“S
Gayspeak
O BONA TO VADA. Oh
you/ Your lovely eek and/
Your lovely riah,” sang
V R
ERNON OSARIO
Morrissey in “Piccadilly
Palare” from his 1990 album Bona Drag.
“The Piccadilly Palare/ Was just silly slang/
Fabulosa!
Between me and the boys in my gang,” he
The Story of Polari, Britain’s
reminisces about “Dilly boys” (swishy
Secret Gay Language
youth who engage in cruising and prostitu-
by Paul Baker
tion). “On the rack I was/ Easy meat, and a
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reasonably good buy.”
Morrissey was reviving a nearly extinct argot: Palare, Parl-
yaree, or Polari. The line translates to, “So good to see you, your
lovely face, and lovely hair.” Morrissey’s lyrics condense many
cultural and linguistic characteristics of Polari. It borrowed from
Italian and French (“bona” from buono or bonne, “vada” from
vedere) and Cockney Rhyming Slang or Backslang (“riah” in-
verts “hair”; “eek” is shortened from “ecaf,” face). By the 20th
century, Polari had evolved from a secret language of the
homosexual, the molly, and the criminal underworld in England.
Paul Baker, a linguistics professor at Lancaster University,
has made it the focus of two decades of study and promotion.
Fabulosa! presents an engaging version of his dissertation (pub-
lished as Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men in 2002). He
easily shifts between the complex linguistic genealogy of Polari
and its gay cultural history, focusing particularly on the vicissi-
tudes of its usage in the past half century and tracking this usage
with gay politics. Polari enjoyed its heyday in 1960s England
thanks to a recurring, campy skit on a BBC radio show. It then
almost faded away after the decriminalization of homosexual-
ity in the U.K. in 1967. Baker is bemused and delighted that it
has seen a resurgence in this millennium, although perhaps for
politically compromised reasons.
Classifying Polari linguistically is Baker’s first challenge.
While he settles on calling it a “language” or “language variety,”
Polari seems more of an English slang that borrowed heavily
from Italian, French, Romani, and even Yiddish. It developed
only a few of its own grammatical peculiarities. Like all spoken
communication, its lexicon evolved over time, depending on the
occupations, origins, and needs of its users, whether criminals,
Vernon Rosario is a historian of science and child psychiatrist with the
Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health and associate clin-
ical professor of psychiatry at UCLA.
May–June 2020
dancers, sailors, or drag queens. Baker also
likes the notion of classifying Polari as an
“anti-language”: that of a marginalized or
countercultural minority. This connotation
of resistance is clearly what drives him to
elevate Polari to a “secret gay language.”
Baker’s history of Polari begins with
cant or “Peddler’s French,” which in turn
has some roots in an Elizabethan “paltry
speech” of vagabonds and criminals. Some
Cant words, such as “booze,” have persisted in mainstream lan-
guage. Curiously enough, many Cant words only recently en-
tered Polari thanks to a revival of its usage by the Sisters of
Perpetual Indulgence (more on that later). There is some evi-
dence that Polari’s gay lexicon was enriched by 18th-century
mollies: effeminate and cross-dressing homosexuals who fre-
quented molly houses. These taverns for drunkenness, sex, and
prostitution have been wonderfully documented by recent gay
historians thanks to detailed police and court records from 18th-
century England. Not surprisingly, mollies had many slang
words for body parts and sexual acts, though perhaps the most
delightful molly phrase was “Where have you been, you saucy
queen?” We can thank them for the endless flavors of “queens”
that we have today.
Polari’s lexicon was enriched in the 19th century by a vari-
ety of immigrants and itinerants: prostitutes, music hall dancers,
circus performers, and food peddlers. “Parlyaree” or “parlare”
(with its own complex history) contributed to Polari’s counting
words, which are clearly Italianate, for example: Una, dooey,
tray, and medza (half). The gay thread from Parlyaree to Polari
may have been the coded language of performers, dancers, and
sex workers (the Piccadilly boys). The gay link is certainly clear
when it comes to sailors’ use of Polari and its utility in picking
up “sea queens.” Polari’s history also has class elements, with
contributions from Cockney and Yiddish, and—in the 20th cen-
tury—words from military slang and drug culture, such as:
“plates” for feet (from Cockney, plates of meat); “meshigener”
for crazy; “doobs” for marijuana doobies; and “seafood” for
sexually available sailors. All of these subcultures of London
undoubtedly had intercourse with the gays on the streets or
under the sheets.
Postwar England was particularly hostile to homosexuals
(as was the U.S.). Baker argues that this repressive context stim-
ulated the popularity of Polari and its strong association with
37
the gay world. It was the gay insider’s slang for ogling men or
probing if a gent at the park was available. Drag queens seem
to have regularly “parlareed” Polari in their saucy routines, like
Lee Sutton singing: “Bona eke/ Your bon polari almost makes
me spring a leak.” The peak of its currency came with Polari’s
weekly use on a popular BBC radio comedy show, Round the
Horne, which aired from 1966 to 1968. Toward the end of its se-
ries of short sketches was a conversation between a pair of flam-
boyant men, Julian and Sandy (actors Hugh Paddick and
Kenneth Williams) and “straight man” Kenneth Horne. The
couple regularly peppered their routine with Polari phrases, to
the hearty laughter of the audience and their own shrieks of glee.
Although Baker describes Julian and Sandy as “a pair of heav-
ily coded gay friends,” they were about as “coded” as Paul
Lynde on Hollywood Squares. One has to listen to clips of the
show (on YouTube) to appreciate the actual cadence of Polari
and the fact that Julian and Sandy were so flaming they must
have melted British radios.
Baker explores the risqué Polari and double entendres that
the comedians used to evade the censors while cackling about
gay sex. Baker’s older Polari-speaking informants all note the
importance of the radio show in their development as gay men.
Especially for young gay men growing up in a conservative time
and in rural areas, it was a huge relief to know they were not
alone. To get a real appreciation for Polari as used by gay men
of the ’60s, you should watch a BBC4 documentary from 2004
(also available on YouTube). Drag queens and older gay men
reminisce about Julian and Sandy and the fun times they had in
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38
the repressive old days in pubs. One can imagine them “dishing
the dirt,” boasting about “cleaning the kitchen” (anilingus) with
a “chicken” last night, or bemoaning “Betty Bracelets” arrest-
ing a friend for a “nosh” in a “brandy latch” (toilet stall). The
queer irony is that Polari could be a “secret” gay language while
being used regularly on a BBC radio show by flaming “poof-
tahs.” Baker does not specifically solve this conundrum, but can
anyone explain how Liberace’s fans and a British court could be
convinced he was straight?
After Stonewall and the decriminalization of homosexual acts
in Britain, Polari seems to have fallen into disuse. Worse, it was
criticized by some as being a language of the closet and of stereo-
typical queens who sullied the respectable image that gay rights
activists were trying to create in the post-AIDS era. Coinciding
with that disease marker was a generational divide: Polari was a
language of old homosexuals (“antiques” in Polari).
The revival of Polari began in the 1990s thanks to its use by
the British Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in their camp cere-
monies, such as their Canterbury Coven’s canonization of Derek
Jarman in 1991. They vastly expanded the lexicon of Polari with
the production of a Polari translation of the King James Bible,
thanks to a group of “research nuns based at the Polari Research
Endeavour (PRE) at the City University Manchester (CUM)”
(www.polaribible.org). Started in 2003, the 7th edition of the
Polari Bible (2013) is available online. It opens with: “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
aquas.” Like the group itself, the Sisters’ resurrection of Polari
is simultaneously campy and politically radical: “Vulgarising
[the Bible] by translating it into Polari would be an act of cul-
tural vandalism akin to translation into Scots. But good taste
has never yet limited the Sisters’ activities, so we did it any-
way.” They hint at a “forthcoming Polari Koran and The Book
of Common Screech.” It is just one manifestation of the 1990’s
queer politics and academics with their revalorization of camp
and gender subversiveness in opposition to the politics of
integration and respectability. A variety of artists from Morris-
sey to edgy drag performers drew on Polari for historical depth
and the political inspiration of pre-Stonewall generations of re-
silient gay men.
Baker highlights another stimulus for the revival of Polari
in the 21st century: commodification. Polari words have been
emblazoned on T-shirts, bars, and cafés as a retro-chic way of
marketing a newly cool lifestyle. The contrasting uses reflect
the divergent politics of contemporary LGBT culture that led to
the splitting of New York’s 50th anniversary of Stonewall into
two celebrations: one political and progressive, the other highly
commercialized. Baker, however, avoids political sermonizing
and instead closes his appreciation of Polari with an expression
of gratitude toward past speakers and his recent informants.
Endearingly, Baker integrates self-deprecating confessions of
his own development from a shy, working-class gay boy with
limited prospects to a still shy but extremely prolific professor.
He closes the book by acknowledging how the bravery and
bravado of Polari-speaking queens have coaxed him out of his
shell to be a “fantabulosa” academic. One thing a drag queen
will teach you: you have to be fierce to survive. “You better
work it, girl!”
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