Guest Post: Faggots, punks, and prostitutes: the evolving language of gay men

Peter Robinson, Swinburne University of Technology

Joe Jackson’s 1982 hit Real Men was the first time I had heard gays referred to as faggots. I was just out of the closet and in my first gay relationship in London. Jackson’s lyrics about how only our friends and other gays could call us faggots was encouraging, coming as it did from a straight man singing a song just before AIDS hit.

Faggot, often-considered a slur, has been reclaimed many times over by gay men, including in a new play by Declan Greene, The Homosexuals, or “Faggots”, currently showing at the Malthouse in Melbourne. The play looks at gay male relationships and their politics, and is apt as middle-class gay men and lesbians struggle with acceptance all over again in the face of their call for marriage equality.

My friends and I called ourselves fags because it was a way of turning the abuse on its head and laughing at the straight bullies.

And in merry-old-England there was abuse: one night when leaving gay club Heaven, a bunch of lads called us and our female friends “pooh jabbers”. It was graphic and offensive (“bum bandit” being a similar, anal-fixated term from about the same time) and it occurred to me how deeply, viscerally they hated us.

Language defines who you are. But words used by others to define gay people can say a great deal more about them than us.

From prostitutes to gays

Let’s begin with the most common term, “gay”, which baby-boomer homosexuals appropriated for their liberationist cause in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its pedigree is longer and according to Edmund White originally applied to women and meant loose or immoral, as in a prostitute. And “gay-house” was the term for a brothel. “In the past one asked if a woman was "gay,” much as today one might ask if she “swings,”“ wrote White.

"Homosexual” (or “homosexualist”) has similar 19th-century origins and was originally coined in 1869 by a Hungarian doctor, Karoly Maria Benkert.

“Faggot” has had different meanings according to where and when it was used. In eighteenth-century London it was first a term for prostitute then for homosexual. In 1920s New York, it described an effeminate homosexual who sought social/sexual relations with “normal men”, according to George Chauncey while a “flaming faggot” was an extremely obvious, flamboyant gay man.

In 1970s Australia, the ubiquitous “poofter” covered all forms of deviancy including men who had sex with other men, poor-performing sportsmen, politicians and motorists. Meanwhile, as the documentary Deep Water revealed, the literal bashing and killing of poofters caught at it in public parklands was something of a pastime.

“Cat” from “catamite” is ancient Roman with connotations of effeminacy, prostitution, and the passive role in a sexual encounter. “Fruit” was, like faggot, according to US historian Randolph Trumbach, a term first used in the 18th century for a prostitute and then a sodomite. “Fairy” and “queer” had similar origins between the world wars.

Why the fixation on prostitution? As Trumbach explains, there is a “long tradition in English usage” of words that are used to designate a prostitute being appropriated one generation later to describe sodomites.

This tendency for the words for prostitute to be later used for homosexual dates from 18th-century England when they often shared common social spaces, argues gay historian Rictor Norton.

Much later, historians such as Chad Heap and George Chauncey found similar intermingling in the underground bars that operated in New York and Chicago during Prohibition in the US.

The words gays use for themselves

Because of the sardonic nature of gayness, all of the above would have to be included also in the vocabulary of gay men and queers.

As well, there are community-specific terms, such as “clone”. Historically-specific, it connotes the style of gay men mid-1970 to mid-1980s (moustache, short hair, faded, baggy Levis and pocket and/or neck handkerchief) as exemplified by the lead singer of the Bronski Beat at the time of their hit single, Smalltown Boy.

More arcane terms include “ganymede” (a young male) which was used by Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries and “Marianne” and “Molly” from the earlier 18th century, again connoting an effeminate (or passive) male.

“Nance” and “nancy boy” as well as “Nelly” and “nellies” were terms used by both gays and straights also connoting effeminacy or youthfulness. According to one of writer Keith Vacha’s interviewees, nellies were “common queens” by which he meant: “ones with bleached blonde hair and plucked eyebrows”.

And finally, perhaps to the consternation of some of today’s toughs, there is “punk,” which according to Rudolph Trumbach was once the slang term for both prostitute and sodomite.

Terms of abuse and endearment

Terms of abuse are a way of distinguishing those whom we choose to marginalise because we do not like the look of them or because we were there first. In other words, they are the “outsiders” of sociologist Norbert Elias’s important work from the mid-1960s.

Humans have been doing this from the outset. Gangs and groups, them and us, and in the case of sexual preference, there are the straights, the “normals”, if you like, and the others, the sexual outcasts.

The terms I’ve illustrated were used by the majority to exclude prostitutes and homosexuals from “polite” society. While these terms were used to mark their difference, this did not prevent males from that same polite society from using the good services of prostitutes and homosexuals when it suited them. And as they did so then, they still do so now.

What is also interesting is the way in which sexual outcasts could adopt terms of abuse used for them and turn them into terms of endearment for each other — as my friends and I did in the 1980s when we called ourselves fags. And so, self mockery becomes a form of defence against the strictures of the priests and preachers.

It was literally the priests and the preachers, and later doctors and lawyers, who sought to demarcate “useful” sexual activity from wasted sexual activity. According to historian Michel Foucault the monogamous heterosexual couple produced new workers; those erotic and sexual activities that detracted from or weakened it were identified, categorised, and punished by law.

That young, gay men are now starting to reclaim these words is significant. It could mean that they are becoming interested in finding out where they have came from, that is, what are the origins of the culture they inhabit?

Twenty-one years ago, AIDS, which was then the dominant concern for gay men and culture, ceased to be a death sentence and instead became a manageable disease. Young men who have grown up since then could feel that other aspects of gay life can now be explored with greater freedom.

If this is so, it would suggest a strengthening of gay culture and community because people can only start exploring their past, warts and all, when they feel safe.

The Homosexuals, or “Faggots” will be showing at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre until March 12.

Peter Robinson, Senior lecturer in History and Sociology, Swinburne University of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: A brief history of Polari: the curious after-life of the dead language for gay men

Paul Baker, Lancaster University

In early February, the Church of England College expressed regret that in an evening liturgy in Cambridge, God was referred to as the Duchess. The service had been advertised as a Polari evening prayer in anticipation of LGBT History Month, and was described as a liturgical experiment. So what was Polari and how did it end up in an evening prayer?

Polari is a secret language, which has now largely fallen out of use, but was historically spoken by gay men and female impersonators. My research has tracked how it grew out of the world of entertainment, stretching back from West End theatres, through to 19th-century music halls and beyond that to travelling entertainers and market-stall holders.

It developed from an earlier form of language called Parlyaree which had roots in Italian and rudimentary forms of language used for communication by sailors around the Mediterranean. Also associated with travellers, buskers, beggars and prostitutes, it found its way into Britain, especially London and port cities, and gradually became used by gay men and female impersonators, especially during the first half of the 20th century.

The Polari bible.
Joe Richardson, Author provided

Polari itself had Parlyaree as a base, but once in Britain was supplemented with a wealth of slang terminology from different sources, including Cockney Rhyming Slang, backslang (pronouncing a word as if it was spelt backwards), French, Yiddish and American airforce slang.

In a period when homosexuality was illegal and heavily stigmatised, it was useful as a means of conducting conversations in public spaces, which would have alerted others to your sexuality. Many of the words allowed speakers to gossip about mutual friends or to critique the appearance of people who were in the immediate vicinity.

“Vada the naff strides on the omee ajax” meant look at the awful trousers on the man nearby. Inserting a Polari word – such as bona (good) or palone (woman) – into a sentence could act as a coded way of identifying other people who might be gay. The language itself, full of camp, irony, innuendo and sarcasm, also helped its speakers to form a resilient worldview in the face of arrest, blackmail and physical violence.

Polari speakers “christened” themselves with camp names like Scotch Flo or Diamond Lil, affording themselves alternative identities that reclaimed the representations of them as effeminate in positive ways.

Surplus to requirements

In the 1990s, I based my doctoral thesis around the study of Polari, examining its varied history and complicated etymology, the ways that it resembled a language, its social functions and the reasons for its eventual decline. I interviewed speakers of the language and analysed texts, including scripts of the 1960s comedy radio series Round the Horne, which had a regular sketch voiced by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, who played Polari-speaking actors.

The version of Polari that was used in Round the Horne was necessarily simplified and toned down for the British public, and by the 1960s, there was a feeling that Polari had already overstayed its welcome. Round the Horne spoiled the secret, rendering the language less attractive to its speakers. Meanwhile the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 was round the corner, making it less necessary for a secret lingo in any case.

Some younger gay men were more interested in concepts like gay pride, gay liberation and coming out and viewed Polari as a naff byproduct of a more repressive time. In the 1970s, in an early gay magazine called Lunch, activists branded Polari as ghettoising and it gradually became surplus to requirements. When I carried out a survey of 800 gay men in the year 2000, about half the respondents had never heard of it.

Renewed interest

While few gay men today actively use Polari, in recent years it has gained a kind of latent respectability as an historic language – similar to the way Latin is seen by the Catholic faith. From a political standpoint, Polari is now recognised as historically important, an example of the perseverance of a reviled group of people who risked arrest and attack just for being true to who they were.

In 2012 a group of Manchester-based artists used Polari to highlight the lack of LGBT inclusivity in education. They created an exam in LGBT studies, getting volunteers to sit it under strict exam conditions. The language portion of the exam was about Polari.

Another group of activists called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence created a Polari Bible, running a Polari wordlist through a computer program on an English version of the Bible. The Bible was bound in leather and displayed in a glass case at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. This was not to mock religion but to highlight how religious practices are filtered through different cultures and societies, and that despite not always being treated well by mainstream religions, there should still be space for gay people to engage with religion.

In 2012, I participated in a group effort to carry out the longest ever Polari Bible reading which took place in a Manchester Art gallery. In a nice touch of high camp we had to wear white gloves while touching the Bible, to ensure the oils from our fingers didn’t ruin the paper. We took turns reading lines such as: “And the rib, which the Duchess Gloria had lelled from homie, made she a palone, and brought her unto the homie.” Translation: “And the rib which God had taken from man was made into a woman and brought to the man.”

The Polari Evensong at Cambridge, carried out by trainee priests, however, took place in a more official context and provoked a range of conflicting opinion. Some people think it is hilarious, some are concerned about Church of England rules being broken and disrespect for religious tradition, while others think that God should be prayed to in any language and that the Evensong was perfectly valid. As someone who has spent 20 years documenting the rise and fall of Polari, I find it fascinating that even now, it is finding new ways to cause controversy. Never has a dead language had such an interesting afterlife.

Paul Baker, Professor of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.