If you follow the hanky code, Bruce Springsteen likes to get fist-fucked.

A brown handkerchief: Is it something to blow your nose on, or is it more? In gay days of yore, a brown handkerchief in your back pocket was the international symbol for “I heart poop.” I personally don’t heart poop, but for a brief moment last Saturday I told the world that I did.

I went for a run with the DC Frontrunners in the morning, and grabbed a bandanna from my boyfriend’s drawer to keep the sweat out of my eyes. It happened to be brown. After the run it had soaked through with sweat, so I tied it to the right side of my backpack to dry. Then I biked two miles to meet some friends for lunch. Brown Hanky. Right side. That, according to the code, makes me a feces-freak bottom. So for two miles — two long, hot, sweaty miles — I announced to Dupont Circle and most of Columbia Heights that I wanted to be their toilet.

A car filled with men yelled at me as they drove by. I thought they were saying “You’re in our way,” but it could’ve actually been “Nice chocolate mustache, Shit McGee.” The cute guy I thought was looking at me near Sticky Fingers? He was probably just memorizing my face so he could point me out to his friends as “that kid that likes ‘em nutty.” More than anything, I was just embarrassed. I completely forgot about an important tradition of the gay past, and so I potentially gave some people the wrong idea. A wrong idea that could give me botulism.

If I had known a little more about gay history, would’ve known what the brown hanky meant. And I’m not the only one who’s ignorant. I think my generation of gay men is in an enviable position, and are wasting it. Gay culture, as such, has existed long enough that we have a past. Not a past shared in cruising parks and restrooms, not a common desire, but an actual history of public figures, battles waged and lessons learned. A generation of older men fought long and hard for a litany of social freedoms that we take for granted.

The hanky code is one example of this. While it may seem anachronistic to us, it is a symbol of our burgeoning sexual freedom in the ’70s, the freedom that lead to the number of social and sexual outlets we have today. However, I am lucky enough to have several older gay friends, and to have read books on gay life in the ’70s. I can’t pretend to know what it was like to live through those times, or the tragedy that followed them. But I have tried to see it through the eyes of the older generation. My life as a gay man is richer for it.

There’s a tendency for people my age to mock the older gays and assume that they’re nothing but leering predators. There’s a certain “there but for the grace of god go I” attitude, as if any sign off our impending aging is too horrible to face. So we mock them and avoid them, and wonder how they dared showed their faces in our bars. We face the wall when showering across from them at the gym.

But we do other things too. We take drugs irresponsibly. We have sex without condoms. An entire generation of our nascent society was nearly eradicated, and we continue to act like the gay world begins and ends with us. In short- we are not learning from their mistakes.

So next time I go out in public with a hanky, I’ll be more careful. Instead of brown, I’ll be rocking one dark-red hanky, one mustard and one white velvet. Then I can tell the world “Hey, I’m a two-handed fisting voyeur with an eight-inch cock. Get used to it.”

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