The Codpiece in Art and Fashion

Early in the eighteenth century, visitors to the Tower of London could gaze upon a painted wooden statue of Henry VIII, the English king who’d died some two hundred years before. Royally robed, sceptre in hand, the likeness befitted Henry’s reputation for extravagance, right down to its lascivious secret mechanism: “If you press a spot on the floor with your feet,” one observer wrote, “you will see something surprising with regard to this figure, but I will not say more.” I will: it was the king’s codpiece, sallying forth in full regalia.

Henry VIII remains the poster boy for codpieces, those profane protuberances that drew eyes crotchward in the sixteenth century. A suit of the king’s armor, boasting a bulbous codpiece weighing more than two and a half pounds, is still on display at the Tower; women used to stick pins in its sumptuous red-velvet lining to ward off barrenness. And who could blame them? Sure, Henry sired notoriously few healthy children, but, in a famous portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, he exudes the lusty mystery of a wellborn stud, his codpiece swollen with the stuff of life. He and his appendage feature prominently in “Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art,” by the English critic Michael Glover. “Has heaven ever before conjured so broad a pair of shoulders?” Glover writes, of Henry’s portrait. “Do you know of any other monarch who is as wide as he is long?”

Good questions, both, but any study of the codpiece begins with simpler ones: Why did it exist at all, and why did men elect to wear it? Theories abound. The historian Grace Vicary has argued that codpieces were, in a sense, the P.P.E. of their day, born as a means of containing a disease—in this case syphilis, which was then sweeping through Europe. Treating the French pox, as it was known, called for “a whole galaxy of herbs, minerals, syrups, and decoctions,” Vicary writes, applied directly in “a variety of messy unguents and poultices.” If you wanted to protect your fancy wardrobe from stains, the reasoning goes, you would do well to isolate the whole package in an oversized box. Plus, Renaissance men carried a lot of junk on their belts—this was the era that gave us the “swashbuckler,” after all—and a bit of padding around the crotch would help insulate them “from bumps and friction.”

With time, codpieces transcended their functional origins, much as the surgical mask has yielded to the cloth Baby Yoda one. For the men of the fifteenth century, conditions for phallic peacocking were optimal: theirs was an age without pants, when only snug stockings and long gowns hid their “privy Members and Buttockes.” By 1450, doublets had become immodestly short. The codpiece, in its early form, was a baggy cloth gusset laced to the stockings, but, in the course of the next century, rising on a tide of ostentation, it bulged and distended. In Italy and Spain, and soon across Europe, padding and stays came into vogue. A kind of circumferential arms race led to boxy, generously portioned tubes that simpered from the waistlines of princes and peons alike.

Thus the codpiece, designed for discretion, became instead a rigid contrivance. Historians have compared it to “a permanent erection,” noting that it was “so voluminous it could serve as a pocket.” And indeed it did, offering convenient storage for one’s hankie or a stray orange, in addition to “ballads, bottles, napkins, pistols, hair, and even a looking glass,” as the scholar Will Fisher has written. With great size comes great decorative responsibility, and men of means rose to the occasion. They brocaded, damasked, bejewelled, embroidered, tasseled, tinseled, and otherwise ornamented their codpieces until they became like walking Christmas trees. Puberty was no prerequisite: boys as young as seven could engorge themselves with silk and satin. On the battlefield, a codpiece signalled martial swagger; in the royal court, procreative swagger; and, everywhere else, swagger at large.

And yet none of this presses on the question of motive. Glover looks for clues in the litany of codpieces jutting from Renaissance paintings, leading a perceptive tour of the nether regions. If nothing else, he’s an inspired describer of groins in their finery. Of Alonso Sánchez Coello’s “Portrait of Alessandro Farnese,” he notices that the young noble’s codpiece mimics “the puffing out of his breeches, which sag from his elegant pinched-in waist like two gently slumping puddings.” Surveying Titian’s “Emperor Charles V with a Dog,” Glover probes the hound’s “questing muzzle,” which veers “sniffing-close” to its master’s codpiece in what can only be “an allusion to the emperor’s virility.” And in Luca Signorelli’s unruly fresco “The End of the World,” Glover sees, amid the “writhing, gesticulating soldiers,” “overripe fruit hanging from the bough of the groin, poised and displayed for quick picking.”

Too often, though, Glover reaches for that overripe fruit, as when he writes, “It seems you just can’t keep a good codpiece down.” When he exclaims that “only a mere letter” separates the French word for codpiece, braguette, from baguette—“that faux cod-phallus, crispy and hard on the surface yet so yielding at its center”—he seems guilty of the same “self-puffery” he mocks. “It was as normal to wear a codpiece,” he writes, “as it is to wear, say, a padded bra in our own day. And yet, and yet, we still wonder about it.” True, but throughout “Thrust,” Glover treats the codpiece more as an object of ridicule than of curiosity. The epitome of embellished manhood, it contributed, he writes, “to a fabricated, fictionalized version of the male body.” Be that as it may, a generation of men lived and died in these things—owned them, stored them, sat pridefully for portraits in them. Even if the phenomenon was solely a crisis of machismo, isn’t there more to learn about it from the art history at the heart of his study?

Fisher has proposed that the codpiece embodies duelling visions of masculinity. Before the Renaissance, a man’s identity was predicated on his ability to have children, ideally lots of them. The codpiece had one stockinged foot in that world—“cod” was slang for the scrotum, not the penis—and the other in a racy alternative that valued “sexual conquest” more than reproduction. Seen in this light, codpiece-wearing men were essentially performing their performance anxiety; Marjorie Garber has called the codpiece “the thinking man’s (or woman’s) bauble, the ultimate detachable part.”

Whatever the case, by the close of the sixteenth century, the codpiece had become a canker-blossom on the male form, and it declined as suddenly as it had ascended. As early as the fifteen-eighties, Michel de Montaigne had written off the accessory as “empty and useless,” puzzling, “What was the meaning of that ridiculous part of the breeches worn by our fathers?” Fashion took a decidedly feminine direction; soon ruffs adorned necks and upperstocks plumped from midriffs. Some mourned the senescence of tumescence. Barton Holyday longed for the days of “that Cod-piece-ago, when the innocency of men did not blush to shew all that Nature gaue them.” (He seems to have elided the fact that codpieces were mostly empty space.) Since their peak, they’ve popped up only in passing. In the nineteen-sixties, Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther Party, used the profits from his prison memoir to design a pair of pants with a large, “sock-like codpiece” built in. “We’ve been castrated in clothing,” Cleaver told the press, “and my pants open up new vistas. I’m against penis binding.” He’s not alone: in the past year, codpieces have appeared on the runway from Thom Browne and Gucci, the latter available in leather.

If a revival is coming—if our thirst for personal protective equipment cannot be slaked with masks, gloves, and shields alone—we would do well to learn from our forebears. To my eye, the finest painting featured in “Thrust” is Brueghel the Elder’s “The Wedding Dance,” from 1566, in which a jumble of tipsy peasants make merry at a homespun reception. Foregrounded, of course, are what Glover aptly calls “no-holds-barred codpieces,” worn by commoners “thoroughly unashamed of themselves . . . exulting in the sheer beastliness of men.” He’s right: the codpiece has never looked more natural. Even if Brueghel intended to warn against bawdiness, he captured the fashion as a way of life rather than as a flagrant absurdity. These men are being, not seeming. Did any of them ever glimpse his crotch and worry, even for a fraction of a second, that he looked ridiculous? Did he fear that history would judge him harshly? As he ran the last lace through its eyelet, did he think anything at all? These and other facts are forever hidden from us, tucked away in the proud codpiece of the past.

A Brief History of the Codpiece, the Personal Protection for Renaissance Equipment

By Dan Piepenbring. The New Yorker , May 23, 2020. 

In these plaguey days, how eager should we be to examine the remains of a 16th-century codpiece firsthand?

Furthermore, how much full-strength, anti-bacterial hand-wash would we need to slather and squander in the panic-stricken, immediate aftermath of any serious, one-on-one act of visual-cum-tactile scrutiny?

Would there be fetid remnants of some ill-definable ancient pungency still remotely alive in the air? A certain suspiciously greasy slitheriness about the surface of the once costly fabric of the thing, now badly faded?

These questions hang mock-menacingly in the fresh south London air that I am still so fortunate (fingers crossed) to be breathing. Luckily, I have been spared all this potential misery, thanks to a deft seamstress and former ballerina called Anne-Marie Norton…

According to Anne-Marie, the ‘remains’ of a codpiece known to have been worn by Don Grazia de Medici in 1562 are preserved at the Pitti Palace in Florence. She learnt of this while delving into the history of the making of codpieces at my request.

Gucci’s Alessandro Michele revived the accessory for his spring/summer 2019 show: rendered in leather and snakeskin, worn harness-like and evoking Robert Mapplethorpe; in shiny diamante, hanging like a glitter ball; and framed like a seashell clutching the symbolic pearl.

The American designer Thom Browne also featured them in his spring/summer 2020 show, which nodded to deconstructed sportswear. His models wore them over pleated tutus and bell-shaped suit-dresses, accessorised with papier-mache-looking football helmets, broken umbrellas and headbands in the red, white and blue of the US flag.

Last autumn I published Thrust (David Zwirner Books, 2019), a little treatise that attempts to be, as the subtitle states, “A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art.”

The codpiece, a gross object of fleeting allure, went down almost as fast as it came up — living and dying as a thing of high fashion and indispensable male accoutrement in the 16th century — and for only about 50 years of that century, at that.

In the book, I discuss paintings by the likes of Titian, Moroni, Coello, Parmigianino, Giorgione, and others who recorded these great priapic occasions, when men of the church, aristocrats, kings, and emperors galore strapped them on as never before (or since) in a veritable orgy of tremendously eye-catching uprearingness.

What I did not do in that book, however, was to say much about the actual making of the codpiece, its materiality you might say, if were you endeavoring to earn a meager living as a culturally high-toned lecturer in fine art and fashion.

To be perfectly honest, I had not up to that point dandled or fondled a Renaissance codpiece in my very own hands. I had not even considered overmuch its actual fabrication — exactly how it was made and from what, and what it really looked like at the back…

I still have not.

Examined one of that vintage, that is.

In fact, thanks to dear Anne-Marie, I have gone one better by far. Having done on my behalf the heavy-lifting that careful research always demands, she was able to find useful pointers in a pattern book of our own time, Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion: The Cut and Construction of Clothes for Men and Women, c.1560-1620 (Macmillan, 1985), which deals with the exactness of things way back when.

And then, faster even than Jumping Jack Flash himself, she made me one. An exact likeness! And so I now possess my very own faux-authentic Renaissance codpiece, made to the exact pattern of the one worn by that Medici whose name I have just cited (with a few extra bits of decorative embellishment boldly snatched from the codpiece of yet another Medici called Cosimo I, and worn just a little later, in 1574.)

So how did it work exactly?

First, she asked me for my measurements. (She knew that I wanted to show it off at a lecture). I sidestepped that nasty little bolt of unanticipated impertinence by giving her the measurements of my waistband. Was I being obtuse and unhelpful?

Not at all! Waistband measurements are very useful because you tie the thing on at the waist, where it hangs down (yet always pridefully, as the Honorable Member demands), at the height of every raised expectation.

On a now-distant day before the lockdown, Anne-Marie presented me with this delight of an eye-feast, in a tall and rather elegant black box, on the steps of a dancing academy in Covent Garden called Pineapple, which is three leaps and a single smart lunge away from the Royal Opera House. The codpiece was modestly nestled, nose down, as if it might have gently crash-landed, in white tissue paper.

When I lifted the lid, to the consternation of the many gathered around (who had been tipped off about the time and place of its imminent appearance), I felt a little like a waggish, thin-mustachioed, pier-end prestidigitator. But a codpiece, even when inert in a box, is a thousand times the cultural superior of a mere rabbit.

And yet, viewed from behind, you notice that there is no point of entry. It is flat-backed, sealed off. No nosing allowed then. The codpiece revealed its function not as a hubristic spectacle, but as mere decoration!

Did the member itself ever cower at the rear, one wonders, fearful that the codpiece may have made a promise that actual anatomy might not deliver? Never! Never! There was always too much at stake.

What was it made from then? Covered in gorgeous red-dyed damask, it was stabilized (like any fresh-primed time bomb of roaring lustfulness) with cotton ticking, and tightly stuffed (you have to pack it as hard as you can because it needs to maintain its solid-looking and -feeling shapeliness for hours, months, years) with an organic fabric called kapok.

Kapok! What an oddly jaunty little word that is. Kapok is the stuff with which children’s toys are stuffed. These materials are not authentic to the time, of course. (This we would have recognized well enough, I have no doubt, as soon as we hear the word “children” uttered. There were no children in the 16th century. There were only miniature adults, and they were always dressed as such.)

Way back when, the codpiece would have been stuffed with horsehair or bombast (a kind of cotton wadding). Its outside might have been made of leather. An animal bone could have been inserted to ensure the maintenance of shapeliness. Needs must.

The point was this: it must never flag in its attentions. Never.

Egregious Renaissance Maleness, From the Inside Out : An up-close look at the codpiece.

By Michael Glover. Hyperallergic , April 18, 2020

There really is no delicate way to open a story about a piece of horsehair-lined leather designed to cover and celebrate a man’s genitals, is there? So let’s just get on with it: The codpiece, as it is called, was wildly popular for just a brief few decades during the Renaissance, and yet it remains a cult object of comical fascination to this day. And it has, you may be delighted or terrified to learn, had a big year: it is the subject of a slim new treatise, the color of artisanal gatorade, entitled Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art, by the English art critic and poet Michael Glover, released by David Zwirner Books. And it was an unexpected motif in the Spring 2020 menswear collection by American designer Thom Browne, shown in Paris this past June.

In celebration of these codpiece-driven coincidences, David Zwirner Books brought together Glover and Browne for an episode of their podcast, Dialogues, which host Lucas Zwirner taped with the pair in Browne’s midtown Manhattan showroom, where the codpiece-pieces themselves could gaze on in tender admiration. Following the podcast taping, we spoke with both author and designer to unpack how this bizarre fashion footnote has continued as a source of inspiration.

Like many objects sprung from delusional masculine grandeur, the codpiece is a punchline, yet so much more. “The codpiece is all about boastfulness and braggadocio, sad men pretending to be more than they could ever hope to be,” as Glover diagnoses in his book, and in a recent phone call, he shared the more pedestrian details: “It would have had to have a fairly hard exterior, probably made of leather. Inside, the padding would probably have been horsehair.” (Horsehair is very breathable—hence its starring role in the world of luxury mattresses.) It would have been measured, he confirmed, though a brief google search reveals that if there was once a special term for the profession of codpiece measurer, it has been lost to the sands of time.

The codpiece eventually reemerged as something more utilitarian in the worlds of ballet and sports—le cup, le jockstrap—but its original purpose was more direct as a visual symbol: “It extends and aggrandizes the genital area,” Glover said. “It suggests that the penis, and everything else that clusters about it, is enormous in proportion. And is tremendously potent. And that the owner, that person, is extremely virile, and is capable of achieving almost anything.”

Exhilarating!

Though it may be hard to imagine, the codpiece was once an object of deep seriousness. Glover’s notion for the book arrived during a hilarious visit to London’s National Portrait Gallery, where a “crepuscular” room filled with Tudor family portraits includes a drawing copied from a destroyed portrait of Henry VIII, “standing in front of his father, spread-legged looking like a mighty Tudor oak, just the way in which this is positioned on the wall, and the way I was standing, the more I looked at it, the more it became evident to me, in a blinding flash of insight, that this entire painting pivoted about this enormous codpiece. It was like a capturing wheel at the center of the painting, but the entire world pivoted about it, and that made me laugh inwardly.”

“There was a certain amount of humor” with which the codpiece was treated during its heyday, he explained, “but it was quite often serious. It was part of the grandiose self display, certainly with Henry VIII. [He] needed a lot of grandeur of self display, because the Tudor monarchs were not long on the throne. He needed to show himself off and he always did.So it was a weapon. It was power.”

That self-seriousness has only added to its comedic potential over time. Male vanity, of course, used to express itself visually with outrageous displays of myth-building tailoring and portraiture, while it’s now become something more like an oil-and-vinegar combo of preening and insecurity. The insecurity often gets in the way of the preening, unfortunately, and perhaps that is why despite the codpiece’s brief relevance to the history of fashion, it has returned again and again as a token of male virility disguised as performance wear in sports and dance. That’s the spirit Browne’s seersucker runway captured, with its pirouetting ballerinos in tutus, codpieces proudly displayed like badges, a sendup of the overt sexual signaling of historical fashion. (Panniers, the women’s basket-like undergarment that made the hips two doors-wide, got similar treatment in the collection.)

A runway fashion observer may not know “the history of it, but they know of a codpiece,” Browne explained in a recent interview. That vague sense of historicism gave the collection its edge of madcap humor, underscoring that the codpiece’s more familiar contemporary cousin, the cup, is far from immune to that same ridiculous interpretation. Rendered in seersucker and affixed to dresses, suits, and dresses that looked like suits, the codpiece, Browne said, was “somewhat for decoration, and for humor.”

Browne is not a designer who lets his collections hang heavy with laborious nods to other centuries, periods, or cultures. The levity of his work comes from his indulgence of a dilettante’s attitude towards his references: “I don’t really approach [fashion design] from a historical point of view,” he said. ”It’s more taking ideas and almost reintroducing them in ways that aren’t a time reference.” That’s why he loves endlessly tweaking and freaking the suit, an object so deeply embedded in the greater style consciousness that even minor changes, like his floodwater hems, drive people nuts: “We still get reactions, even 15 years later. Some people hate it—they don’t understand why it exists, and I love that about it.”

“I just like to make people see things differently,” Browne said. “And make people either love it, or hate it.”

Why the Codpiece Remains One of Menswear’s Most Essential Accessories.  By Rachel Tashjian. GQ , December  13, 2019.

The codpiece—a fashion curio, yes, but one whose padded cup runneth over as a conversation piece. The designer Thom Browne, whose collections have featured codpieces over the years, and the writer Michael Glover, who just published an unlikely and hilarious history of the codpiece in art, talk male vanity, gender fluidity, camp, Catholicism, tailoring, and more—all revolving around this little flap of cloth about the midsection.

Dialogues :The David Zwirner Podcast.  December 13, 2019. 

David Zwirner Books

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.