The Very Fantabulosa Language of Polari

There’s nothing a gay person loves more than a good secret. But for the longest time in history, the biggest secret gay people had was… the fact they were gay.  But by their love of gossip culture, how were these people meant to live and talk without actively endangering themselves?

Well, the queer population of the United Kingdom found their solution to this way back in the early 19th century through a secret gay language called Polari. Polari (from the Italian word parlare “to talk”) is a slang language used amongst the UK’s gay subculture, made up of over 500 codewords that are strongly linked to an older slang called Parlyaree, which was used by beggars, merchants, and travelling entertainers, but also includes many words and slangs from Italian, French, Turkic Sailor’s Slang, and British thieves’ cant. This language was found necessary during a time when the suspected engagement of ‘same-sex relations and activity’ and ‘buggery’ by men was a punishable offense that would sentence one to at least 2 years in jail, potentially with hard labor. 

Strangely enough, this legal punishment was not usually the case for the women of the United Kingdom because of two reasons. For one, gay women could not participate in ‘buggery,’ which meant that lesbian acts would not automatically fall under the same laws for homosexual men. For two, British legislators were hesitant to call attention and illegalize the intimate relations between two women because they feared that writing this into law would cause women to discover homosexual feelings that they would never otherwise experience. Additionally, historical rumors in the early 1900s found that lesbians caused the fall of the Greek and Roman empires, meaning that British gay women were rarely legally penalized because the British Parliament believed that writing lesbianism into law would cause the fall of the British Empire.

Polari was mostly used by gay men, but was also used by lesbians, theatrical actors, drag queens, and sea-queens (gay men in the British Navy). Even heterosexual people used it when they had connections to theatre, or if they had gay friends that wanted to teach them. By using Polari, gay men could identify other gay men without publicly outing themselves and even hold entire conversations to talk about sexuality and relationships while being entirely incomprehensible to outsiders. This language allowed gay people to form secret communities in plain sight while hiding from undercover police officers and public scrutiny.

(Caption: An album from Round the Horne. Julian and Sandy are two camp characters from the show that spoke Polari.)

Some words in Polari include:

• Dona, palone — Woman

• Omi — Man

• Bibi, acdc — Bisexual

• Bold, fruit, homy palone, so (is he ‘so’?) — Gay man

• Palone-omi — Lesbian

• Butch — A masculine lesbian

• Camp — Effeminate

• Ogle, vada — To see or view

• Ecaf, eek — Face (in backslang)

• Riah — Hair (in backslang)

• Clobber, drag — Clothes

• Bona —Good

• Dolly — Beautiful, nice, and pretty

• Fantabulosa — Wonderful or fabulous

• Zhoosh, zhooshy — Showy or stylish

• Lilly law, lilly, orderly daughters, rozzer, sharpy — Police officers

In addition to these codewords, gay men using Polari would invert gendered pronouns and names so their relationships seemed unassumingly straight. For example, if Steve wanted to talk to Barbara about his new boyfriend Paul, he might say, “Barbara, you should vada my new fruit, Pauline. She’s got quite the dolly eek and some real zhooshy clobber. Oh, and she’s a nice person too.”

Although Polari has been largely forgotten about, it has still left a lasting mark on LGBTQ+ culture today with words like drag, camp, trade, butch, ogle, fruit, and zhoosh. The language fell into disuse by the late 1960s when homosexual acts in England became partially decriminalized, as well as a result of the popular media starting to use more Polari terms with the increasing amount of gay representation, such as in the 1960s BBC radio comedy Round the Horne. This caused both the necessity and ability for secret queer communication to decrease drastically, eventually leading to Polari being seen as ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘perpetuating harmful stereotypes’ with the rise of the gay liberation movement.

To this day, Polari is more of a historical fun fact or party trick that could be used like Pig Latin or Morse Code, but that doesn’t deny its crucial role in queer history by helping people find belonging and family in a society that loathed their existence. Polari, along with many other secret gay languages across the world, played a huge factor in the progression of the LGBTQ+ community before the gay liberation movement, as these languages stood in rebellion to the socio-political systems that took basic human rights and joys away from people, simply for having different identities than the majority. So when you’re using queer slang like camp, clock it, DL trade, and ate, just know that these quick TikTok terms aren’t just fun phrases and words, but the standing effect of protest, perseverance, and liberation. It’s been bona to vada your dolly old eek!