Paul Baker - Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britains Secret Gay Language

P icture it. London, 1953, the A&B Club in Rupert Court, Soho. It is Saturday night, just gone half ten, and theres a sudden surge as the chorus boys make their entrance and everyone looks to the door. Many of them are still in stage slap while a few others, like Bobby (Gloria to her friends), have added a bold bit of blue eyeshadow and rouge to their ekes. They have climbed the stairs to the third floor and knocked to be let in, arriving in twos, threes and fours, parting the fug of vogue smoke, camp little things in tight colourful clobber, gossiping in Polari most bona, luppers flapping around like windmills, oblivious to the effect that theyre having on the scattering of respectable and slightly awkward-looking middle-aged omees who have been waiting for just this moment. A couple of off-duty Guardsmen have pitched up in a corner. One, Teddy, is an old hand at this hes been coming here for a few months now introduced into the game by an older friend. Its a marvellous way to fill out your packet catch the eye of anyone whos not completely cod, make a suggestion to take things elsewhere, then he just has to stand in an unlit alley (or sit or even lie back, if the chaps brave enough to take him back home), getplated and earn a few measures in the process. Willing for a shilling nothing wrong with that. Except the last time, the omee wanted to have it up the dish and offered a lot more, so he thought well why not and gave it a go. And after the first minute, when it stopped hurting, he decided he quite liked it. Have you got any friends, the man asked? Theres multi dinarly if theres two of you. So Teddys brought Arthur along this time only nineteen, blushes if anyone vadas him hes been bright red all night. Trouble is, this might have been a mistake. Arthurs getting a lot more attention than anyone else in here.

Theres a sudden dip in the din but then it doubles in volume as a bona fide Queen of the Screen comes in. So the rumours are true! Shes with a couple of feely omee-palones who must be half her age. Someone tells Gloria that the Screen Queens been caught with her lally-drags around her ankles at that cottage in the Dilly, aka the meat rack, but her savvy managers kept it out of the papers somehow. Shes playing it like shes the Snow Queen but her orbs are darting round at all the bona omee-palones when she thinks no ones vadering. And yes, shes just clocked Arthur. Theres some discreet palarying to one of her consorts and hes been dispatched to where Teddy and Arthur are standing a request for an audience with her gracious Majesty! Arthur practically spills his bevvy in excitement. Say hello to your mother! says the Queen, holding out her hand graciously. And oh, wont someone parker her a Vera!

This is a book about the story of Polari and the people who spoke it mostly camp gay men. They were a class of people who lived on the margins of society. Many of them broke thelaw a law which is now seen in civilized societies as being unfair and cruel and so they were at risk of arrest, shaming, blackmail and attack. They were not seen as important or interesting. Their stories were not told. If they were ever represented in books, films, plays or songs, they were usually given tiny supporting roles, and the audience was not supposed to identify with or root for them. In the rare cases when they did appear, they were often implied to be silly or sinister, victims or villains. So because of their criminal status, they learnt to speak in an unfamiliar tongue their voices changed out of recognition so that they could not be understood by others. This is a book which gives them a voice. But first, I ought to tell you about how I got involved in all of this.

It is 1994, I am 22, and I cant get a job. Ive just finished a masters in psychology at Lancaster University (a 1960s northern university with a good reputation) but Britain is emerging from one of its periodical recessions, so the prospect for graduates at the time is rather grim, especially if you are a shy boy from a council estate with phobias of public speaking and strangers, and no social skills, only manners.

At the end of my masters Id plucked up the courage to knock on the doors of the lecturers and asked them, one by one, if they had any research projects I could get involved in. They all said no. So I signed on and applied for a job at a Young Offenders Institution. I didnt get it so I applied for a job as a data analyst at an advertising agency and at the interview was asked to make four triangles out of not enoughmatchsticks (things like that happened a lot at interviews in the 1990s). I managed it but the interviewer looked at me askew and said that that wasnt the solution he had on the answer sheet. I didnt get it. I applied for a job as a trainee accountant and was offered a sum of money so small that I would have had to take out a loan to pay for the travel to work. Then I heard of another job back at Lancaster University, not in psychology but in linguistics. It involved correcting the output of a computer program that was supposed to identify whether words were nouns or verbs but sometimes got it wrong. It was mind-numbingly tedious but I didnt mind. I sat a grammar test and got in. Best of all, because I was an employee of Lancaster University any fees for study were automatically waived. Sign up for a PhD, people advised. You might as well. So I did.

Getting onto a PhD programme isnt easy. You have to have an Idea and a Proposal and then find a Supervisor who thinks you are clever enough to give it a go and not cause them too much trouble. I knocked on the door of the person I liked best in the linguistics department and, stammering, asked her to read my proposal on how academics use politeness a development of my masters thesis. She agreed, but after several weeks of not hearing from her, I took the hint and decided to have a rethink. I narrowed it down to two options. One was to create and test a computer program that would help people to learn French. The other was Polari.

Polari won.

Id first heard Polari a few months earlier, on a cassette tape, produced by the BBC, of a radio comedy sketch programme called Round the Horne. Two of the characters were named Julian and Sandy, and they were a pair of heavily coded gayfriends, living in London and speaking occasionally in a kind of camp jargon. Their sketch began each time with Sandy saying something like Oh hello Mr Horne, how bona to vada your dolly old eek!