Polari, the slang used by some gay men in 1960s Britain, is having a moment. Not just because Professor Paul Baker, a linguist at the University of Lancaster and the nation’s acknowledged expert on the language, has kindly agreed to contribute to the Darwin College Lecture Series. But because singer and actor Olly Alexander has released a new album titled Polari, and is using his current tour to draw attention to a sometimes forgotten history.
“Every few years there’s a kind of revival of interest in it, but this probably one of the biggest ones there’s been,” acknowledges Paul. “It’s actually been quite nice because he got in touch with me to tell me he’d read the book I wrote a few years ago and we met. We had a coffee and I’ve given him some tips and some little words and phrases that he’s used in various contexts.”
The two also joined forces on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last month to discuss the significance of Polari, with Olly Alexander describing its use as “subversive but playful”.
For Paul, his interest dates back to his PhD in the mid 1990s, which became a book, Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men, later updated for a general readership as Fabulosa!. The BBC had released forgotten tapes of Round the Horne, the 1960s radio programme which used and popularised the concept, and he found himself drawn into the story of how the language evolved and disappeared.
“Round the Horne probably contributed to Polari’s demise in some way, because it spoiled the secret,” he explains. “But by that point, when they released the tapes, no one had heard about it, and I’d never heard of it either. And I found it fascinating. It just kind of raised all these questions for me: was it a real language? Had they just made it up for the radio show? And if it was real, why had it died out? Why was no one speaking it anymore? So it was a mystery.”
While, as Paul points out, “all languages are codes to an extent,” Polari functioned as a code on multiple levels. Used by gay men at a time when homosexuality was both illegal and socially unacceptable, as a means of signalling membership of a hidden society, it allowed them to speak publicly without being understood. Though Polari itself is unique to Britain, the phenomenon of a gay language is not an isolated one.
“There are similar languages in different countries,” says Paul. “Polari is probably one of the most well-developed ones, but there’s one in Pakistan, there’s one in South Africa, I think there’s sort of one in Greece, and a couple of others. It tends to be for similar reasons – for secrecy, for community building, or coming out of an oppressed context where the group has been made illegal in some way. But I think of all of them Polari’s probably the most extensive, in terms of having the most words, and also being researched the most.”
At the height of its popularity, some speakers would have peppered their speech with the occasional word, while for others whole conversations might be held in its vocabulary, which has links to Cockney rhyming slang, Romany and Yiddish.
“It’s not a full language – it’s a language variety, I’d say. But it’s been on a very interesting journey, and in some ways what happened to it after it died or people stopped using it is even more interesting than what happened when people were using it. It’s been having quite a fabulous afterlife.”
This includes the language’s recent reclamation by a generation of gay men raised in a very different context to their predecessors. In addition to album titles, Polari is the name of a literary award for LGBTQ+ writers, and has attained a status that Paul finds both gratifying and amusing.
“In recent decades, after it had died off and then was rediscovered, people from the community were kind of reclaiming it and saying ‘we need to remember our history.’ And so now it has this literary, edgy, kind of esoteric edge to it, which it didn’t have when it was initially spoken. It was a language spoken by very working class, camp gay men, who didn’t view themselves as particularly political or particularly academic in any way. But now it’s definitely seen as something which is almost highbrow, I think, which I find very funny. And I think they would too, if they knew what has happened to it.”
