In the s, 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 s 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 s, 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 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.
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In the s, 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 gay men in the year , about half the respondents had never heard of it.
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.
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 , I participated in a group effort to carry out the longest ever Polari Bible reading which took place in a Manchester Art gallery. We took turns reading lines such as: 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. Post-Castro Cuba and the cult of personality — Egham, Surrey. Religious accommodation on both sides of the pond: Different paths to a common norm? Front-end planning of capital projects: Available editions United Kingdom. His liberal boyfriend of about a year, whom C. Though C. As we waited for C. I heard something similar from Tim Miller, a gay former communications staff member for Jeb Bush, who told me he was surprised by how quickly a community of mostly young, openly gay conservative men has formed in recent years in Washington.
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Conservative lesbians often have less luck finding community. Sarah Longwell told me that she personally knew only a handful of conservative lesbians, and that her spouse and all her close lesbian friends are Democrats. When C. Awkward silence ensued. Before long, C. In late I visited Chadwick Moore, a year-old former liberal and writer for the national gay magazine Out who is now one of the most combative L. During a June segment about a Huffington Post piece calling for a boycott of Chick-fil-A for its past donations to groups opposing L. This current iteration of Moore would likely come as a surprise to the old version, who voted for Hillary Clinton.
Worse yet, the left is no fun anymore. Wintrich, who attended Bard College and could even now pass for a brooding student at the famously liberal school, smoked a cigarette near an open kitchen window. In April I traveled to northwest Oklahoma to meet Colton Buckley, a year-old gay cowboy in the midst of a Republican primary campaign for a seat in the Oklahoma House.
Of the 1, county residents who voted in the presidential election, only backed Clinton. That was good news for Buckley, one of the youngest Trump delegates to the Republican convention and one of more than 20 Republican L. Five of these candidates won. Buckley, who came out publicly after the deadly terrorist shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, told me that his primary opponents were trying to use his sexual orientation against him.
I watched Buckley give a short version of his stump speech to three men in their 30s sitting around a table drinking. The man looked confused. Before long, in fact, he almost seemed ready to play matchmaker. Any fellas? Buckley offered him a choice. Would he prefer a candidate who is straight but who wants to raise taxes, as Buckley suggested one of his opponents did?
Buckley turned toward me. Buckley turned out to be wrong about that — he finished in third place with just 26 percent of the vote. He suspected that had he been born five or 10 years earlier, he would have run as a closeted candidate. Three transgender women, including Jennifer Williams, a year-old government contractor from Trenton, walked around the Gaylord holding an L.
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I could think of few lonelier identities than that of transgender conservative activist, and I wondered whether Williams considered leaving the party after she transitioned in Like many L. Jimmy LaSalvia, the longtime gay conservative who left the party in , told me that he had watched several waves of gay conservatives have similar hopes dashed over the decades: Egan, a political scientist at N. Diffuse his masculinity at all costs. Never question a trans person. That seeming lack of compassion also struck Alexander Chalgren, who for a time was arguably the most famous young Trump supporter in America.
Among some L. In the midterms, in fact, 82 percent of L. The same polls show a decline since in Republican Party identification among L. A leading proponent of the Democratic-flight theory is Brandon Straka, a gay year-old hairstylist and longtime liberal from New York who became disillusioned with the Democratic Party and announced in a YouTube video last May that he was walking away from it.
The WalkAway hashtag became a sensation on right-wing social media, and Straka organized a WalkAway march and rally in Washington 10 days before the midterm elections.
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Though it was raining, about people the crowd would later at least quadruple, by my estimate gathered for a premarch rally at a park. Some came bearing signs. As I spoke with Lynzee and Michelle, another lesbian walked by and said: We love Daddy! The most interesting conversation I had that morning was with a married lesbian couple in their 60s who had until recently lived in San Francisco. The evangelical wing of the party would keep me away.
Old-school Democrats — we fought for the right of people we disagreed with to be able to speak, even when we thought their positions were offensive and wrong. Among the gays and lesbians I spoke with at the rally, there was a prevailing belief that while the L. As many gay conservatives see it, most L. Whether L. He believes that as L.