Fabulosa! The Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language,

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

Polari isn’t spoken very much any more. The ‘secret’ language – used in the past by gay men to avoid arrest and to signal to one another that a kindred spirit had been found – doesn’t seem so necessary when Pride flags fly boldly over Whitehall.

Though the language that gay men now use to talk about one another can still seem fairly recherché – twinks, bears, daddies and otters – it can make one rather long for a day of talking about ‘omee-palones’ (gay men). Paul Baker has made a career compiling and taxonomising Polari from a linguistic perspective. Fortunately, he is not on a mission to revive it, but he suggests that learning about Polari will also allow

you to ‘learn about myself and about people generally’. There are worse reasons to write a book.

And what a lot about him we learn. From the dedication alone, we discover that he has been in a long-term relationship with a man who was so indecisive on their first date that he cooked three main courses – and that this caused Baker to fall in love. We learn that there is some way of glossing their relationship through pop culture – ‘You’re Top of the Pops’ – and that they make each other laugh. Not bad before you’ve even reached the title page.

The story of Polari – or at least of the world of Polari and the people who spoke it – is gripping in its own right. Polari seems to have its roots in cant languages spoken in the 16th and 17th centuries by outsiders, criminals, street performers and sailors – you get the idea. It was a lingua franca that enabled different groups of foreigners to communicate.

As it grew into a gay language, two strains developed: East End and West End Polari. The East End variety tapped into cockney and incorporated Yiddish from the Jewish community in that part of London, while the West End variety was used in the theatres. The focus of the language is on body parts and appearances – so that you can discuss the trade at the bar. But it also encompasses other necessities for a night’s entertainment, such as ordering a bevvy. In the Sixties, the appearance of Polari in the Julian and Sandy sketches in Round the Horne, which played to nine million people at peak family-listening time, brought it truly into mainstream popular culture.

The language itself isn’t that exciting. Its grammar is basic, its vocabulary limited. What is fascinating is the subculture it offers a way into. There’s a Polari word ‘bold’ that is quite hard to translate. It’s not the same as its English homonym. Baker glosses it as implying ‘a mixture of camp flamboyance and bravery about your sexuality’. It is not quite the same as the manner of a screaming queen. But it described a pose many gay men learned to manage, a self-dramatising carapace that proclaimed so loudly the thing that was meant to be hidden that it acted as a defence mechanism. It is related to camp and, as Susan Sontag notes, ‘It neutralises moral indignation; sponsors playfulness.’ It suggests a form of behaviour that has long since been eroded and a sensibility that is both fascinating and defiant.

You catch glimpses of it in Baker’s interviews with drag queens such as Bette Bourne, who says the oppression of the Fifties ‘was a f***ing drag, the whole thing was terrible and awful and made people very secretive and suspicious and wary, very wary … but, once you got that together, it was fine’.

Merchant Navy sailors tell similar tales that are suggestive of whole other worlds. But in Baker’s linguistic approach to the subject, these worlds play second fiddle to word order. As such, this isn’t the story of Britain’s secret gays, but the record of a language that not many people now speak or understand.