Polari - English gay slang5.





 My own researching Polari
Since writing the above, I am horrified to find so much that is misleading.
For one thing, apparently it is impossible to talk of "gay language"
anymore. It's just "not allowed" in society. There are as many ways to be
gay as there are gay people. We can't just all be lumped together and then
told that we have a "language". And just what is meant by "gay" anyway? Oh,
it's so confusing to a simple boy from a council estate in the northeast.
Then, and apparently this is even more scary - simply describing Polari in
itself isn't going to get us anywhere. We have to consider it in terms of
"gay identities" (note the plural here), or rather, how do Polari speakers
use Polari in order to construct or perform an identity based upon an
alternative gender (to the one that men are usually assigned)? And this is
where it gets difficult because it's really hard to find any examples of
Polari, other than the Julian and Sandy tapes (which were made up), a
number of (different) lexicons, and some interviews of gay and lesbians
talking about Polari (but not talking in Polari unless they're giving
examples). It's a bit like trying to tell someone what water is like, when
you've never tasted it yourself, but other people have told you about it.
So I'll be having to "make do" with secondary sources of data for the most
part. Hopefully, each kind of data has its own kind of validity, and taken
together, each part will be able to show up something exciting about Polari

But is Polari dead anyway? Well, no, not that dead. The London Order of the
Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (a group of gay men who dress as nuns in
order to combine the political with the comedic) have started using Polari
in their ceremonies - in order to lend spiritual weight to such occasions.
For the Sisters, Polari is to gay men what Latins is to Catholics. However,
from what I know of these events, the Polari that is used is as scripted as
the Polari employed by Julian and Sandy - and even more bizarre - it's in
the form of a monologue: a long way from its original bitchy, gossipy,
cruisy usage in the bars, clubs and buses of 1950s/60s London. Then again,
Polari has never remained the same thing for very long, as the lexica can
testify. Perhaps the appropriation of it by the Sisters is simply a
postmodern revival?

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