Топик: Polari - English gay slang

By the 1960s, the political situation had begun to change. Polari was used less to cautiously "out" yourself, and more for chatting with friends. Its vocabulary - full of words to do with clothing (lally-drags: trousers, ogle-fakes: spectacles) and parts of the body (thews: arms, luppers: fingers) and evaluative adjectives (bona: good, cod: bad), reflects what it was most often used for - gossiping about potential sexual partners with your mates, while your target was in earshot. "Vada that bona omee ajax - the one with nanti riah!" translates to "Look at that nice man over there - the one with no hair!" Use it in the club, or on the tube - you could spill all of the details about what you got up to last night, without anyone being the wiser.

However, in the 1970s, Polari started to fade from people's memories. Julian and Sandy had represented a swan-song of sorts in any case. In 1967 (the same year that Round the Horne was at its peak, winning the award for best comedy radio programme), the legal situation for the average gay man was improved with the implementation of the Wolfenden Report’s recommendations of ten years earlier. Homosexuality was partially decriminalised (although there were still a variety of ways that men could be prosecuted for having gay sex), and as a result, there was less of a need for a secret language. In addition to that, Julian and Sandy gave Polari a kind of doomed respectability - they had inadvertently blurted out the secret via the radio, into 9 million homes a week. What was the point of using Polari when Aunt Beryl listened to Round The Horne and was able to get the gist of what you were saying?

And ultimately, there were political reasons for ditching Polari - it was associated with oppression, and the early Gay Liberationists wanted to put all of that behind them. It was rather easy to criticise Polari as being sexist, racist and brimming over with internalised homophobia. Gay magazines of the early 70s are quick to cast Polari as keeping gay men in a ghetto. One writer warns that gay culture is going to become consumed by a "language of body parts ". And Polari, with its camp bitchy overtones was so last decade, don't you know? This was the era when harmless, much-loved John Inman was picketed outside Brighton's Dome Hall by gay men for "contributing to the television distortion of the image of homosexuals".

By the beginning of the 1980s, Polari had all but vanished from the gay scene, and in place of the fey Polari speakers, were American influences - butch was in, and the Malboro Man look - muscles, leather, denim, facial hair, uniforms, big boots etc. became fashionable. The clone was born, and with minor modifications still exists today. Suddenly going to the gym became a popular pastime and the gay scene was in danger of becoming populated with butch Marys who took their masculinity and muscle tone ever-so seriously. Butch gay men aren't supposed to speak Polari - instead they grunt and show you a coloured handkerchief so you know what they're into.

However, in the 1990s, the situation changes again. With more people becoming relaxed about sexuality, Polari is undergoing a revival of interest. It's now possible to view it as part of gay heritage - a weapon that was used to fight oppression, and something that gay men can be proud of again. Camp is no longer viewed as apolitical - for example, the London branch of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence use "High Polari" in their blessings, sermons and canonisations - adding a bit of religious mystique while also acknowledging gay history within their ceremonies. And anyone who wants to add some authentic mid-20th century atmosphere in their film, book or play or pop song about gay men can drop a few words of Polari into their script for instant credibility (see Love Is The Devil, The Velvet Goldmine or Morrissey's Piccadilly Palare for examples). Polari has become a short-hand to represent being gay in the '50s or '60s in the same way that a hula hoop or a space-hopper represents the 1970s.

However, Polari still occupies a controversial position in the hearts of contemporary gay men. Last year a phone debate in a gay free-sheet unearthed a number of conflicting, and at times strange attitudes towards it. Some callers were quick to dismiss Polari as camp nonsense, only spoken by unfashionable people who lived "in the sticks" (i.e. outside London). Such words are "neither useful, relevant or reflect the queer society we live in today," complained one caller. Others argued that it was harmless fun, and to ignore Polari is to do an injustice to the men and women who lived through more oppressive times. The free-sheet joined in, labeling Polari as "evil".

It's unlikely that Polari will ever be revived to the extent that it was used in the 50s - but that's no shame. Without realising it, many of the words that people consider to be "gay slang" were once part of Polari's lexicon - chicken, trade, butch, camp, cottage etc. These words, which are more useful in describing gay experiences because they don't have straight equivalents, have survived while other words like lally: legs, poll: wig, order: go etc. have fallen into disuse. That's not to say that it can't be fun to use them occasionally. Speaking a few words of Polari is hardly going to cause a pair of Larry Grayson glasses on a chain to magically appear around your neck. And in any case, little bits of Polari have even been incorporated into mainstream slang. For example - the word naff was originally used as a Polari acronym meaning "Not Available For F..". Now it simply refers to something that's tasteless. Clearly, those poor confused straights must have heard it - "oh don't bother with him, he's naff!", inferred it meant something bad, and started using it themselves - not realising that the word was originally an insult hurled at them.

So while it's important that a situation never arises where gay men need to use a secret language again, we do ourselves no favours by distancing ourselves completely from Polari. From the initial 1960s media representations of effeminate, camp gay man, through to the hyper-masculine alternatives created by the gay subculture in the 1970s, the recent years have seen a resurgence and a reappraisal of both identities. Distinctions between the two, however, are now more blurred than ever. And while gay still means something different from straight, there continues to be a place for Polari.

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Paul Baker, 2001

Contents:

1.Note UK statistics

2.My own researching Polari my way of researching

3.The history of Polari

4.An American Polari Ms. Martha Brummett researching

5.Researching Polari an article Paul Baker wrote for Lancaster University's student magazine "Scan" dated 15th November 1996.

6.Bona Contention an article Paul Baker wrote for “Gay Times” dated January 2001

7.Vocabulary

My own researching Polari

Since writing the above, I am horrified to find so much that is misleading. For one thing, apparently it is impossible to talk of "gay language" anymore. It's just "not allowed" in society. There are as many ways to be gay as there are gay people. We can't just all be lumped together and then told that we have a "language". And just what is meant by "gay" anyway? Oh, it's so confusing to a simple boy from a council estate in the northeast.

Then, and apparently this is even more scary - simply describing Polari in itself isn't going to get us anywhere. We have to consider it in terms of "gay identities" (note the plural here), or rather, how do Polari speakers use Polari in order to construct or perform an identity based upon an alternative gender (to the one that men are usually assigned)? And this is where it gets difficult because it's really hard to find any examples of Polari, other than the Julian and Sandy tapes (which were made up), a number of (different) lexicons, and some interviews of gay and lesbians talking about Polari (but not talking in Polari unless they're giving examples). It's a bit like trying to tell someone what water is like, when you've never tasted it yourself, but other people have told you about it.

So I'll be having to "make do" with secondary sources of data for the most part. Hopefully, each kind of data has its own kind of validity, and taken together, each part will be able to show up something exciting about Polari

But is Polari dead anyway? Well, no, not that dead. The London Order of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (a group of gay men who dress as nuns in order to combine the political with the comedic) have started using Polari in their ceremonies - in order to lend spiritual weight to such occasions. For the Sisters, Polari is to gay men what Latins is to Catholics. However, from what I know of these events, the Polari that is used is as scripted as the Polari employed by Julian and Sandy - and even more bizarre - it's in the form of a monologue: a long way from its original bitchy, gossipy, cruisy usage in the bars, clubs and buses of 1950s/60s London. Then again, Polari has never remained the same thing for very long, as the lexica can testify. Perhaps the appropriation of it by the Sisters is simply a postmodern revival?

Note:

United Kingdom

58,210,000 (1995). United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.