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In 1834, Anne Lister and Ann Walker exchanged rings and took Holy Communion together at Holy Trinity Church in York. To the world, it was an ambiguous act of devotion. To them, it was a marriage. The rings were the signal.
Queer women have always found ways to signal identity to each other. Long before pride flags, before visibility marches, before the language we use today existed, the code lived in objects: a flower on a lapel, a ring on a particular finger, a specific shade of purple. These were not fashion choices in any casual sense. They were quiet acts of courage, and quiet acts of connection.
Some of these signals still work today. Some have been absorbed into mainstream fashion and lost their specificity. Others have evolved into new forms. Understanding the history helps you read the present: which signals are still active, what they communicate, and how lesbians have always been extraordinarily inventive at finding each other in plain sight.
The oldest thread in this story connects us to the Greek poet Sappho, who lived on the island of Lesbos around 600 BCE. Her poetry described love between women with vivid, sensory detail. In one surviving fragment, she writes of 'violet tiaras' and flowers woven around a young woman's neck.
Violet, and its close relative lavender, became associated with same-sex love between women through that poetry. By the early twentieth century, members of Paris's thriving lesbian scene were wearing violets as a silent signal of attraction and shared identity. Then in 1926, a play called The Captive (La Prisonnière) opened in New York and Paris. Its subject: a lesbian relationship narrated through the giving and receiving of bunches of violets. Lesbians in the audience began wearing violets on their lapels to attend.
A flower became a code. This is the oldest pattern in the history of lesbian signalling: necessity produces ingenuity, and ingenuity produces something that lasts centuries.
The connection to lavender endured. In the 1950s, during the US government's 'Lavender Scare', lesbian and gay civil servants were targeted and dismissed. The word 'lavender' was used as a slur. In the 1970s, a group of lesbian feminists reclaimed it entirely, calling themselves the Lavender Menace and turning it into a rallying identity.
Purple remains a meaningful colour in lesbian and queer culture today. It runs through the Labrys lesbian flag (designed by Sean Campbell in 1999, referencing both the double-headed axe of lesbian feminism and Sappho herself) and appears in the jewellery and accessories people still choose when they want to signal without spelling it out. If you see a woman wearing a lot of purple, particularly lavender or violet tones, in a queer-adjacent space, the association is not accidental.
Anne Lister (1791-1840), whose diaries, written partly in a coded script, are among the most detailed records of lesbian life in nineteenth century Britain, understood the power of jewellery as signal. Her relationship with Ann Walker, their shared rings, their 'marriage' in 1834, all predate any formal language for what they were. The rings communicated what words could not safely say.
This logic extended throughout the nineteenth century. Women in same-sex relationships wore rings as a sign of union that the world could see without necessarily understanding. The ambiguity was the point.
The specific history of rings as lesbian signals becomes more precise from there. Fashion historian Katrina Rolley, interviewing British lesbians about their fashion history, found that pinky rings worn on the left hand were a recognised working-class lesbian signal in the interwar years. The thumb ring carries more recent but well-documented associations: queer women wearing them as quiet rebellion against the heteronormative symbolism of rings on other fingers, choosing a finger with no conventional romantic meaning and making it their own.
Today, both the pinky ring and the thumb ring remain active signals within lesbian and queer women's communities. Multiple rings on multiple fingers has also become a recognisable aesthetic. If you want to signal, rings remain one of the most versatile and durable codes available, precisely because they look like jewellery to everyone, and like a signal to those who know.
The carabiner is a more recent signal, emerging in the mid-twentieth century, and its logic is worth understanding because it reveals something important about how lesbian coded signals work, and why some eventually stop working.
As women entered the industrial and blue-collar workforce in greater numbers during and after the Second World War, practical tools became part of their dress. The carabiner, used in climbing and later in manual trades, became associated with women doing physically demanding work, a tool worn on a belt loop rather than kept in a bag. Butch and masc-presenting women adopted it, and within lesbian communities it became a recognisable signal.
What makes the carabiner significant is that it operates on dual legibility. To someone outside the code, it holds keys. To someone inside, it says something specific. Fashion historian Eleanor Medhurst describes lesbian signals as needing to 'balance between visibility and subtlety.' The carabiner does exactly that.
It also illustrates the vulnerability of lesbian signals to mainstream adoption. As carabiners became fashionable accessories more broadly in the 2010s, their specificity weakened. By 2016, writer Krista Burton was lamenting in the New York Times that 'since you all wear carabiners as key chains, we lesbians no longer have any private signals to each other.'
The carabiner has since had something of a sapphic renaissance, particularly among masc-presenting lesbians, and remains a recognisable signal in many queer spaces. But this is the pattern: signals get absorbed into mainstream fashion, lose their specificity, and the community creates new ones. Understanding this cycle helps you read which signals are currently active rather than merely historical.
The modern chapter of this history begins with the pride flag itself. Gilbert Baker created the first rainbow flag in 1978, with each colour carrying specific meaning. The identity flags that followed extended that logic, making it possible to signal not just 'queer' but specific identities within the community.
For lesbians, the flag landscape has a complicated history worth understanding. The Labrys flag (1999) was first, created by Sean Campbell, with its double-headed axe and purple background referencing lesbian feminism and Sappho. The Lipstick Lesbian flag (2010) followed, but became widely rejected after its creator made transphobic statements, which is worth knowing if you encounter it. The orange-and-pink sunset flag, designed by Emily Gwen in 2018, has since become the most widely adopted. Its seven stripes represent gender non-conformity, independence, community, unique relationships to womanhood, serenity and peace, love and sex, and femininity. It was specifically designed to include trans lesbians and non-binary lesbians.
The sunset flag's orange-to-pink gradient has become a recognisable coded signal in its own right. To someone unfamiliar, it reads as a warm-toned colour palette. To someone who knows, it's immediately legible. Wearing those colours, in any form, is a current and active signal.
Read: What Are the Lesbian Flag Colours? →
The secret history of lesbian coded signals is not a closed archive. It is a living practice, and understanding it makes you better at both sending and receiving.
Some signals remain strong and specific: the sunset flag's orange and pink tones, thumb rings and stacked rings, the colour purple in a queer context, and the carabiner in certain spaces. Others have blurred into mainstream fashion and require more context to read reliably, Doc Martens being the most obvious example.
The most reliable signals tend to combine multiple elements. A woman wearing a thumb ring, with warm orange-toned jewellery, in a coffee shop with a tote bag covered in patches, is probably not sending any single signal accidentally. This is how the code has always worked: layered, contextual, readable to those who are looking.
There is also something worth saying about the practical value of these signals in 2026. Hate crime against LGBTQ+ people in the UK has risen significantly in recent years. In many workplaces, families, and communities, being out carries real risk. Across large parts of the world, it carries legal risk. The need for signals that communicate to those who know while remaining opaque to those who do not is not a historical curiosity. It is current.
From Sappho's violets to Anne Lister's rings, from the carabiner on a belt loop to flag colours worn in semi-precious stone, each generation of lesbian and queer women has found ways to reach each other. The methods evolve. The intention does not.
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