Transcript

Interviewer:

Fernando, what is Polari?

Fernando Rosell Aguilar:

Well, Polari was a sort of slang that originated among gay men to communicate without being understood kind of in the same way that, you know, Cockney rhyming slang did and, and other similar dialects and slang types.

Interviewer:

How did it originate?

Fernando Rosell Aguilar:

Well, it was mostly a language around the beginning of the twentieth century, 1920s, ’30s, that kind of started being used in, in what the equivalent of nowadays would be a gay bar, so establishments where gay people would go, um, the theatre and also the merchant navy, where a lot of gay men kind of enrolled to sort of escape the places where they were.

Interviewer:

And what was the function of, er, Polari?

Fernando Rosell Aguilar:

Well it was sort of, it was a code, so it protected you from being understood by others, and we have to remember that in those times and for many years after, homosexuality was a crime. So, you needed to make sure that you were speaking to people who would understand you but also that others wouldn’t understand you when you were making references to something that was illegal.

Interviewer:

What kinds of words did they use then?

Fernando Rosell Aguilar:

Well, a lot of them seemed to come from Italian or from Romany culture, because, you know, the kind of, the theatre environment was also often linked to the circus. Some of them have made it to the mainstream, so words like ‘bitch’, ‘camp’, er, ‘drag’, ‘naff’, all those were words that originated in Polari, and actually the word ‘Polari’ is kind of an interpretation of the word parlare in Italian. So, a lot of those would now be understood in the mainstream.

Some other words like, um, cottage or cottaging to refer to sex in a public toilet, or zhoosh for ‘style’, dinari for, um, to mean ‘money’, have remained less commonly known.

Interviewer:

So they would use a combination of words from other languages and words from English but with a different meaning?

Fernando Rosell Aguilar:

That’s right. There’s also a lot of, er, Yiddish that was incorporated in to it as well.

Interviewer:

What were the attitudes of society at large towards, um, Polari and have these changed over time?

Fernando Rosell Aguilar:

Well, at first, basically society was not aware of Polari. That’s the whole point of a code, that it’s meant to be a secret. It really kind of became prominent with the, er, Julian and Sandy sketches in the ’60s with Kenneth Williams, and so it, it sort of did two things. It brought it fame, so to speak, and made it popular but at the same time, because people outside of that code could suddenly understand these words, the code lost its functionality.

You also have to take into consideration that homosexuality was decriminalised in England in the, in 1967. So, a lot of the reasons for using it sort of went away, at least in legal terms. Obviously it has taken society a lot longer to adapt to that and obviously there are still kind of issues around it and battles to be fought in that, in that sense, but also what happened was that among the gay, um, community, population, it also became sort of a bit not necessarily, old fashioned to a certain extent, but also kind of regarded in a less positive way. Because it was being used by perhaps very camp, very theatrical people, other members of, of the gay population who didn’t identify with those people who were using it rejected it.

Interviewer:

Who use it these days?

Fernando Rosell Aguilar:

Nowadays it’s not really used as a code. Er, in the 1990s there was a bit of an effort to kind of revitalise it, and it sort of, it was targeted as an endangered language. Nowadays it’s mostly entertainers who use it, you know, people like Julian Clary, Paul O’Grady, Matt Lucas, you know, for sketches and in comedy.

Interviewer:

Fernando, you’re Spanish. Is there a similar phenomenon in Spain?

Fernando Rosell Aguilar:

I think most languages have some sort of code that gay people have used to keep what was a clandestine thing secret from others. American English had a similar code, er, Japanese also had a gay code, er, and in Spain, yes, um, a lot of it now is old-fashioned and a lot of the words that were originally used as a secret code are now in the mainstream, as has happened with Polari. But there’s words like entender, literally ‘to understand’. So, if you said of someone, ‘Oh, does he understand?’ what you were asking really is, ‘Is he gay?’ Then words like tener pluma, um, literally, ‘to have a feather’ signified being quite camp or effeminate, and words like reina, ‘queen’ or loca, um, ‘crazy woman’, referred to, to gay men … mostly affectionately: there are plenty of words in every language that are disrespectful to gay men and lesbians, and, um, those were kind of terms of endearment really. Um, people call each other hermana, ‘sister’, or prima, ‘cousin’, mari, which is actually short for maricón which is the word, you know, negative words for, for gay and, um, it’s kind of been adopted and turned around to say ‘actually I will accept the word’.

Then there’s, there’s some funny words that haven’t really made it so much to the mainstream, like buga to refer to a heterosexual person; Elvis was, um, someone who was bisexual; and, um, you talk about someone being ‘in the opposite side of the sidewalk’ en la acera de enfrente, and combinations of these like, for example, loca is quite a well-known expression to refer to a, to a gay man. Um, you can also have variants like musculoca, which is basically a ‘muscle Mary’, as you would say it in English.

Interviewer:

Well, it’s interesting because it looks like all these groups that have their own code also have a term to describe the, the people who are not members of the group.

Fernando Rosell Aguilar:

That’s right, yes. Obviously to, sort of, as a warning you may want to use it and say, oh, people around you may not want to identify with. I think that the clandestine nature of it is, is what’s been particularly interesting about these types of codes, and in a way, nowadays it’s a bit of a double-edged thing isn’t it, because it’s sad that this type of use of language is, is dying. At the same time, at least in many societies nowadays, it means that there’s no need for it and that, you know, gay people don’t have to, to hide and use secret codes because there’s nothing illegal or shameful about it. That is great, but again it’s a little bit sad in the sense that this richness of the language is disappearing.

There are still many places in the world where being gay is illegal, punishable by even death, and as long as there are places like that, codes similar to Polari will be required and in use.