminiscent of the English word ‘bondage.’ (They could be cousins, but they’re not. ‘Bondage’ is from the Middle English ‘bond/a,’ via the Anglo-Latin ‘bondagium,’ meaning serf, one bound to the land. )

India produced the first recognisable bandanas; red or blue squares of cotton or silk, densely decorated with tiny white dots. Their simple design made them  practical and adaptable. Then as now, they were used as headwear, neckwear, straps and packaging. Patterns evolved to become more elaborate, and teardrop-shaped motifs appeared. These were ‘buta’ or ‘boteh’ from the Persian: Zoroastrian symbols of eternity and life. They combine stylised elements of long-lived cypress trees and annually occurring floral sprays. Under Arab/Muslim conquest, and most likely in the Azerbaijani region, the motif curled further, becoming the ‘bent’ cedar, a hidden (coded) reference to the virtues of strength, resistance and modesty under occupation. This is the pattern most associated with bandanas and that which we recognise as ‘paisley’ today.

During the sixteenth century, buta patterned cloth, imported by the East India Company, became available in Europe. By 1640, Marseilles France had become a production  for continentally produced fabric bearing the popular pattern. From ‘couvre-chef,’ meaning a head covering, comes ‘kerchief,’ which expands via location and use into ‘neckerchief’ and ‘handkerchief,’ the latter of which shortens to the familiar ‘hanky’ of the code. Across the English Channel in Scotland, Glasgow and the nearby town of Paisley became early British centres of manufacture and ‘paisley’ eventually became the generic term for the pattern.

Bandanas evoke the nineteenth-century American West, and contain a bit of the myth of it. Cowboys, train engineers, scouts, sailors, prospectors: hard-working, hard-drinking members of mostly male societies. In the absence of law, the ‘wild’ west operated, as certain contingently extralegal subcultures do still, on systems of codes of conduct, including for instance cowboy codes and road codes, standards of acceptable behaviour that while not mirroring polite or straight society, nevertheless provide a structure within which certain expectations can be conveyed. How is property marked? How are disagreements settled? What constituted an honourable duel? Who led and who followed (i.e. danced male and female parts) in all-male miners’ camps? Dancers would wear hankies tied to their right or left sleeves to signal respective roles. In the century and a half since, bandanas have become a standard of Western equestrian gear, including being a staple of every gay cowboy, whether urban or rural, circuit queen or rodeo circuit rider.

The ‘busy’ aesthetic of the traditional bandana allows for easy deep coding. Early twentieth-century advertisers experimented with festooning everyday mass-produced objects with logos, mottos, recognisable images and thematic characters. The age of mass reproduction of images was just gearing up. Clubs wanted insignia, businesses wanted give-aways, tourists wanted souvenirs, and consumers were starting to demand variety. Printed bandanas were small, inexpensive to produce in large quantities and easy to transport. With their square, flat, printable surfaces, they were ideal for the emerging practice of commercial branding. Bolstered by nostalgia for a west that never existed in reality as it did in depictions, popularity of the handy hanky among the general public soared.¹

The twentieth century saw the bandana’s adaptation by motorcyclists, both straight and gay. They were especially popular with outlaw or 1%-er bikers, so self-named in joking contrast to the assertion that 99 percent of motorcycle riders were good, law-abiding citizens. Outlaws were less likely to have conventional jobs and more likely to have long hair than citizen bikers. Folded long and used as a headband, a bandana holds long hair down. Worn over the whole head and secured in back, it performs the same function as its  stylistic and functional cousin, the do-rag. These styles arose in the days before helmet laws and before the multi-coloured bandanas of today’s code. There were two basic colours: red and blue.

The rise of the bandana as a coded accessory in gay circles can be seen in the context of the historical moment when it appeared. The bandana was already in subcultural use by the 1960s. Interest in ancient cultures and Eastern religions was in ascension and hippie trails through Central and South Asia were among the roads more travelled. Beat souvenirs spurred popularisation of the buta or paisley pattern. Acid tripping leant colour to the counterculture. In 1967 Fender issued a pink paisley guitar. Hippie-dicks, hair fairies, gay bikers, leathers and other ancient non-mainstream categories of queer folk populated the early history of gay liberation and contributed to its rise. The adaptation of coded flagging in leather sub-cultures arose in this moment. Without the commercial availability of a range of differently coloured bandanas, the hanky code itself would have been impossible.

In leather subcultures, the signifying factors of a bandana’s colour and placement are arguably the most remarkable. What does each colour mean worn left or right? That is the code. But use value still adheres and includes: use as a binding device (Bandhnati), as a blindfold, a gag or a strap to tie up genitals. The homoerotic bandana both says something and does something.  Mostly it distinguishes. The late journalist and leather maven Robert Davolt noted:

We are leather, we label: Top, bottom, master, slave, daddy, boy, gay, straight, Mr., Ms, red hanky, blue. At some point, you are not inclusive if you try to claim these all (or none) at once, merely indecisive.²

There is some disagreement about the details of the establishment of the code. Certainly, red and blue bandanas had a long and fairly well established history both within and exterior to gay and leather subcultures. But it was informal, and had not yet been codified. The code is generally believed to have been ‘officially’ launched in 1972 by Alan Selby of Mr. S Leather and Ron Ernst and Pat O’Brien of Leather ‘n’ Things. They worked together at this time, developing many of the products that are today considered classics of leather style. This was when Mr. S was still based in London, well before there was a retail outlet in San Francisco. Selby described the circumstances that led up to the publication of an initial list of coded colours:

We had gotten an order in from a bandana company and they had inadvertently doubled their order. Since we’d just started doing business with them we didn’t want to return the order, so we had to think up a way of selling all these extra dozens of bandanas…the hanky code took off like a whirlwind and spread internationally…we worked together deciding which colours were going to represent what.³

Flagging is a way of communicating basic information without needing to speak. Bandanas are soft introductions. They are self-labelling devices, material imbued with meaning, intended to provide enough information for cruising parties to determine the likelihood of an erotic match. In many cases, they provide a way of making an initial connection. Like any system of underground communication, it is community specific, and does not travel well. Where do you wear them and what does that mean? Subcultural meaning stays local.

Alan Selby listed the original colours in his recounting of the circumstances in which the code came about, but there is good reason to consider that his memory was not entirely accurate. He recalled:

Despite arguments to the contrary, when worn on the left side you were recognised as a top, and right side, bottom. This was a universal recognition signal. There were about twelve colours to start with: red, black, navy blue, grey, orange, yellow, brown, green, purple, light blue…light blue was very popular!’⁴

Although Selby lists the colour purple as one of the original colours, it was in fact added a half dozen years later by Jim Ward, the founder of The Gauntlet, widely regarded as the founder of modern body piercing in the global west. Holes may be temporary or permanent, may barely break the skin, can hold meat-hooks thick enough to support a body’s suspended weight, might be invisible, or can even stretch out to sport massive jewelry and attract attention to the protuberances they pierce. The freak is a forest of holes and protuberances, and holey freaks flag purple. In Running the Gauntlet, Ward describes how purple became associated with piercing:

By 1978 I had made up my mind that purple was to be the colour for body piercing. This had sprung directly from another of those products of gay creativity, the bandana or hanky code…purple, the colour associated in astrology with prosperity and good fortune; purple, the colour draping Catholic and Anglican churches during Holy Week when they commemorate the day their deity got pierced.⁵

Red, together with blue, is one of the two original bandana colours. It reaches into time and across space. It travelled from the Indian subcontinent to the North American far west. The classic cowboy bandana was red. In the code it is the colour of handballers, or fist-fuckers, of the (mostly) men who reach up into others and those who take it that way. Alan Selby flagged green and gray – and red. Feel the heart beat: that’s red.

Orange was, and is, a problem colour. Worn on the left it means: ‘I’ll do anything, anytime – to you.’ Worn on the right it once mirrored a similar thinking from a bottom’s POV: ‘Do me. No limits.’ But of course there are always limits and nobody, top or bottom, is really available for anything anytime. So the right side re-coded and became some version of ‘nothing now.’ Flanked by impossibility on one side and pointlessness on the other, orange is the red-headed stepchild of the code. People laugh at it, and most won’t flag it. I think there’s a potentially deeper and more nuanced meaning, but that is a subject for another essay.  

Yellow is for watersports. Thirsty? Want a sip from the source? Flag right. Need to drain? No need for indoor plumbing when there’s a line of waterboys by the men’s room. On them or in them: flag left. Liquid sunshine, good to the last drop, piss scenes are raunchy. Piss is considered a subset of raunch, which is an attraction to and emphasis on body fluids, excretions and the like. Prolific author and leather lifestyle columnist Larry Townsend commented on the appeal of this taste:

The sensation of warm piss across the skin is much the same as water from a shower head, but the knowledge of its source puts it in a category all its own. For the giver there is a real sense of power and domination. It is common enough to say ‘piss on you’ to someone, but actually to do it…⁶

Green began with what is sometimes called the world’s oldest profession. Green, the colour of money, was associated with the tricks of the trade: hustlers and their clients. The original code had only one green and it was coded to sex work. In 1972, the Daddy/boy scene had not really emerged. When it did, green became more associated with that and less with pay-to-play. They are, however, adjacent, and in the more detailed iterations of the code, kelly green is associated with hustlers and johns and hunter green with Daddies and boys. Sugar for sugar; sweets for the sweet: the Sugar Daddy, a sex worker’s favourite client, one they might genuinely like and who pays the bills consistently, morphs into the Daddy of the contemporary Daddy/boy scene, a mythic figure who did not exist as such at the advent of the hanky code system. With this transformation, the colour green moves from the marketplace to the family room.

Blue, navy and light, map onto the most iconic of gay male sexual activities, both of which are shared by mainstream vanilla as well as alternative pervert guys. They are probably also the practises most likely to be shared with heterosexuals and other groups identifiable by specific sexual tastes, proclivities or identities. They are of course, fucking and sucking respectively. Fuckers flag navy blue left. Cocksuckers flag light blue right.

Black signifies heavy S/M, sadomasochism. This is the hard stuff. Black means pain. Dig dishing it? Flag left. Can you take it? Fly right. While certain colours are associated with fairly narrow tastes and practises, others are broader and black is deep and wide. How many ways are there to hurt and be hurt? They all fit under the big black umbrella. Often the codes cross: certainly pain is associated with purple, for instance. Piercings hurt. The pain involved may or may not be central. In black, it is centred.

Roped up, tied down, cuffed, caged, chained, restrained, put in a sack: can’t move at all. Grey is for bondage. It’s the colour of handcuffs, of many metals, but it can signify rope bondage or other methods of restraint as well. Bondage is often a first kink, sometimes an only kink and like its counterpoint and code colour grey, mixes well with others, often enhancing and highlighting other practises.  

Brown is wholly shit. Like its raunchy counterpoint, yellow, its coded colour is a visual analog for the substance its adherents enjoy. Scat fans are a minority within a minority and face a certain amount of social critique, even within kinky circles, for their unusual tastes. While fudge-packing jokes may be a staple of gay-baiting comedy routines, the reality is that most gay men who practice anal sex know how to clean out. If it’s dirty, it is probably meant to be. It is somewhat surprising that brown was included in the original code since it maps onto an uncommon practice. Certainly more common and popular tastes were not included in the original code. However, given the origin of the code in an overstocking episode, its presence may be attributable to the practical reality of what colours were actually available. The simplicity of assigning brown to the rare shit fetish may have come about because yellow was the obvious choice for the more common and popular taste for piss.  

But wait: there’s more. From a few basic colours of bandanas, there evolved over time an arcane array of specialty colours (and coded objects) conveying what are in many cases equally obscure sexual practises. Including four intended as jokes, and omitting one he considered too dangerous to include, Trevor Jacques listed seventy-one coded colours and objects in his 1993 manual On the Safe Edge.⁷) Some of these arose to meet a need. Shaving, spitting, food fetish and foot fetish are certainly charged enough practises and invisible enough for fans to find inclusion in the code useful. Burgundy, pale yellow, lime green and coral oblige. Others could be apocryphal, perhaps appearing nowhere but on the printed reproductions of the code itself. A few seem redundant. While a ‘chubby chaser’ might flag apricot right, why would ‘two tons o’ fun’ need any indication beyond his own corporeality? Some may be jokes. Certainly the acknowledged joke of a stalk of celery suggesting the flagger was either offering brunch or out to brunch is simply out to lunch. But a teddy bear to indicate cuddling seems cute if silly, and a kewpie doll worn left to indicate the flagger’s ‘chicken’ or underage status is just weird. Coded objects can be self-referential and practical, as much about having the gear at hand as signalling a preference. Incorporating a skein of rope itself into one’s sartorial gear not only signals an interest in rope bondage, it also keeps the tool of the kink available for use at any time. The same would be true of wearing floggers, whips, paddles and other impact implements, although these are not typically included in the code. A wire brush, indicating abrasion play, is included in Jacques’ list. Probably uncommon in practice, its inclusion does tend to emphasise the potentially infinite flexibility of object coding.

There are of course, bugs in the code. There are variations in the origin stories and disagreements about specific meanings. The obscure tastes that are coded contrast with the more common ones that are absent and beg the question why. Where is bootlicking? Breath control? Verbal? Even dominance and submission is missing. It does not automatically map on to other practises as much as it might seem to do so. This is not a call for inclusion, just an acknowledgement of omission. The next generation is also always bringing fresh ideas and practises.

Decay and growth in a system of communication mean meanings change over time. In the twenty-first century it is more apparent than ever that safety is an illusion. Sanity remains a construct of nineteenth-century psychoanalysis. And consent is arguably a gray area. Idealism based on notions of purity is dangerous. Now more than ever we need the skills to deploy and read subtle code. This is not just about bandanas. What are you saying with what you are wearing? Sometimes a hanky is just a hanky. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But usually, there is a lot more to it than that.

Dr. Jordy Jones is an independent scholar, curator and artist. He is the author of The Mayor of Folsom Street and an honorary member of the 15 Association.

Photograph courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art (www.moma.org).

1. M Jakobsen, ‘The History of the Bandana.’ Retrieved February 2018 from: https://www.heddels.com/2017/05/the-history-of-the-bandana/ ↩

2. R Davolt, Painfully Obvious: An Irreverent & Unauthorized Manual for Leather/SM. Los Angeles, Daedalus Publishing, 2003, 229  ↩

3. J Jones. The Mayor of Folsom Street: The Auto/biography of ‘Daddy’ Alan Selby, aka Mr. S. Springfield, Fair Page Media, 2017, 61-62 ↩

4. Ibid. 62. ↩

5. J Ward. Running the Gauntlet: An Intimate History of the Modern Piercing Movement. Gauntlet Enterprises, 2011, 46-47 ↩

6. L Townsend, The Leatherman’s Handbook II. New York, Carlyle Communications, 1983, 152 ↩

7. T Jacques, On the Safe Edge: A Manual for SM Play. Toronto, WholeSM Publishing, 1993, Appendix E 2-3 ↩

I call what I’m wearing now my Incognito. It’s kind of a disguise. Something comfortable when I’m more or less going to the ranch or doing some kind of physical labour. My Image is different: The vest. The hat. I usually wear a Stetson or a Resistol, or a hat from a maker called Shorty in Oklahoma City. I like a Silver Belly hat, which means it’s not white, it’s a little off-white. It’s not gray, but it’s close to gray. Sometimes they call it platinum mist, or a horseshoe, because it’s got a little horseshoe up there.

A hat tells the story of what you do. If you’re a bull rider, different hat. Barrel racer, different hat. I wear a cutter’s crease, which is for cutting horses – it’s an event. The only difference between a cutting horse and a cattleman is a dimple here on each side. George Strait wears a roping hat, because he’s a roper. The double X on the side is the fineness of the felt. 10X is cheapo. 100X is $1,000. My hat is about $500. Then there are the hats that we call a Kmart, Walmart special. Some people from out of town come here with those cheap straw hats, it’s kinda like a heehaw hat, comical. But we like it. They’re trying. They’re proud to have it on.

My daughter Ginny makes my shirts for me. She buys them and then adds the beads and rhinestones and sequins. This one is based on a [Nathan] Turk design. The original Turks and Nudies here are my dad’s. He rode in every parade in Southern California. Rhinestones started out with cowboys, and then the country music singers took it up. Roy Rogers said, when I ride into an area I want my shirt to light up, so every kid can see me all the way up in the top of the stands.

In 1964, I had just got out of the army. I served three years, here in Austin at the missile base, and then they shipped me off to Okinawa for six months. I had a craving to hear country music. We didn’t have no cell phones, no computer, no touch at all with anybody back home. I figured it’d be kinda neat to open up a place on my own. I came out here underneath that big old oak tree, and there was all open land and I looked over the pasture and cattle. We started building September 25, 1964. I opened November 10, 1964. So we did that pretty damn quick. They’d never let you build this today. I didn’t have a blueprint. It’s all up here. Every drunk in Austin worked on this place when I built it. And those same drunks became my customers. When I opened up beer was 25 cents a bottle. Slap a quarter down, say buy me a beer.

Back then on a Saturday night, you always wore just about the best clothes you had. Suit and tie and a cowboy hat and boots. Put a little makeup on or something. And no effects on your pants. No holey jeans! If you had holes, your mother would patch them up. Coming out of the depression, everybody was proud of the fact that they weren’t poor. I wore my brother’s hand-me-down clothes. It was different times. Today everybody dresses real casual.

For a while when we first started going, the cowboys were clean shaven, with short hair, maybe a moustache. Then the hippies came, and the cowboys didn’t like the hippies too much. They’d pop off and say, why don’t you get a haircut? I didn’t really have fights over it, though. One thing about the flower children is they didn’t like to fight. One night, I booked a fundraiser for Lloyd Doggett, who’s now our federal rep. The band was Freda and the Firedogs. About 500 people showed up, and 80 percent was hippies. We enjoyed watching them come, they had these weird looking dresses, and were driving all kinds of beat-up looking vehicles. Now that’s hard to draw 500 people to a fundraiser. And they drink a lot of beer and didn’t cause no trouble! The thing is, they didn’t know how to dance. We called their dance the hippie hop, real fast in a circle kind of like a hillbilly hoedown. It was good times.

I started booking more bands, like Asleep at the Wheel, Alvin Crowe. Around that same time Willie Nelson moved to Austin. At first he was clean shaven, then he kind of got a goatee and started getting his hair a little longer. And that’s what kind of helped, Willie’s influence, being able to play in front of rednecks and hippies. The same cowboys, their hair started to get longer, too, and they started growing beards. Nowadays people dress up more than they used to. You get the bachelorette parties, the women come out in high heels, but a lot of times they take them off and dance in stockings. The women like to wear the bling, similar to what I wear.

Some people ask me how long my family has been in Texas. In 1846 my great great grandfather, him and a group of Texas rangers, camped out where the capital is today and forded the Colorado River on horseback. They was in the last indian battle just over that hill. And my great great great, he was in the damn war of 1812. That’s a long time ago.

I came from a place about a mile from here where there was a farm. I have a scar on my leg where a horse threw me off. I don’t even remember that but they told me about it, my grandmother and mother. That’s where old Betsy Lou reared up! I’ve always been around horses. As a kid, sometimes they’d dress us up in cowboy clothes. We had a pair of boots in our family that kind of went from my brother to me, and then when I outgrew them, there was another child in the family. They were black with a lone star on it, a white star.

Nobody’s ever been in the honky-tonk business as long as I have. They’d have to start really young. The business has been good to me; it’s kept me and my wife young. We meet people from all over the world. And it’s easier for me to talk to these people. Sometimes, people in their twenties, it’s a bit hard to communicate with them. They didn’t have to scratch hard for their money or whatever. We’re from South Austin. We always had to scratch a little bit harder to make it than the people over in the rich part of town. But that’s never bothered me. I never did think that I wouldn’t make it. People ask, are you gonna keep it going. I say, as long as it’s standing up.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor and a writer in New York City.