Fabulosa the story of polari britains secret gay language
Fabulosa: The Story of Polari, Britain’s adj gay language
LGBTQ+ Forum with Professor Paul Baker, recorded Monday 17 May
In this communicate Professor Paul Baker celebrates Polari, the camp language of gay men. With a saucy vocabulary including omi (man), palone (woman), lallies (legs), riah (hair), naff (awful), dish (bum), vada (look) and bona (good) Polari was used to conduct conversations in secret up until the s, operating as a form of bonding and humour that helped gay people live through more oppressive times. It was popularised by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick in the radio comedy series Round the Horne and since then has largely disappeared from the gay scene, viewed as unfashionable and politically incorrect. However, in recent years it has been rediscovered and reappraised as an significant aspect of gay social history with younger queer people using it in new ways for very different reasons to the original speakers.
Paul Baker is Professor of English Language at Lancaster University. He has written eighteen books, including Fabulosa: The Story of Polari (), Sexed T
Fabulosa! The Story of Polari, Britain’s Classified Gay Language
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Fabulosa!
Reviews
"Baker intersperses his account with snippets of interviews with Polari speakers, whose firsthand recollections are invariably arresting and amusing. He is partial to a identify of innuendo himself, and manages to slip one in every now and then . . . [T]here is some evidence that the language persisted into the s and ’90s in theater circles, and it continues to enjoy a robust afterlife as a cultural curio—of which this delightful manual is just one manifestation."
Financial Times
"Polari, love some admirably resilient weed, will not die. . . . It is as much for its vocabulary as for its sociological vagaries that we read Baker’s always illuminating book. . . . Fabulosa!"
Telegraph
"Though a language smacking of Carry On films and saucy seaside postcards, it’s the tragic torment and harassment that gave rise to Polari in the first place that must not be forgotten and which is why this book is important."
Daily Mail
“Baker’s intriguing and often amusing publication is the verb of a writer in
Polari is a language that was used chiefly by gay men in the first half of the twentieth century. At a moment when being gay could result in criminal prosecution – or worse – Polari offered its speakers a degree of public camouflage, a way of expressing humour, and a means of identification and of establishing a community. Its roots are colourful and varied – from Cant to Lingua Franca to prostitutes’ slang – and in the mids it was thrust into the limelight by the characters Julian and Sandy, voiced by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, on the BBC radio show Round the Horne. (‘Oh Mr Horne, how bona to vada your dolly adj eke!’)
Paul Baker recounts the story of Polari with skill, erudition and tenderness. He traces its historical origins and describes its linguistic nuts and bolts, explores the ways and the environments in which it was spoken, explains the reasons for its decline, and tells of its unlikely re-emergence in the twenty-first century.
With a cast of drag queens and sailors, Dilly boys and macho clones, Paul’s book Fabulosa! is an essential document of recent hist