I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I first learnt about Polari through a Morrissey song, given the fact he's actually a massive racist. But luckily enough, Polari predates him and comes from a much more inclusive background of LGBTQ+ people, sex workers, actors, criminals, sailors, Romani people, Jewish people, and immigrants across Britain from the nineteenth to mid twentieth century (although some Polari words and terms existed before this point, the grouping of them together into what can be called Polari only occurred during the Victorian era).
But what is Polari, anyway? Also spelled as Palare (from the Italian word meaning 'to talk'), Parlary, or Palari, Polari is a set of slang words, developed in collaboration by marginalised, socially excluded, and criminalised groups that through the twentieth century became mostly associated with LGBTQ+ people. It contains elements of Italian, French, Sabir (a Mediterranean pidgin language made up of different Romance languages used by sailors and other traders working across Europe), Romani, Yiddish, cockney rhyming slang, backslang (words said backwards), and established queer slang from the Molly-houses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Polari is what's known as a cant: language developed to mislead or exclude outsiders, and this meant that eavesdroppers and undercover police wouldn't be able to follow conversations or easily infiltrate safe spaces or trick LGBTQ+ people into coming out to them, only to have them arrested.
Back then, there was no Polari dictionary. Incidentally, there is one now, if you'd like to get a copy. Otherwise, you can just check out the Wikipedia page, which has a decent Polari glossary.
Polari wasn't just used for safety, though. It worked as a form of initiation, bringing younger or newly-identifying queer people into a culture that accepted their identity when the rest of society didn't. It also provided language to discuss things which mainstream society wasn't interested in: gay sex, male effeminacy and attractiveness, and queer relationship structures, among other things. There was joy to be found in Polari too, with humour forming a basis of a lot of words and phrases.
When interviewed about Polari in 2017, linguist Paul Baker said:
"The important point about Polari is that it was not just a secret language, it was an alternative way of looking at the world. A word like ‘bona’ didn't just mean good, it meant good by the values of the gay subculture. And the humorous or camp worldview was a coping strategy in dealing with difficult situations like abuse, attack, blackmail or arrest. Appearing to be upset about a broken nail or askew wig, rather than being arrested, made the speaker not seem to care about the ways that mainstream society tried to shame them."
Even though Polari has faded from popular usage, some of the words within it have entered the mainstream. If you've ever described someone as 'camp', or a fight as a 'barney', you've used words that come from Polari. If you've 'scarpered' or 'minced', you can thank Polari for giving you those verbs. And if you've thought something, someone or somewhere was 'naff' or 'manky', that's from Polari too.
Plenty of other words did not make it into the mainstream, though. I don't have an answer as to why certain ones stuck and others didn't, but I can tell you why the language as a whole disappeared.
Polari faded from use for two reasons. The first is its use on the BBC radio show Round the Horne, in which two heavily gay-coded characters conversed using Polari slang. There's little point in a secret code when it's no longer a secret, after all. The second is the decline in criminalisation of LGBTQ+ people and others who typically used Polari. If actors are no longer seen as of ill repute, being gay isn't illegal, and people are beginning to consider that migrants might actually be people after all, there was far less of a need for secret communication.
As for knowledge of the language, it seems like one of the many things that was lost during the AIDS crisis. Even for those who survived, the efforts were so focused on campaigns around AIDS - from supporting those who were HIV positive to combating government-mandated erasure in sex education to calling out the collective apathy or even pleasure of many at seeing LGBTQ+ people dying - that teaching young people about slang that had fallen out of use some twenty years prior was hardly a priority. This is not to say that these priorities were wrong, of course. Simply that it never should have been a choice to make in the first place.
I honestly don't think Polari can be resurrected. While vampires are inherently very gay (a topic which no one should get me started on because I can and will talk about it for at least ten full minutes), it has been gone too long to make a full comeback. But that doesn't mean we can't appreciate it and recognise it as part of queer history in the UK, even if today's (primarily American influenced) queer slang (broadly speaking) bears little resemblance to the queer slang of 100 years ago.
By Tristan Oscar Smith
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