In Photos: The secret gay language still in use today

A hot soup of influences and cultures, Polari offered queer people protection and freedom to communicate Professor Paul Baker tells us alongside a photo essay by photographer Felix Pilgrim.

I like zhoosh,” says Pro­fes­sor Paul Bak­er on his favourite Polari word when we inter­viewed him for this fea­ture. It’s got an inter­est­ing pro­nun­ci­a­tion and starts with a con­so­nant sound that rarely appears at the start of words in Eng­lish (the zhju” sound), although you do get it in lan­guages like French, so it’s a word that sounds exot­ic to Eng­lish ears. You have to place your mouth in a cer­tain posi­tion to get the sound right, sort of pout­ing your lips and putting your top and bot­tom sets of teeth quite close togeth­er, so you make your face quite camp when you’re say­ing it.” Pro­fes­sor Bak­er knows what he’s talk­ing about. Not only is Paul a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish Lan­guage at Lan­cast­er Uni­ver­si­ty, he’s recog­nised as the world’s fore­most expert on Polari – his book, Fab­u­losa!, is a must read if you want to dis­cov­er more about the language.

It’s also a very ver­sa­tile word,” he con­tin­ues. You can zhoosh your riah (do your hair) or slap (make-up), zhoosh a bevvy (have a drink) or even zhoosh the dinarly (steal the mon­ey). I was in a gay pub last night and some­one used the word zhoosh” when talk­ing to me, so I do still hear bits and pieces of it now (they prob­a­bly got it more direct­ly from Queer Eye, an Amer­i­can show, although it is still Polari). So there are some words from it that are still used on the gay scene, although it is not used to talk in full sen­tences as it was used in the 1950s.”

Can you give us an abridged his­to­ry of Polari, professor?

It’s very hard to get a com­plete his­to­ry of Polari because it was a secret spo­ken lan­guage, rarely writ­ten down, and devel­oped before the avail­abil­i­ty of audio record­ing devices. In the 18th cen­tu­ry groups of men who had sex with men – known as Mol­lies – were using slang terms like bitch’, queen’ and trade’, and they also some­times used forms of Cant, a slang used by crim­i­nals of the time. From today’s per­spec­tive, some of the Mollys might be seen as non-bina­ry or trans, although iden­ti­ties were under­stood dif­fer­ent­ly back then. As we go into the 19th cen­tu­ry we start to see a new­er form of slang, called Parl­ya­ree, which was used by Ital­ian enter­tain­ers in the UK. It was also used by beg­gars, cir­cus and fair­ground peo­ple and trav­el­ling mar­kets. It includ­ed bits of slang used by sailors who trav­elled round the Mediter­ranean. Grad­u­al­ly, Parl­ya­ree made its way into music halls and then the­atres, becom­ing more adopt­ed by gay dancers and actors and male sex work­ers. By the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry this new­er ver­sion of Parl­ya­ree was known as Polari, and it had been sup­ple­ment­ed with var­i­ous words and phras­es that were of rel­e­vance to gay men, as well as some of the old Mol­ly words. It was pop­u­lar in UK towns and cities with gay scenes until the 1960s, when decrim­i­nal­i­sa­tion of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty meant the need for a secret lan­guage was less important.

How did it become influ­enced by so many dif­fer­ent cul­tures to end up being what’s com­mon­ly ref­er­enced as a secret lan­guage for homosexuals”?

The sim­ple answer is that peo­ple can belong to more than one cul­ture, and dif­fer­ent cul­tures rarely oper­ate in iso­la­tion from the rest of soci­ety, so there is usu­al­ly crossover. The cul­tures that used Parl­ya­ree and then Polari had a few things in com­mon – they con­tained peo­ple who tend­ed to trav­el around a lot, and were on the fringes of soci­ety, often at risk of being arrest­ed. Until the end of the 18th cen­tu­ry, actors were not seen as a respectable group. So for these peo­ple there was a need to com­mu­ni­cate things in secret, for protection.

The peo­ple and cul­tures who’ve influ­enced and added to Polari would not have been regard­ed as main­stream – did this influ­ence how the lan­guage developed?

Yes, many of them lived day-to-day, their lives could be unpre­dictable and some­times even bru­tal and vio­lent. They had lit­tle oppor­tu­ni­ty for social advance­ment and they were not usu­al­ly high­ly edu­cat­ed. In a sense, they were beyond the restric­tions of refined soci­ety, and for those who had gay or les­bian sex, that made them crim­i­nals. Many of them used tav­erns, pubs (or lat­er on bars and drink­ing clubs) as places to meet, so alco­hol was part of the cul­ture, as was a some­what mat­ter-of-fact approach to sex – very un-Victorian! 

Top to bottom: Trade (Male Sexual Partner); Camp (Outrageous/ Funny)

How impor­tant to the queer com­mu­ni­ty was Polari – espe­cial­ly pre 1967 – it was a gen­uine­ly unique lan­guage of a subculture.

I doubt that if you invent­ed a time machine and went back to the 1950s and asked peo­ple if Polari was impor­tant they would have said it was – they didn’t have the per­spec­tive we have from the 2020s, they were just get­ting on with their lives, mak­ing the best of things, not being impa­tient and angry because they didn’t have legal sta­tus or laws to pro­tect them. Polari was just a nor­mal part of every­day life to them. But it did offer a form of pro­tec­tion, and a way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing shared val­ues and humour, allow­ing them to bond and also to iden­ti­fy one anoth­er at times. So I’d say it was impor­tant, although I think some of them might laugh at the idea that some­thing like Polari is even of inter­est to social historians.

When was Polari in use the most with the queer community?

You’d have heard it in gay pubs and bars, as well as being spo­ken on cruise ships where lots of gay men worked, up until the 1970s. You might also hear it in cruis­ing areas: cin­e­mas, Turk­ish baths, parks and pub­lic loos, although it might be more of a hissed warn­ing: Lily!” when the police were spot­ted. And you might hear it on pub­lic trans­port so that two peo­ple could have a con­ver­sa­tion with­out oth­ers understanding.

Top to bottom: National Handbag (Dole); Mince (Walk Affectedly)

Ken­neth Williams’ pop­u­lar radio show in the 60s famous­ly used Polari in its scripts. Was that a good or bad thing? Did the expo­sure of it to the main­stream kill it off?

Round the Horne pro­vides a record of Polari which, although script­ed, was cre­at­ed by peo­ple who knew what they were talk­ing about – Ken­neth Williams who played Sandy, used Polari him­self among his friends and in his diaries. And the sense of humour from Julian and Sandy is very much in keep­ing with those who used Polari. It did expose the secret to large num­bers of peo­ple so has­tened its demise a bit, but I also think that by the late 1960s, Polari had already start­ed to go out of fash­ion, and if any­thing, the radio show revived it for a short while in the gay scene.

How near is it to dying off – are there any projects to bring it back or help it survive?

I’ve been involved in lots of projects to com­mem­o­rate or remem­ber Polari, but none real­ly to bring it back. Artists and script writ­ers have done all sorts of amaz­ing things with Polari in the last 20 years or so. It is impor­tant to remem­ber gay social his­to­ry and Polari has the capac­i­ty to cap­ture imag­i­na­tions, espe­cial­ly young queer peo­ple for whom every­thing is new. I was cap­ti­vat­ed by hear­ing Polari spo­ken by Julian and Sandy when I lis­tened to theRound the Horne audio tapes back in the 90s. And now, when I type Polari” into Tik­Tok, it’s always nice to see a young per­son say­ing Hey guys, did you know there used to be a secret lan­guage called Polari!” It’s great that so many younger peo­ple find it inter­est­ing and fun and want to share it with one anoth­er. So there is a con­tin­u­ous process of redis­cov­ery for each new gen­er­a­tion, and thanks to the inter­net, it’s much eas­i­er to find out about it than it used to be, even though there are few­er of the orig­i­nal speak­ers left.

Vogue (Cigarettes)
Pots (Teeth)
Marts/Martinis (Hands)
Lily/ Lily Law (Police)
Dolly (Pretty)
Cod (Bad)

This piece appeared in Huck #80. Get your copy here.

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