The Secret Gay Language

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SOURCES & FURTHER READING

[stephanielee]

Lesbianism was not illegal in England. When the law against homosexuality was written, Queen Victoria did not believe women would “do things like that.”

[ShawnRavenfire]

I heard "zhuzh" all my life, but I never knew it was part of the gay community. (A lot of the women in my family growing up were hairdressers.)

[AI-hxfx]

Interestingly, Swardspeak here in the Philippines is a very similar phenomenon (minus homosexual activity being illegal) but it changes even faster, and draws more on pop culture depending on the decade. We even have non-LGBTQI+ people using some words that evolved from this gay slang; it also adopted the word "drag" and made into the easy-to-figure out "dragá". Sometimes, it even morphs into "dragelya" for added humour or camp.

[Club]

As a Bisexual, I understood about like half of the polari sentence


ba dum

[bafanasithole]

There.s a similar language in South Africa called Gayle. Was used exclusively by the LGBT+ community. One can still hear some people using it, younger LGBT+ people use it less though. Again, it came about to make sure members of the community could communicate without incriminating themselves.

[Onionion]

In Hong Kong (a former British colony), I used to hear people describing feminine men as "cam". Little did I know it's actually a Polari word "camp" with bad pronunciation.

[fermintenava]

Interesting phenomenon! I think the official term is "sociolect", and many languages have one or two among their social outcasts. That story sounds similar to "Rotwelsch" and "Jenisch", which are German sociolects and also were influenced by Romanes, Yiddish and Criminals cants (but had no influence on German Gay culture, as far as I know).

[LazarusBell]

I'm really glad that more and more countries have come far enough for people to be themselves, and to see the decline of the use of secret languages like Polari, despite their linguistic intrigues.

[jayfrank]

I'm "about 60 years old" and I remember knowing of and even seeing "Punch and Judy" puppet shows in the US when I was a child. I even remember my mother telling me that they glorified domestic violence.

[Creek]

its french

the secretly gay language is french

[Trilo-KhD]

Brazil has a similar phenomena with the pajubá dialect, used only by queer people, it has its own words, spelling, pronunciation, grammar, differently gendered words, and different from standard portuguese it conjugates using the feminine as the neutral form instead of the masculine which is standard in romance languages.

someone speaking fully in pajubá is really hard to understand for standard speakers, which is on purpose, since it was made to avoid censors, cops and the military, during times where it was common to circumvent the laws prohibiting lgbt people during our military dictatorships.

[Bloobz]

As a French, I never heard of Punch & Judy, but here we have Guignol, I suppose it's very similar.

[doyouguysnothavephones]

This video will weed out all the bigots that may have been subscribed

[bentoth]

The term for this type of language (mostly slang turned into full language) is an argot.

[slyar]

"Butch" now is often used to say 'masculine' in reference to queer people more recently [i.e butch lesbians]

[badbuiltbq]

Great video, I know you focused on Polari and British English but it’d be cool if you’d do a follow up on American (specifically Black and Brown) contributions to the lexicon of “gay words”. Shade, beat (as in makeup), tea, snatched, kiki… those are just a few words of the top of my head that come out of black and brown gay communities in the US that have jumped to being understood in the broader culture. And also how white gays have scooped up words and terminology from Black and Brown members of the community and “mainstreamed” them. Not a criticism but it’s important to document!

[makouras]

There's a secret gay language in Greece, it's called kaliarda (καλιαρτνά) and funnily enough it's also influenced by Romani.

[thienpool]

HAPPY PRIDE , HON ! Thank you for speaking about Homosexuality in such an educational and compassionate way! <3

[-NGC--]

The title sounds like a history channel at 2 am thing

[auldfouter]

As alluded to by Patrick , homosexuality wasn't officially legalised in Scotland until 1981 - the year I turned 25.