Gay men had their own secret language. How did they communicate at a time when homosexuality could mean imprisonment?
“Vada the bona omi.” If you’d ever overheard a sentence like that in post-war London, it probably wouldn’t have made any sense to you at all. To someone familiar with Polari, however, it might have meant something along the lines of “look at that handsome bloke”. ‘Vada’ meant ‘to look’, ‘bona’ meant ‘good’ or ‘handsome’, and ‘omi’ meant ‘man’. Polari, however, was not a separate language with its own complete grammar, but rather an extensive slang or argot, the expressions of which people incorporated into everyday English.
Today, it may seem like an amusing linguistic curiosity. In reality, however, its history is closely linked to a time when gay men had to think very carefully about whom they could even reveal their sexual orientation to.
When sex between two men could lead to imprisonment
In the UK, homosexuality as an identity was not simply ‘banned’, but the laws criminalised sexual acts between men. A significant tightening of the law came in 1885 with an amendment tabled by MP Henry Laboucher, which introduced the offence of so-called ‘gross indecency’ between men. It was on this basis that, for example, the writer Oscar Wilde and the mathematician and war hero Alan Turing were later convicted.
Moreover, the problem was not limited to the police. The discovery of homosexuality could lead to scandal, loss of employment, rejection by one’s family or blackmail. It was precisely in such an environment that a secret means of communication made perfect sense. If a man could talk to a friend in front of others about men, sex or meeting places without those around him understanding what was being said, he gained at least a little privacy in a world that otherwise offered him very little.
However, Polari did not emerge overnight as a carefully devised code created by a group of gay men. Its history is far more complex and varied.
Gay men did not invent Polari. They adopted the language of people on the margins of society
One of the leading experts on Polari is the British linguist Paul Baker from Lancaster University, who has been researching it for decades. According to his history of Polari, published by Lancaster University, it grew out of an earlier way of speaking known as Parlyaree, which was found, for example, amongst travelling entertainers, market traders and in the entertainment industry. It was also linked to the language of sailors moving between Mediterranean ports.
As it gradually took root in Britain, further influences were incorporated. Polari absorbed elements of Italian, French, Yiddish, London rhyming slang, sailors’ parlance and so-called ‘backslang’, in which words were reversed in various ways. It was used by people from the theatre, variety shows and the circus world, sailors, sex workers and other groups whose lives often unfolded outside respectable mainstream society.
It was precisely the theatre and entertainment venues that helped Polari find its way into the gay male community. During the first half of the 20th century, it became so closely associated with gay culture that it later came to be referred to simply as the ‘secret language of gay men’. It would be more accurate, however, to say that gay men adapted the existing mix of slang, expanded upon it, and made it a distinctive part of their subculture.
All it took was a single word. Then you’d wait to see if the other person replied
Polari had one huge advantage – you didn’t have to strike up a long conversation in a secret language with a potential partner. Sometimes it was enough to discreetly slip a single familiar expression into an ordinary English sentence and watch for a reaction.
Paul Baker explains that, for example, using words such as ‘bona’ or ‘palone’ could serve as a way of cautiously finding out whether the other person also knew Polari. If they responded to the hint with a similar expression, there was a chance they belonged to the same scene. The Fabulosa research project at Lancaster University therefore cites not only secrecy but also the ability to recognise other members of the gay and theatre subcultures among Polari’s functions.
In a sense, it was the analogue precursor to gaydar or dating apps. Today, a man can open Grindr and, within seconds, find out how many other men seeking men are in his vicinity. Eighty years ago, people had nothing of the sort. If he fancied a man in a bar, on a train or in the street, he might not have the faintest idea whether he was also gay – and an overly overt attempt at flirting could be dangerous.
Secret slang therefore provided a way to ‘put out a feeler’ whilst retaining an escape route. If the other person didn’t understand the expression, the conversation could simply carry on as normal.
A face was ‘eek’, hair was ‘riah’ and a man was ‘omi’
Polari was by no means a particularly serious language. Quite the opposite. One of its most distinctive features was its playfulness, theatricality, irony and sexual double entendres. The vocabulary was particularly suited to what people really wanted to talk about in secret – other people, appearance, clothes, sex, dating or nightlife.
In Paul Baker’s Polari dictionary from Lancaster University, we find, for example, ‘omi’ for a man, ‘palone’ for a woman, ‘eek’ for a face, ‘riah’ for hair, ‘lally’ for a leg, ‘lattie’ for a house, ‘bevvy’ for a drink, or ‘vada’ meaning ‘to look’. Something good was ‘bona’, whilst ‘naff’ referred to something bad or tasteless. Some terms related to sex, sexual partners or ‘cruising’, that is, looking for casual sexual encounters.
Furthermore, Polari was constantly evolving, and there was no official dictionary to determine the correct form of individual expressions. Some people knew only a few basic words, whilst others were able to incorporate Polari into their speech much more extensively. It could also vary depending on the city, generation or social milieu.
It was precisely because of this that a conversation between two people in the know might sound almost absurd to someone standing next to them, whilst both participants knew full well who they were assessing or what they were talking about.
The secret language was not just a means of protection against the police
However, it would be a mistake to view Polari merely as a cryptographic tool used by frightened men trying to evade the police. Its social function was just as important. In an environment where mainstream culture either condemned gay life or pretended it did not exist, gay men used their own language to create a world that belonged solely to them.
They could gossip about acquaintances, assess the men around them, joke, flirt or talk about sex in a way that outsiders could not understand. Polari was strongly associated with camp humour, exaggeration and irony. Baker points out that it was precisely this characteristic that helped its users forge a shared identity and a particular perspective on a society that otherwise subjected them to arrest, blackmail or violence.
Lancaster University alsodescribes, for example, the use of theatrical nicknames such as Diamond Lil or Scotch Flo. What mainstream society regarded as ridiculous effeminacy in gay men could thus be appropriated by gay men and transformed into their own humour and identity.
There is an interesting paradox here. A language that arose partly out of the need to hide also provided a space where its speakers could be much more open with one another.
Then the secret language was broadcast on the BBC and ceased to be a secret
One of the greatest paradoxes of the Polari story is the fact that its own popularity contributed to its decline. In the 1960s, it featured in one of the BBC’s most successful radio programmes.
The comedy programme *Round the Horne* featured Julian and Sandy, two distinctly camp characters played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams. Their dialogues were peppered with Polari expressions. Queer listeners immediately knew what they were hearing, whilst a large proportion of the rest of the audience were amused by the bizarre-sounding sentences, without necessarily understanding all their meanings.
However, a secret language only works until the very people it is meant to hide things from learn it. Baker therefore points out in his history of Polari that the popularity of *Round the Horne* revealed the secret to a certain extent. Polari was becoming more widely known, thereby losing one of its most important functions. At the same time, the legal status of gay men also began to change.
The year 1967 brought change. But certainly not full equality
In 1967, the British Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalised consensual sexual acts between two men aged 21 or over in private in England and Wales. This was therefore not an immediate ‘legalisation of homosexuality’, as this historic change is sometimes simplistically described. The law contained a number of restrictions and, for example, the age of consent for homosexual intercourse remained higher than for heterosexual relationships. In Scotland, a similar change did not come until 1980, and in Northern Ireland in 1982.
As society gradually became more liberal, the need for a secret language began to fade. Moreover, the 1970s saw the emergence of a new gay liberation movement, which viewed homosexuality in a completely different light. Instead of hiding, it emphasised coming out, visibility, pride and the open fight for rights.
For some younger gay men, therefore, Polari began to represent more of a relic of a world they wanted to leave behind. Baker notes that some activists even regarded it as something that confined gay men to a ghetto. The secret language that had provided security for one generation might have seemed to the next as a symbol of the need to hide.
Polari has almost disappeared, but some of its words have survived
By the end of the 20th century, the active use of Polari had significantly declined. When Paul Baker conducted a survey among 800 gay men in 2000, according to his data, approximately half of them had never heard of it. What had been a secret everyday language gradually became, above all, a historical reminder of British queer culture.
However, some words have managed to survive and even find their way into standard British English. The best-known example is ‘naff’, used to mean tacky, cringe-worthy or of poor quality. At the same time, terms associated with Polari continue to appear in art, books, music and queer culture. Rather than a tool for secrecy, it has become a subject of historical interest. And it is actually not difficult to understand why.
Secret languages have disappeared. Queer slang has not
Today’s gay men no longer need Polari to communicate, but the idea of a distinct community language has certainly not disappeared. One need only look at modern terms such as ‘twink’, ‘bear’, ‘otter’, ‘daddy’, ‘top’, ‘bottom’, ‘vers’, ‘cruising’ or ‘gaydar’. Someone completely outside the queer community may not understand some of these terms at all, whilst for gay men, they can convey fairly precise information in a single sentence.
The difference lies primarily in the purpose. Today’s queer slang in the Czech Republic or the UK is generally not created so that its users can avoid criminal prosecution. It is rather an expression of shared experience, humour, sexual culture and identity. And thanks to the internet, terms that were used by a relatively small community just a few years ago are now rapidly reaching millions of people via TikTok, dating apps or popular culture.
Polari originated in a completely different world. A society in which a man sometimes needed to know whether the person opposite him belonged to the same community, but could not simply ask them. A world in which a single misunderstood proposition or piece of information in the wrong hands could have very serious consequences.
That is precisely why Polari is not just a charming collection of words such as ‘bona’, ‘omi’ or ‘vada’. It is a reminder of how people can carve out their own space even when society refuses to grant it to them. When gay men could not safely talk about their lives using the language of the majority, they simply created their own.
