ℹ️ This is a lightly-edited transcript of the commencement speech I gave at the Lavender Celebration last week at the College of William & Mary in Virginia (my alma mater) about Polari and the history of queer language. The Lavender Celebration honors and recognizes LGBTQ+ graduates of the university.
Polari reminds us that queer history is full of brilliance under pressure—people building a life in the margins with nothing but wit, nerve, good humor, and each other.
I’m a linguist, and if you don’t know, linguistics is pretty gay. While there’s nothing inherent about the scientific study of language that makes it queer, nonetheless the discipline has a strong tendency to attract queer practitioners to the field. As best I can tell (and stats are hard to come by on this), members of the queer community are overrepresented in linguistics as compared to both the general population and the rest of academia (Armstrong & Sullivan 2024). So I think it’s pretty fair to call linguistics the “gay science”.
Now, I have a theory about why this is. For many of us growing up, because our sexuality or gender expression set us apart from our peers, we were conscious about the fact that something was different about us. Even for those of us lucky enough to grow up in a supportive environment, that can be a real cause for anxiety. Many members of our community have been understandably afraid to present that side of themselves to the world. That causes us to be hyper-aware of how we present ourselves to others. Of course, one of the most salient ways that we construct our identities for others is through how we talk. As a result, many of us from a very early age were acutely aware of the social connotations of different ways of speaking. Many of us have a “straight voice” that we shift into in situations where we don’t want to highlight our queer identities, when we want to “pass” as straight or cisgender. In linguistics this is called style shifting (or sometimes code-switching when the term is being used loosely).
My theory is that the necessity of style shifting has made us as a community more linguistically aware on the whole. So it’s no surprise that many of us would wind up in the field of linguistics, because we’ve had to be aware of these language dynamics from an early age.
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Now, generally speaking, new linguistic trends tend to start among young females, and propagate out to other demographics. Young women are at the leading edge of linguistic innovation. But one of the other groups that’s often right there with them is the queer community. We pick up on the linguistic strategies that are the most socially successful. This is one of the reasons that so many people think that gay men in particular “sound feminine”. (That said, I don’t want to oversimplify this. The idea of a “gay voice” is a very complex issue, and linguists are still sorting out what exactly makes someone “sound gay”. We know it varies from community to community and language to language. Nonetheless this does seem to be one of the contributing factors.)
Attentiveness to language in the queer community as a tool for identity-building is hardly a new phenomenon either. As early as the 1850s we have documentation of a secret language used by gay subculture in the United Kingdom called Polari. Polari itself has roots stretching back to the language of traveling shows and menageries in the 1600s. It contains a mixture of words from Italian, Mediterranean Lingua Franca, Romani, Yiddish, rhyming slang, sailors’ slang, and thieves’ cant—basically the whole range of alt subcultures. It’s largely because of Polari that gay men have the tradition of inverting grammatical genders (calling males she/her), used both as a form of endearment and to protect the identities of the people being discussed.
Some words that come from Polari include:
zhuzh ‘smarten up, stylize’
(rough) trade ‘working class / tough-looking sex partner’
naff ‘bad, drab/dull, tacky/vile, hetero’
camp ‘effeminate, absurdly exaggerated’
butch ‘masculine; masculine lesbian’
fruit ‘gay man’
hoof (it) ‘walk, dance’
ogle ‘look admiringly’
drag ‘entertainment’
Polari reminds us that queer history is full of brilliance under pressure—people building a life in the margins with nothing but wit, nerve, good humor, and each other. The queer community has been using language as a tool for cautiously navigating our place in society—and gleefully celebrating our wonderful community—for centuries.
Nowadays, Polari is severely endangered, which is sad for me as a linguist, but perhaps a great sign for our community as a whole. The words which do survive have seen broad uptake by the rest of society, which is a testament to the degree queer culture has become not just accepted but sometimes even valorized. Words which even a decade ago were unique to the lexicon of gay subculture are now common parlance. (I never would have imagined that I’d hear the word twink thrown around casually on TikTok, for example—it’s a useful word, I guess? 🤷🏼♂️) Today there’s less of a need for secret argots and style shifting. Our linguistic prowess has shifted from a once-imperative defense mechanism to a robust strength that helps us thrive in the social world.
Many of us are fortunate to go through this same shift over the course of our individual lives too. When we were young we had to be circumspect in our language just to get through the day. As we age and come to accept ourselves and find acceptance from others, we no longer feel the need to accommodate the linguistic preferences of others.
But I don’t want the lesson here to be “we don’t need queer language anymore”. In fact, even though we’re still tuned in to everything our language signals socially, we nonetheless often choose to flout linguistic norms and embrace queer language in a joyous celebration of our differences. Our very ability to flout those norms is in fact what demonstrates our mastery of them. Instead, my hope for you is that you continue to use queer language in the way it’s always been used: for recognition, community, safety, and joy. As you go forward from here, keep using language in a way that invites others to exist out loud with you.
Congratulations, Class of 2026!
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Choosing to say “style shifting” in one context and “code switching” in another is an example of style shifting. Or is it code switching? 😉 Really, this is so meta it almost makes me squeal!