As the Collaboratory embarks on our new Drag Kings Oral History Project, I find that Jack Halberstam’s “Transgender Butch: Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum” keeps surfacing in our conversations. Reading Halberstam’s reflection on tensions between transmascs and butch lesbians in the 1990s, and existing in queer circles that still feel tension around the words people use (can a bisexual friend-of-a-friend call herself a dyke in passing?), I’m struck by how consistent queer discourse about naming has remained.

Language, naming, and labels (by all of this I mean putting words to queer and trans identities, desires, bodies, and ways of living) have long been a point of tension within queer and trans communities. Naming creates recognition and community, yes, but it can also pin things down, narrow what’s possible, and expose what is better left ambiguous. This tension shapes how and what we think about in times when naming is useful and in times when it starts to become a liability.

I think for those of us in an emerging generation of queer and trans historians it becomes easy to forget that, historically, queer and trans life hasn’t always leaned so heavily on naming. In many times and places in our shared past, language has been unavailable, unsafe, or deliberately avoided. Identities couldn’t (and still cannot) always be spoken aloud, written down, or claimed in public. Gay men cruising in public washrooms under police surveillance in the 1980s, or pre-Stonewall bar culture more broadly, offer clear examples of contexts in which spoken labels carried significant risk for the bodies involved — and yet queerness persisted. This reality pushes us to look beyond language and beyond our contemporary understandings to understand how past queerness has otherwise been communicated and sustained.

So, in these spaces where naming is impossible or dangerous, nonverbal systems of communication fill those gaps and can serve a critical role. Flagging practices, cruising codes, gestures, clothing, and other visual/embodied signals carry meaning just like names and labels, but in different ways. Handkerchief code is a well-known longstanding example of this: a colour-coded signalling system used to communicate sexual preferences typically worn in back pockets. Its resilience shows that these nonverbal systems aren’t just substitutes for language: they work alongside it as parallel systems of meaning-making.

In the past decade, there has been a lot of cultural and political energy poured into naming identity categories, refining them, and arguing over whether these words are “right.” Labels emerge, catch on, and disappear quickly, moving at the same pace as online discourse itself. The rapid-cycling rise and fall of contemporary terms like “futch” right now captures this speed and points to a broader anti-queer obsession with linguistic precision and self-definition (and this is coming from both outside of and within queer circles).

And yet, this isn’t new. Queer and trans communities have always invented, argued, and reinvented names, only to find that they usually don’t quite fit. (How queer!) Because our modes of existing inherently spill beyond language, labels are constantly revised, abandoned, or brought back in new forms. The instability of naming isn’t a contemporary crisis: it’s an ongoing aspect of the queer condition.

Still, today it often feels like we’re existing in yet another time and place when explicit naming is getting riskier. Without making sweeping claims about the state of queer or trans liberation, we can point to tangible shifts: funding cuts and program rollbacks in the United States, restrictions on how trans history can be framed in academic and public spaces, and growing institutional unease with explicit language naming our own names and naming those who are hurting us. These shifts reflect earlier periods when visibility through naming carried similar real consequences.

Naming can be strategically powerful, but it evidently can’t, by itself, secure safety, resources, or liberation. When recognition depends on legibility, those who can’t (or choose not to) name themselves often fall through the cracks.

Symbols offer another route when language fails or becomes dangerous. Pins, flags, accessories, and other visual markers communicate affiliation without demanding explanation. They allow for ambiguity, partial recognition, and selective legibility, operating differently than explicit identity labels.

Symbols aren’t stable either. Like language, they shift over time. The histories of buttons, flags, and other queer visual markers show constant reinvention, reinterpretation, and contestation. Their meanings are unstable, deeply contextual, relational, and collectively worked out.

For example, this pin references 1970s gay men’s popular associations with actress Judy Garland to signal that this bowling league was designed for gay men without stating that explicitly. Founded in 1972, the league existed in a political context where gatherings of its members may have been subjected to police raids and thus had to convey its message through this unlabelled nod to queerness.

These symbolic practices make it possible to live and move publicly in a queer way without naming it outright. They create moments of recognition that don’t require labels or verbal disclosure. That recognition can foster a quieter, more understated form of solidarity — one that exists alongside (and sometimes beyond) identity as a spoken category.

In these symbols, complex histories and identities get compressed into hints, and perhaps that is not a negative thing. Perhaps it is even queer. A colour, a pin, or a particular style of dress can hold decades of meaning while remaining deniable or opaque to outsiders. That compression is itself a distinctly queer move, often in its own cheeky little way.

Take this sweet little imperative, for example:

And if you don’t immediately get the joke, that may be part of the point.

There’s something queer about visual display. Symbols occupy public space without bowing to institutional demands for clarity, documentation, or confession. They resist easy capture while still making connections possible.

After all that, I’m left with a question: how does this intersect with oral history? Oral history relies on language, narration, and naming, yet many of the queer lives we’re investigating through this method were shaped through silence, gesture, and symbol. How do we speak about histories rooted in things never spoken?

One answer may be that we do it messily. That we learn by paying close attention to the ways we stumble over our words, pause, fall short, gesture, contradict ourselves, and rely on props or other items to help tell our stories in these interviews. Maybe these forms of communication were never meant to be fully spelled out, and perhaps opportunities to probe the limits of language are already built into oral history practice.

Ally Krueger-Kischak (any/all) is a Research Assistant on the Drag Kings Oral History Project. As an MA candidate in History and Sexual Diversity Studies, their research explores trans and queer rural histories, futurities, and working-class environmentalism in Southern Ontario.