“Polari has a long and complicated provenance, and not all of it is fully known because it was spoken by marginalised groups who didn’t usually have their voices or stories recorded,” he says. “Layering upon layering of different influences ensures that there is no one single version of Polari but many versions, and very little agreement about the spellings, pronunciations and meanings of words.”īaker has found it difficult to untangle a clear history of the lexicon. “There was little academic interest in it and it would not have been viewed as respectable enough to be taken seriously.” As a result, it wasn’t written down – and Baker argues it’s not necessarily even one language. “It was a secret, spoken form of language, used mainly by groups of people who were on the margins of society and associated with criminality,” says Paul Baker, a linguistic history expert at the University of Lancaster and author of Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang. Yet in the years when homosexuality was illegal, it was a way of communicating in public without risking arrest – as well as a chance to challenge the status quo. “You would be hiding what you were talking about from people who didn’t know it, but also if you were in a bar and you liked the look of somebody, you’d pop it into conversation and they’d either go ‘ah’ or they’d look blank and you’d be on your way.” Polari is rarely spoken today. “One of the things that makes Polari so powerful is that it is simultaneously about disguise and identification,” the artist Jez Dolan tells BBC Culture. The secret language became a kind of verbal wink between gay men in Britain during the early 20th Century – allowing them to hide and to reveal at the same time.
“And Gloria cackled, let there be sparkle and there was sparkle.” It’s a passage from the Bible, but not as we know it: this is a familiar line from the Book of Genesis as spoken in Polari.