Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language

Perhaps we should start with how Polari should sound. Many speakers had regional accents, of whom a good proportion would have had London, especially East End or Cockney, ones, as London was Polari’s spiritual home. You don’t need a Cockney accent to speak Polari, though—I interviewed speakers with strong Scouse and Glaswegian accents. And Liverpudlian Paul O’Grady, who performed as Lily Savage, knows plenty of Polari.

Speaking in a “posh” upper-class or a middle-class “received pronunciation” accent, sometimes thought of as standard English or what people say when they claim (incorrectly) to have “no accent,” isn’t great for Polari, unless you can also sound very camp. Ideally you should have a regional accent, Cockney if you can get away with it, but then overlay that with the occasional affected attempt to sound as if you’re descended from your actual royalty.

Just as the word queen was used to describe men who often came from modest backgrounds, the accents of these men also had majestic pretensions. Kenneth Williams is a good role model. He grew up above his dad’s hairdresser’s shop, but in his many Carry On film roles he acted with an upper-middle-class provenance, playing a variety of haughty doctors and professors, presenting a slightly stern posh accent when trying to impress, although slipping into Cockney when highly excited.

Kenneth’s Sandy exploits the Cockney accent in the Round the Horne sketches to insert more Polari into the dialogue. In a sketch called “Bona Homes,” where he and Julian play landscape gardeners, he opens with, “Oh hello Mr. Horne, we’re bona ’omes you see.” By dropping the h in homes, he is able to make the word sound more like omee, the Polari word for man.

Or listen to the recordings of Lee Sutton’s drag acts. Compared to Williams, who always sounds animated, Sutton has a deadpan comedic delivery—and although he’s in drag there’s scant attempt to contrive to the audience that he’s female: his voice is unapologetically gravelly. However, he sounds like he is having a good time, and that’s key to Polari. Even if your heart is breaking on the inside, you keep up the act, whether you’re in drag or out of it. A Polari queen never cried, until she got home and drew the curtains.

The “pseudo-posh” bits of Polari can come across in a variety of ways. Some Polari speakers could sound quite cosmopolitan as they threw bits of classroom French (or, less frequently, German) into their conversation. While Polari has a complicated history, picking up all sorts of linguistic influences over the decades, my guess is that use of French was more about showing off than there being a more substantial French connection.

For the average working-class Brit in the 1950s and 60s, holidays “abroad,” as the world beyond the English Channel was known, were much less common than they are now. A bit of French could imply that the speaker was a glamorous jet-setter or at least had a foreign boyfriend. However, I don’t think that most speakers were convincing anyone of this, other than the most naive chicken. Instead, use of classroom French was more parodic, based on the understanding that it is funny to pretend to be someone who thinks that speaking French is glamorous.

Attempts to speak those little bits of French in an actual French accent are therefore to be frowned upon—that would be trying too hard and indicate that the speaker really knew French as opposed to be pretending to know it (although using an exaggerated French pronunciation is acceptable). Julian and Sandy regularly made use of a set of stock French phrases, including artiste, tres passé, intimé, pas de deux, entrepreneur and nouvelle vague. And one of Kenneth Williams’s party pieces was to sing a song called “Ma Crêpe Suzette,” which consisted of a string of unrelated French phrases that have been absorbed into English, put to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.”

The phrase gardy loo (meaning beware) is derived from the French garder l’eau (beware the water), originally used when the contents of a chamber pot were thrown out of a window onto the street below. Lily Savage has noted that some Polari words also have –ois added to them—such as in nanteois, none, and bevois, drink. This has the effect of making them appear as if they are French, introducing a further level of complexity.

Polari, when spoken naturally, can have an exaggerated intonation style. Vowel sounds can be dragged out and within longer words there can be multiple rises and falls across the different syllables. Take for example fantabulosa, which contains five syllables: fan-tab-u-los-a. If used as an exclamation, as Sandy would sometimes do, the “a” sound in the syllable “tab” would be extended while the following “u” would have a falling intonation. Then the “los” part would have an almost hysterically rising or a rise-fall intonation, along with another lengthened vowel sound, with a final, slight falling intonation on the last syllable, making the speaker appear exhausted but triumphant.

But there are numerous other combinations of rises, falls or accented syllables that can be applied to fantabulosa—try enunciating it in at least three different ways, aiming for the campest intonation you can find!

Exclamations were an essential part of speaking Polari, being associated with “stereotypically feminine” language, as they are reactive. If we say, “oh!” or “really!” or “fabulosa!,” we’re usually reacting to some sort of external event such as someone’s wig falling off or a claim about how many men someone danced with at last night’s ball. There have been claims by some feminist linguists that women carry out what has been memorably described as “shitwork” in conversations, especially with men. This shitwork involves all the little things that people do to keep a conversation running smoothly—asking questions, showing that you’re listening with little “ohs” and “ahas”, choosing topics that you know the other person will want to talk about. It’s very tiring.

Men, on the other hand, aren’t meant to even acknowledge that someone else has spoken—they just stand a little away from everyone, facing the wall in a murderous sulk, or they simply bludgeon their way into an ongoing conversation, interrupting whoever is speaking to tell them they’re wrong (usually on a subject they know nothing about), or to change the subject to sport or cars or politics. If they can get a little boast in about their sexual prowess or how much money they make, then all the better.

That’s the stereotype at least, and while it holds for a small number of men and women, some of the time, actually most of us are pretty versatile communicators and there are more similarities than differences between the sexes. Polari, then, with its exaggerated exclamations and its dears and duckies and empty adjectives (bona!), feels like a hyper-realized version of stereotypical women’s speech—a parody of how women talk taken to a hilarious extreme—a linguistic form of drag.

There are different ways to speak Polari, then, linking through to personas—the piss-elegant posh queen, the world-weary seen-it-all tired old queen, the excited, breathless young queen, the witty, caustic queen, the gossipy queen who knows everyone’s business. Each would use a different set of intonational patterns for different effects.

Polari is about drama and Polari speakers were drama queens par excellence. Another feminine stereotype—gossip—is meat and drink to Polari. Polari was essentially a social language, and many speakers lived in densely packed urban areas and had numerous friends, acquaintances, lovers, one-night-stands, exes, crushes, stalkers, rivals, enemies and frenemies. They also had a perfect recollection not only of all of their current relationships but of the status of the relationships of all of the other people that they knew, and social occasions would be spent updating one another on these relationships in great detail.

As a young and introverted man on the gay scene, I often found this volume of gossip to be dizzying and overwhelming. I’d sit in the living rooms of some new friend who’d invited me round and then three or four of his other, more long-standing friends would arrive and there they’d sit all afternoon, drinking cups of tea and talking about all the people they knew, with me a sullen presence in the corner, to the point where I was sure they were simply making up names—nobody could know that many people! There couldn’t be that many people in existence!

Gossip is one of a queen’s weapons—you never know when it’ll come in handy, and much of it is, of course, geared towards the possibility of having sex with someone at some later date. Keeping track of who has split up with who, who is rumored to have been seen down the cottage, who made a clumsy pass at who, whose wig fell off on the dance floor—these are all matters of state importance to Polari speakers.

The large number of words that relate to people indicates the importance of gossip in the Polari speaker’s world. As we’ve seen, the generic term for man, usually a heterosexual man, was omee (also omior homi), while a woman was a palone (sometimes pronounced to rhyme with omee as paloney, sometimes not). A gay man was named by combining the Polari words for man and woman together into omee-palone, whereas a lesbian was the reverse order—palone-omee. There’s a conflation of gender and sexuality here which from some later perspectives might be seen as problematic—to say that a gay man is literally a man-woman keys into negative stereotypes about gay men as effeminate or women trapped in men’s bodies.

This was the general thinking of the time, so it is hardly surprising that these ideas found their way into the Polari mindset. However, many Polari speakers were very camp and a good number were what people might nowadays call gender-creative. They dressed in women’s clothes—either by dragging up as female impersonators, or in a relatively more low-key way, by dyeing hair, wearing a touch of make-up or accessorizing with a colorful scarf.

These speakers enjoyed the aspects of their identity that were feminine and felt that they were being true to themselves when they expressed them—they may have looked and sounded like camp stereotypes but most of them didn’t view themselves or people like them negatively. Accordingly, queen keyed in to the imaginary world of Polari speakers as (female) royalty. If you are going to emulate a woman, why not be the most powerful woman in the country?

In 1981, a documentary called Lol: A Bona Queen of Fabularity was broadcast on BBC2. Starring London drag queen Lorri Lee, the documentary cuts between Lorri’s drag act at a hen night, hoovering her flat and reconstructions of her younger days coming out of national service and joining the Merchant Navy (with Lorri playing her younger self in flashbacks). Lorri waxed lyrical on the word queen, providing a lesson in the different sub-classifications:

        Well what is a queen? Well you’ve met one, that’s the drag queen, that’s me . . . There’s also the camp queen, that everyone sees in the street . . . you know, “alright duck,” that type of queen . . . There’s what you call a black market queen. Now that’s the type of queen that an ordinary everyday person, and even me, could look at it, and you’d never suss that it was a queen in a million years, but they’re the types, I don’t really admire terribly . . . that usually sort of creep up on people and then strike, you know, sort of lull them into a false sense of security and then strike, and I think they’re the ones that usually get smacked in the face because of it.

But then . . . you’ve got your blob type queen, this a queen of no account, you know, she’s a little dumpy queen, walks around, usually follows a drag queen and sort of hangs on to every word it says, hoping a bit of the glitter’s going to fall off on her and one day she’s going to wake up like Prince Charming, suddenly turn into something different . . .

  After that you’ve got . . . your cottage queens. Now a cottage queen is a queen that would get her trade from a cottage naturally . . . it means a man’s toilet. And I know queens . . . couldn’t pass a cottage dear, would have to go in, some would even take sandwiches and a flask, would spend a pleasant day.

In the Polari speaker’s world, gender was linguistically reversed—he was she and (less commonly) she became he. This practice of feminizing through language, referred to by artist and Sister of Perpetual Indulgence (Manchester branch) Jez Dolan, is referred to as “she-ing.” She-ing is one of the aspects of Polari that has survived into more recent decades, and the practice was so pervasive at a particular bar on Canal Street in Manchester’s Gay Village that a “She-box” was installed a few years ago, akin to a “Swear-box,” where patrons would have to put in a few coins if they she’d someone, with the proceeds being donated to charity.

In the Julian and Sandy sketches, she is occasionally used to refer to the (male) partner of a (butch) man. In the following exchange, from “Bona Bijou Tourettes,” the pair refer to their friend Gordon, who wears leather and rides a motorbike, bearing some of the identity markers of rough trade. Julian and Sandy discuss how Gordon had set himself up with a bar in Tangiers, although the venture has recently fallen through:

     Julian: She walked out on him.

    Sandy: Oh, that old American boiler.

    Julian: Yes.

    Sandy: Oh.

    Julian: She moved on.

    Sandy: Mm, Mm. I thought she would.

   Mr Horne: Look, erm.

   Sandy: I could tell you a thing or two there.

   Mr Horne: Yes, er, now look.

   Sandy: Make your hair curl. Don’t you talk to me ducky.

  

 As there are enough clues regarding Gordon’s sexuality elsewhere in the sketches, we can interpret she as referring to a male partner.

Hypothetically, almost everything can be referred to as she, including oneself. Polari speakers would routinely call one another she—normally in an affectionate, sisterly way, although if they knew that the person being spoken to didn’t identify as a queen, there would be a more confrontational aspect to the pronoun. She effectively drags up the most masculine of men, without the need for a trip to the make-up counter at Selfridges, and it also acts as an insinuation that the man being talked about may not be as fully masculine or heterosexual as he presents himself to be.

To an extent this may have been wishful thinking—for many Polari speakers the ideal partner would be a butch man who did not identify as gay, the Great Dark Man of Quentin Crisp’s fantasies. However, there was also a more spiteful side to “she-ing”—the Polari speakers would have known that such men would have found the use of feminine pronouns on them to have been very insulting, so to use them was a way of taking them down a peg or two.

This explains the large number of feminizing terms for the police, who were rightly seen as natural enemies: Betty Bracelets, Hilda Handcuffs, Jennifer Justice, orderly daughters, Lily Law. These terms indicated that Polari speakers were able to turn a threat into a joke, with the added advantage that they could act as coded warnings—uttering “Betty Bracelets!” at the local cottage would have the effect of sending queens scattering in all directions.

The gender politics behind the feminizing pronouns are complicated. When gay men use she on themselves and their friends, are they parodying women in a way that borders on offensive? Are they simply complicit in their own oppression by adopting language and labels that are used in homophobic ways, and then using that oppressive language on their enemies, knowing it will hurt them even more?

Am I over-thinking it? Polari speakers simultaneously reclaimed and weaponized she. We could argue that they were a product of their time, but after decades of Gay Liberation, she is still used by (some) gay men. I like to think of it as an affectionate word—and if it was used to hurt, then it was more about the drag queen’s uncanny ability to find a person’s weakness rather than saying anything about the speaker’s own politics.

Another pronoun, perhaps even more problematic from later perspectives, was it—which Lorri Lee uses three times in her discussion of queens quoted earlier. It was sometimes used to refer to a one-off anonymous sexual partner—signifying a form of objectification which can appear dismissive, even callous. Consider the following, from Kenneth Williams’s diary:

              I met Harry who said Tom picked up a boy in the Piano and Harry said “It’s got a huge cock so Tom is silly, with that pile and all . . . so I thought hallo!“ It certainly gets around in Tangier.

To an extent such partners appear to be reduced to their physical body parts. As mentioned, another term for a sexual partner was trade, which had a range of slightly overlapping meanings. It could refer to a potential, past or current sexual partner, and usually indicated a temporary sexual relationship, sometimes a one-off.

Trade sometimes, but not always, indicated a masculine man who might not have identified as gay and would have been likely to have taken the “inserter” role in sex. Such men who were classed as trade did not usually speak Polari and probably would not have identified as trade or talked much about their sexuality.

Trade could also literally refer to a male prostitute, or to someone who would occasionally take money for sex but might not typically be viewed as a male prostitute—sailors on shore leave, for example, or Guardsmen who traditionally cruised parks looking for well-off men. Money might exchange hands; it might not. Sometimes the money would have been nominal, a way for the trade to establish his masculine, normally heterosexual credentials.

This was in a time when some men felt that they had to engage in elaborate excuses to justify having sex with one another. However, trade could also be a station on the way towards a more established gay identity. Gardiner notes the aphorism “today’s trade is tomorrow’s competition,” which indicates a downside to the endless hunt for new partners in a finite context.

Internalized homophobia or just plain nastiness might make the trade attack their sexual partner or demand money from them, hence the term rough trade, although this term could also refer more generally to working-class casual male partners.

Quentin Crisp, despite being a camp gay man, did not really use Polari in his autobiographies, although in the televised dramatization of The Naked Civil Servant he does refer to roughs—aggressively masculine working-class men who disguised their attraction to other men through harassment: “Some roughs are really queer and some queers are really rough.” And Lee Sutton cracks, “I’ve been feeling a little rough all day,” in his drag act.

from Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language.

The Feints and Jabs of Polari, Britain’s Gay Slang. By Paul Baker. LitHub , August 22, 2019.

Reaktion Books 

In early February, the Church of England College expressed regret that in an evening liturgy in Cambridge, God was referred to as the Duchess. The service had been advertised as a Polari evening prayer in anticipation of LGBT History Month, and was described as a liturgical experiment. So what was Polari and how did it end up in an evening prayer?

Polari is a secret language, which has now largely fallen out of use, but was historically spoken by gay men and female impersonators. My research has tracked how it grew out of the world of entertainment, stretching back from West End theatres, through to 19th-century music halls and beyond that to travelling entertainers and market-stall holders.

It developed from an earlier form of language called Parlyaree which had roots in Italian and rudimentary forms of language used for communication by sailors around the Mediterranean. Also associated with travellers, buskers, beggars and prostitutes, it found its way into Britain, especially London and port cities, and gradually became used by gay men and female impersonators, especially during the first half of the 20th century.

Polari itself had Parlyaree as a base, but once in Britain was supplemented with a wealth of slang terminology from different sources, including Cockney Rhyming Slang, backslang (pronouncing a word as if it was spelt backwards), French, Yiddish and American airforce slang.

In a period when homosexuality was illegal and heavily stigmatised, it was useful as a means of conducting conversations in public spaces, which would have alerted others to your sexuality. Many of the words allowed speakers to gossip about mutual friends or to critique the appearance of people who were in the immediate vicinity.

“Vada the naff strides on the omee ajax” meant look at the awful trousers on the man nearby. Inserting a Polari word – such as bona (good) or palone (woman) – into a sentence could act as a coded way of identifying other people who might be gay. The language itself, full of camp, irony, innuendo and sarcasm, also helped its speakers to form a resilient worldview in the face of arrest, blackmail and physical violence.

Polari speakers “christened” themselves with camp names like Scotch Flo or Diamond Lil, affording themselves alternative identities that reclaimed the representations of them as effeminate in positive ways.

In the 1990s, I based my doctoral thesis around the study of Polari, examining its varied history and complicated etymology, the ways that it resembled a language, its social functions and the reasons for its eventual decline. I interviewed speakers of the language and analysed texts, including scripts of the 1960s comedy radio series Round the Horne, which had a regular sketch voiced by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, who played Polari-speaking actors.

The version of Polari that was used in Round the Horne was necessarily simplified and toned down for the British public, and by the 1960s, there was a feeling that Polari had already overstayed its welcome. Round the Horne spoiled the secret, rendering the language less attractive to its speakers. Meanwhile the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 was round the corner, making it less necessary for a secret lingo in any case.

Some younger gay men were more interested in concepts like gay pride, gay liberation and coming out and viewed Polari as a naff byproduct of a more repressive time. In the 1970s, in an early gay magazine called Lunch, activists branded Polari as ghettoising and it gradually became surplus to requirements. When I carried out a survey of 800 gay men in the year 2000, about half the respondents had never heard of it.

While few gay men today actively use Polari, in recent years it has gained a kind of latent respectability as an historic language – similar to the way Latin is seen by the Catholic faith. From a political standpoint, Polari is now recognised as historically important, an example of the perseverance of a reviled group of people who risked arrest and attack just for being true to who they were.

In 2012 a group of Manchester-based artists used Polari to highlight the lack of LGBT inclusivity in education. They created an exam in LGBT studies, getting volunteers to sit it under strict exam conditions. The language portion of the exam was about Polari.

Another group of activists called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence created a Polari Bible, running a Polari wordlist through a computer program on an English version of the Bible. The Bible was bound in leather and displayed in a glass case at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. This was not to mock religion but to highlight how religious practices are filtered through different cultures and societies, and that despite not always being treated well by mainstream religions, there should still be space for gay people to engage with religion.

In 2012, I participated in a group effort to carry out the longest ever Polari Bible reading which took place in a Manchester Art gallery. In a nice touch of high camp we had to wear white gloves while touching the Bible, to ensure the oils from our fingers didn’t ruin the paper. We took turns reading lines such as: “And the rib, which the Duchess Gloria had lelled from homie, made she a palone, and brought her unto the homie.” Translation: “And the rib which God had taken from man was made into a woman and brought to the man.”

The Polari Evensong at Cambridge, carried out by trainee priests, however, took place in a more official context and provoked a range of conflicting opinion. Some people think it is hilarious, some are concerned about Church of England rules being broken and disrespect for religious tradition, while others think that God should be prayed to in any language and that the Evensong was perfectly valid. As someone who has spent 20 years documenting the rise and fall of Polari, I find it fascinating that even now, it is finding new ways to cause controversy. Never has a dead language had such an interesting afterlife.

   

A brief history of Polari: the curious after-life of the dead language for gay men. By Paul Baker. The Conversation , February 8, 2017.

When homosexuality was illegal, a secret language brought people together. In 1960s England, Polari was a creative blend of Romani, Italian, rhyming slang, and backslang, used among the LGBT community. It could be used to communicate, or to identify someone a a member of the group. Now Polari has been lost, even as some of its words have crossed over into mainstream English. Talking to Professor Paul Baker about this lost language on this episode of Talk the Talk.

Talk theTalk, August 5, 2019. 

Imagine you’re a gay man living in the year 1950. Not unnaturally, you would like to meet another gay man. How to identify yourself to a potential partner? A confession might bring the police; dressing and carrying yourself in distinctive ways will invite ridicule or violence in the street. The solution is this: you casually remark to a stranger that the pub you are both in is ‘naff’. He looks up, and before you know it, you’re talking like this:

           ‘Pauline? Can’t swing a cat but hit a cove. She’s had nanti bully fake. Dyed her riah, her end’s a right mess.’

    ‘Nanti bona. I hope she vaggeried straight to the crimper.’

    ‘Well that’s where she’d been. The palone tried to give her an Irish. Moultee palaver.Pauline told her to shove her shyckle up her khyber.’

This is taken from Putting on the Dish, a brilliant 2015 short film recreation by ‘Brian and Karl’ of the secret speech of gay men before 1960. Known as Polari, it flourished as an initial signal between outlaws and as a method of talking intended to be unintelligible to outsiders. It is, in linguistic terms, a criminal argot, like Verlan in French; probably not quite a language, and certainly nobody ever spoke it exclusively.

Nevertheless, the ways it has reached us, in occasional performances by the now very old, don’t quite convey the extent and improvisational quality that took it well beyond a mere collection of slang terms. We know that gay men could hold long conversations in it, shaping grammar in unusual ways and creating new lexical items on the hoof. The fact is that nobody tried to describe it until it had almost died, and then most attempts amounted merely to lists of vocabulary.

It might be best not to think of it as a language, nor just as a collection of abstruse slang words, but as what linguistics calls ‘a pidgin’; a version of a language improvised for a particular functional purpose, and in time turning into a ‘creole’, or language spoken by its users from birth. Obviously this would never have happened to Polari; but just as Tok Pisin, a Papuan creole, describes the Duke of Edinburgh as ‘oldfella Pili-Pili him bilong Misis Kwin’, so an adept Polari-speaker might express ‘that woman is giving me dirty looks’ not by substituting slang for orthodox vocabulary but by reconstructing the grammar as ‘palone vadas omee-palone very cod’. There are other glimpses of grammatical innovation. ‘Nanti’ is a sort of general negative that can also be used as an imperative — ‘nanti polari’: ‘don’t say anything’ — as well as ‘nanti dinarly’: ‘I don’t have any money’, and, concisely but irrationally, ‘nanti that’: ‘forget it’, or perhaps ‘sod it’.

Where did it come from? There are elements in the preserved vocabulary that suggest connections with immigrant communities, especially Yiddish (‘shyckle’ for ‘wig’), Italian (‘omi’ for ‘man’) and Romany (‘vada’ or ‘varda’ for ‘look at’ — from ‘warda’, ‘take care’). There is a staggeringly implausible anecdote in Paul Baker’s Fabulosa! about two queens in a Roman shoe shop discussing the sexy assistant in (they thought) impenetrable Polari, only to be greeted with ‘grazie mille, signori’.

Some other elements were taken from cockney, including rhyming slang and back slang, in which words are spelt backwards. ‘Eek’ (or ‘eke’) for ‘face’ is short for the original ‘ecaf’. But where Polari begins and ends is a vexed question. A lot of its characteristic flavour comes from the use of ordinary English vocabulary with specific secret meanings, and particular, apparently orthodox, turns of phrase — such as ‘That’s your actual French’.

The facetious talk of urban gay men goes back a long way. Peter Ackroyd has drawn our attention to a trial in 1726 in which the men are reported to have said things like ‘Oh, you bold pullet, I’ll break all your eggs!’ and ‘Where have you been, you saucy queen?’. Polari, however, probably only started to emerge in the late 19th century — Dickens would surely have been interested in it had it been around much earlier. But the period of its most general use was between the second world war and the 1970s, when active persecution of gay men was at its height and the need for secrecy and coded identification at its most urgent.

Baker’s intriguing and often amusing book is the work of a writer interested in language who has been led by his subject to think about social oppression. The relationship between the argot and attempts to eradicate its speakers is inescapable, and Baker writes well about the milieux in which Polari flourished — the theatre and the merchant navy. He is especially acute on the political uses of vulgar innuendo. When the popular radio programme Round the Horne created the two chorus boys Julian and Sandy, they escaped the attentions of Mrs Whitehouse because their worst obscenities were couched in perfectly innocent English. In the sketch ‘Bona Law’, featuring them as lawyers, Julian remarks: ‘We’ve got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time.’ They certainly deserve an award for succeeding in getting a reference to the recherché sexual practice of bukakke on to the radio in the early 1960s with the innocent remark: ‘The party’s over, it’s all over my friend.’

There are glimpses of Polari elsewhere. Rodney Ackland’s fascinating 1951 Soho play Absolute Hell contains a flash of unmistakable bad-taste Polari wit when Maurice, a queen bored by a soldier talking earnestly about what he saw in Belsen, says:

     Someone minced up to me the other night and said ‘Ooh, I couldn’t sleep all night for thinking of that ghastly horror camp.’ I thought he meant Cyril Clatworthy.

(In reality, Maurice would have said ‘she’, of course.) It surfaces in some very unexpected places, including in a 1970s episode of Doctor Who, as intergalactic theatrical types chatter boldly. Baker has done well, too, to excavate some long-ago drag acts and to extract convincing accounts from reliable witnesses, of whom Paul O’Grady, the man behind Lily Savage, is one of the best.

The truth of the matter is that Round the Horne, with its huge audience, played a large part in killing off Polari. After Julian and Sandy, the man behind you on the bus might not follow exactly what you were saying but he would understand very well what you were. After the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, Gay Liberation had no time for concealment and dissembling; many gay men in the 1970s took the view that it was best to behave exactly as the heterosexual world. The argot fell largely into desuetude.

Strikingly, one of the most brilliant records of the way urban gay men talked in the early 1980s, a book called Queens by ‘Pickles’, published in 1982, has hardly any use for Polari; the characters might call each other ‘she’, but almost all the classic vocabulary had by then quite disappeared.

Baker’s story takes a curious final turn. In recent years, the community has rather taken up the idea of camp as a radical gesture, and some quite serious efforts have been made to bring Polari back from the dead. Paul Burston’s gay and lesbian literary salon at the Southbank Centre is actually called Polari. People have tried to learn the language and discourse in it, much as Hebrew or Irish Gaelic were revived for reasons of political identity. Attempts have been made to broaden its application, including, astonishingly, to religious and sacramental functions. A Polari Evensong was held in Oxford in 2017, causing a terrible row, and the Bible has been rendered in it:

      And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle. And Gloria vardad the sparkle, that it was bona: and Gloria medzered the sparkle from the munge.

Criminal argots are always fascinating and peculiar, and this one, with its astonishing verve and lewdness, its harmless and insistent lechery, has a ludicrous charm too. Its witnesses and practitioners clearly still feel it, and Baker’s interviews radiate warmth and good humour. Even if, like me, you are exactly the wrong age to be speaking it, it’s quite possible, walking in the street, to remark to your friend, ‘Don’t fancy the one you’re getting, dear’, or to mount the occasional small-scale revival of the deathless banter in Round the Horne:

  Sandy: ‘We got it from our special charcuterie.’Mr Horne: ‘Charcuterie?’

Sandy: ‘Hm.’ Mr Horne: ‘Your butcher?’ Julian: ‘Oh, do you think so? It must be the way I’ve had my hair done.’

Polari, the secret gay argot, is making a surprising comeback.  By Philip Hensher. The Spectator  , June 22, 2019.

In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the Fairy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.

In the beginning was thieves cant, a criminal slang dating back to Elizabethan times. Then Molly slang, from the Georgian period, and Parlyaree, primarily spoken by peddlars and circus people, which had a strong Italian influence, thanks to an unusually high number of Italian Punch and Judy professors and organ grinders arriving in Britain in the mid nineteenth century (yes, really. Imagine what the Daily Mail would say). Polari borrowed from all these sources, adding in bits of rhyming and back slang, terms from the theatre and from Mediterranean sailors.

I first learned about polari when I was 9 or 10, listening to tapes of the radio comedy Round the Horne. The sketch show, originally broadcast in 1965, featured Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick playing Julian and Sandy, a polari-speaking pair of stereotypical ‘resting actors’ who embarked on a series of doomed ventures, appearing as travel agents or circus empresarios. Later, when polari phrases cropped up in songs by Morrissey (before he was Bad) and scenes in Velvet Goldmine, I felt an instant connection to a hidden lineage. Recognising the phrases meant being in the know, part of a group; for someone who was experimenting with make-up and cross dressing in a grim northern industrial town, it was a connection to something bigger, a secret history to carry inside.

‘We’ve got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time… we’ve handled the most unusual briefs’

Polari is a vocabulary of alertness, whether to beauty (‘varda the bona omi’s dolly eek’) or danger (‘gardy loo – nanti polari, charpering omi ajax’). It uses compounds which are playfully literal – spectacles become ‘oglefakes’ or fake eyes, a policeman is a ‘charpering omi’, a man who searches. Some phrases are pleasingly musical (a poorly endowed man has ‘nada to varda in the larder’), others are utterly obtuse (‘order lau your luppers on the strillers bona’ – I’ll leave that translation for later). Much of the language is functional, and physical; by Paul Baker’s estimation, around 20% of polari nouns refer to body parts, and of these, one third relate to the face, and another third to the genitals. The grammar is idiosyncratic at best, often relying on context; for example, the word ‘dowry’ is used as a magnifier. If a lattie is a house, a dowry lattie is a big house and the dowriest lattie would be a palace. It’s also not terribly precise; distances, for example, are limited to ‘ajax’ and ‘nanti ajax’.

There is a debate as to whether polari is a language at all. Baker suggests it might better be understood as an anti-language, ‘used by people who are somehow apart from mainstream society, either residing on the edge of it, perhaps frowned on in some way, or hidden away or even criminalised, with attempts from the mainstream to expel or contain them’. Anti-languages typically encode a counter-cultural or subversive attitude, with mocking words for the police, and members of ‘straight’ society. In this way, the anti-language also encodes an attitude, and a way of being, as well as a lexicon. The use of polari pre-supposes a set of shared interests and experiences, whilst also acting as a shibboleth.

While we might now see polari terms as an adornment to our speech, and focus on the wit encoded within it, it is vital to remember that it developed at least in part as a defence mechanism, a way for members of a persecuted group to communicate. Polari was most prominent in the 1950s and 60s, during which time homosexual acts between men were criminal, even in private. Although use of polari waned after the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, it was still employed by groups whose activities brought them into contact with the law after this time: for example, Jeremy Reed records the use of an evolved form of polari by male sex workers in Piccadilly during the 1970s, a time of intense police surveillance.

As previously noted, polari works to both enlighten and conceal. This is particularly notable when looking at its most famous exponents, Julian and Sandy. With an audience of millions, Julian and Sandy performed a version of counter-cultural identity for a mainstream audience. While the pair were presented as amusing rather than threatening, their portrayal is distinctly more subversive than that of, say John Inman’s Mr Humphreys in Are You Being Served. Baker notes that the pair are ‘daring in their suggestions of relationships with other men, and offer hints regarding a network of fictional gay establishments’. This is even bolder as, at the time, the BBC, and in particular Director General Hugh Greene, was under severe pressure from Mary Whitehouse, who scrutinised their output for the merest hint of indecency.

Julian and Sandy demonstrate the subversive strength of polari, using the language as a trojan horse to sneak risqué content past the likes of Whitehouse, to the (unofficial) delight of Greene. And some of their output was genuinely bold; heavily reliant of double entendre, the pair make numerous references to their illegal status. In one sketch, in which the pair are acting as solicitors, they refer to their ‘criminal practice’; in another, in which they are homeopaths, they declare that they are ‘not recognised by any doctors’. In a third, they ask literal straight man Kenneth Horne whether they can interest him in a wig; he responds ‘not me, but you might interest the chief of police’. These sorts of barbs undercut the image of camp comedians as ‘Uncle Toms’, presenting an acceptable form of sexuality for a mainstream audience. Even more surprisingly, Baker learns that the pair often improvised their dialogue, meaning that queer performers were dropping in phrases that the show’s writers didn’t understand, shaping their own presentation. While Julian and Sandy used a fairly abridged version of polari, around 40 words or phrases understandable through context, they would occasionally employ more complex language, such as Paddick telling Williams to play something nice on the piano: ‘order lau your luppers on the strillers bona’.

Round the Horne ended suddenly in 1969 after the death of Kenneth Horne, and polari itself didn’t last much longer; the passage of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967 had removed much of the imperative for using the language, and while its use was still habitual among older speakers, it fell out of step with the Gay Liberation movement. In the 1970s, camp, and by extension polari, became seen as problematic; following Susan Sontag’s definition of camp as disengaged or apolitical, the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto, published in 1971, declared that ‘those gay men and women caught up in the femme role must realise… that any security this brings is more than offset by the loss of freedom’. This was reinforced by writers such as the feminist Mary McIntosh, writing for Lunch magazine in 1972, who called camp ‘a form of minstrellisation’ and Polari ‘a product of a culture that is deeply ambivalent’. While polari had bite in the hands of some speakers, it was seen as overly defensive, while terms such as ‘omipalone’ or ‘manwoman’ to denote homosexual was criticised for portraying gay men as necessarily feminine. While the shifting political landscape, and newfound confidence of the Gay Liberation movement played a part in polari’s loss of popularity, Baker also identifies the effect of ‘cultural cringe’ – the language was seen as old hat, the preserve of fusty and out of date characters.

And when she thus had cackled, she screeched with a loud cackling fakement, Lazarus, troll forth.

One test of a language is the range of emotions and artistic ideas which they can be used to express. LL Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, published translations of Shakespeare as a means of promoting his language, and gaining cultural capital for it. Similarly, in recent years the playwright Ken Campbell translated Macbeth into Pidgin, as part of an effort to have it adapted as a global lingua franca. Although polari was previously known in the mainstream as a source of light entertainment in Round the Horne, and in other circles as a means of evading police, in 2003 the Manchester branch of drag activists The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence began work on a grand scheme to elevate polari: a full translation of the King James Bible.

In the introduction to the polari bible’s first edition, Sister Matic de Bauchery notes that the King James Version ‘has become a watchword for the majesty and power of its language. Vulgarising it by translating it in to Polari would be an act of cultural vandalism akin to translation in to Scots. But good taste has never yet limited the Sisters’ activities, so we did it anyway.’ Working with a crack (addled) team of linguists and computer scientists, the Sisterhood created a program which used over 800 rules to transform the language of the KJV into something approaching that of Julian and Sandy. This required a degree of formalisation, and a certain amount of borrowing from other sources, leading to the creation of a new strain, High Polari, which is also used by the Sisters in their subversive rituals (which included the canonisation of Derek Jarman, described by Baker in one of Fabulosa’s most moving sections).

Although the Polari bible is presented with the Sisters’ trademark irreverence (the frontispiece notes that it is ‘appointed to be used in Turkish baths and discotheques’, and that it was produced in Manchester, ‘a notorious hotbed of the sin of sodom’), it also performs an important cultural function. In 2012, a bound volume of the Bible was created and displayed in John Rylands Library, alongside a 1455 Gutenberg Bible and a fragment of John’s Gospel from circa 457 CE, placing it in a continuum of holy texts. And although high polari might bear as little relation to the spoken language as Shakespeare’s soliloquies did to day-to-day Elizabethan conversation, there is beauty and sophistication in verses like ‘And Gloria screeched the sparkle journo, and the munge she screeched nochy. And the bijou nochy and the morning were the first journo’, or ‘And her name through faith in her name hath made this homie butch, whom ye varda and know: any road up, the faith which is by her hath parkered her this absolutely fantabulosa soundness in the presence of you all.’

This coincided with a wider revival of interest in polari; as a young academic, Baker published a polari dictionary, and the artist Jez Dolan used polari in a series of events in the North West, including projecting polari phrases onto Bury Town Hall. There is a long-standing LGBT literary salon names Polari, which has also given its name to a prestigious annual award, and next year the author Richard Milward is scheduled to publish a novel in polari. Baker also notes the appropriation of the language by high end fashion labels and London bars, in an unlikely reversal of fortunes for the clandestine language. That’s not to say that polari had become totally rarefied; The Polari Lounge was a welcome addition to Stoke-on-Trent’s gay scene in 2010, acting as a bar, meeting place and community hub. Although Baker’s account of his own visit there was not a happy one, it’s hard to overstate how important its presence felt in the middle of the decaying high street. Polari was proudly visible at last, its reach extended beyond the major cities and ports. As the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence say, ‘if decades of homophobic pressure had failed to defeat camp, what chance did a mere reorganization of subcultural priorities stand?’

And Gloria vardad every fakement that she had made, and, varda, it was dowry bona. And the bijou nochy and the morning were the seyth journo.

Fabulosa attempts to bridge the gap between Baker’s academic work and a more popular approach to Polari, and largely succeeds. He is especially strong on the changing attitude towards polari within the gay community in the 70s and 80s, and on the important reclamation performed by The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. While the subject of Julian and Sandy is well-trodden ground, his approach feels fresh, and the personal interludes add to the narrative without being overly intrusive. Fabulosa is also an excellent primer for would-be polari speakers. To test the theory, I went to a party last weekend and tried to give a couple of doctors the basics of the language. I think the lessons went well; if your GP ever asks you to take your shirt off so they can nellyarda your thumping cheat, you know who to blame.

Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari by Paul Baker. By Thom Cuell. Minor Literature[s] , July 9, 2019.

Excerpt: Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language by Paul Baker.  Minor Literature[s] , July 11, 2019.