Vulgar Tongues Read online

  If you could then transport this particular righteously hep individual in a time machine back to Covent Garden in the 18th century, they would mostly have to trade in their customary vocabulary for a whole new set of slang. To take just one example, the head becomes a napper, a sconce, a costard, the crown office, a jobbernole, a poll, a jolly nob, or the idea pot. Yet in among these terms that were unfamiliar to our jazz visitor could be found others such as upper storey and knowledge-box, which then managed to survive two centuries and a journey across the ocean basically intact in spelling and meaning.

  The culture shock of such a journey, though, might well encourage our visitor to head for the nearest hoofery (dance hall), absorb some tonsil paint or neck oil (alcohol), rest the weight (sit down), and, being generally cool, calm and a solid wig (sensible), settle down and start whistling that old Lee Morse tune from 1930, ‘T’aint No Sin to Take Off Your Skin, and Dance around in Your Bones’.

  FOUR

  POLARI MISSILES

  The wrong pew

  THERE IS NO SUCH THING as a gay slang dictionary published in the 18th century – or, indeed, any time before the late 20th century. This is hardly surprising, since for several hundred years the usual punishment for male homosexual activity in Britain was death, so those involved had little reason to draw attention to themselves, and indeed, a powerful incentive for disguising their meanings. As a result, their lives and language were mostly documented, when documented at all, in the law courts, and brief reports in the newspapers. Lesbianism was not illegal, but remained even more under the radar than its male equivalent.

  Up until after the Second World War, when attitudes in some quarters began to shift, the prevailing view of homosexual relationships, and the language used to describe them, was not far removed from that expressed in this anonymous limerick from 1941:

  There was a young man from Purdue

  Who was only just learning to screw,

  But he hadn’t the knack,

  And he got too far back –

  In the right church, but in the wrong pew.

  Detestable and abominable

  WHATEVER ENGLISH SOCIETY, and especially the Church, may have thought of homosexual relationships in the late Middle Ages, there were no laws against them. It was not until the year 1533, in the reign of Henry VIII, that a statute entitled An Acte for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie was introduced, which appears to have been directed as much at those who were romantically inclined towards our four-legged friends as at any potential same-sex liaisons:

  Forasmuch as there is not yet sufficient and condign punishment appointed and limited by the due course of the Laws of this realm for the detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast. . .

  Indeed, the difficulty involved in tracing the words buggery and sodomy is that, from medieval times until the 19th century, the legal definition of both in England was considerably wider than it later became. For instance, as far as the law was concerned, in former times, anything from cunnilingus and fellatio, up to and including the murky business of becoming overly intimate with a family pet or farmyard animal, all fell within the scope of the word buggery.

  Nevertheless, it carried a death sentence, and could land you at the end of a noose up until 1861.

  If his weapon be out

  EVER SINCE THE PUBLICATION of The Portrait of Mr W. H. by Oscar Wilde in 1889 – inspired by a suggestion first made in the 18th century by the critic Thomas Tyrwhitt that Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed to a man – people have been searching the works of the Bard looking for clues to his sexuality. Yet, as the lexicographer Eric Partridge has pointed out, there are very few unambiguous references to homosexuality in Shakespeare’s plays:

  Perhaps the clearest-cut passages are these two:– ‘Thersites. Thou art thought to be Achilles’ male variet! – Patroclus. Male varlet, you rogue, what’s that? – Thersites, Why, his masculine whore’ (Troilus and Cressida, V i 14–16); and the Hostess, concerning Falstaff, ‘In good faith, ’a cares not what mischief he doth, if his weapon be out: he will foin like any devil; he will spare neither man, woman, nor child’ (2 Henry IV, II i 14–17).

  During the reign of Charles II, it was common for men to kiss each other by way of greeting. Indeed, in Richard Head’s novel The English Rogue (1665), the narrator objects to the custom:

  For in my opinion, it is very unnatural, nay loathsome, for one man to kiss another, though of late too customary I know it is; yet I look on such as use it, inclining to Sodomy, and have had the unhappiness to be acquainted with severall, who using that unnatural action, found it onely the Preludium to a more beastly intention.

  The word lesbian occurs relatively frequently in surviving 17th-century documents, but it generally referred to an architect’s tool made of lead, known as a lesbian rule. At the close of that century, however, B.E.’s A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew, in its several tribes of gypsies, beggers, thieves, cheats &c. (1699) contained the following:

  Quean, a Whore, or Slut.

  A dirty Quean, a very Puzzel or Slut.

  However, these are heterosexual nicknames. Closer to the point is another slang expression in the same dictionary:

  Tip the Velvet, c, [cant] to Tongue a Woman.

  To many of today’s readers and television viewers, this phrase will be familiar as the title of Sarah Waters’s 1998 lesbian historical novel Tipping the Velvet, and its subsequent 2002 BBC drama adaptation by Andrew Davies. Much of the publicity surrounding both of these asserted that the title was based upon ‘a Victorian slang word for cunnilingus’, but it was a century and a half older than that, and not originally a lesbian-specific term. However, not far into the 18th century, a genuine coinage for this kind of relationship emerged. Women having sex with each other were said to be engaging in the game of flats – since flats was a slang name for playing cards, but also doubled as a colloquial term for the female genitals.

  Ah ye little dear Toad!

  IT WAS ALSO IN THE EARLY 1700s that the word molly as a name for homosexual men came into use, implying effeminacy. The first recorded use of the term occurs in Ned Ward’s Satyrical Reflections on Clubs (1710). In it, he described a clandestine London club for homosexual men:

  There is a particular Gang of Sodomitical Wretches, in this Town, who call themselves the Mollies, and are so far degenerated from all masculine Deportment, or manly Exercises, that they rather fancy themselves Women, imitating all the little Vanities that Custom has reconcil’d to the Female Sex, affecting to Speak, Walk, Tattle, Cursy, Cry, Scold, and to mimick all Manner of Effeminacy. . .

  The most famous establishment of this kind was brought to public notice during a series of Old Bailey trials in 1726, for offences said to have taken place at an establishment run by one Margaret Clap in Holborn. This was the subject of Rictor Norton’s book Mother Clap’s Molly House (1992), which inspired the 2001 Mark Ravenhill play of the same name.

  At one of the trials, Samuel Stephens, who had visited the establishment several times in order to investigate it with a view to potential prosecutions, testified that ‘Mrs Clap’s House was notorious for being a Molly-House’. Then, at Clap’s own trial, Stephens described something of the scene he had encountered:

  I found near Men Fifty there, making Love to one another as they call’d it. Sometimes they’d sit in one anothers Laps, use their Hands indecently Dance and make Curtsies and mimick the Language of Women – O Sir! – Pray Sir! – dear Sir! Lord how can ye serve me so! – Ah ye little dear Toad! Then go by Couples, into a Room on the same Floor to be marry’d as they call’d it.

  Satan’s Harvest Home

  A NOTABLE LONDON PUBLICATION in 1749 alluded to both male and female homosexuality in its contents, and in its extravagant title: Satan’s Harvest Home: or the Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Pimping, Sodomy, And the Game of Flatts (Illustrated by an Authentic and Entertaining Story) And other Sa
tanic Works, daily propagated in this good Protestant Kingdom.

  The anonymous author claimed that ‘some of our Tip top Beaus dress their Heads on quilted Hair Caps, to make ’em look more Womanish; so that Master Molly has nothing to do but slip on his Head Cloaths and he is an errant Woman’. In addition to the term molly, homosexual men are also referred to here as ganymedes, after the handsome young man in the Greek myths, said in some versions to have been the lover of Zeus.

  While the term lesbian at that time would still either be used in its earlier architectural sense, or else to denote a particular type of Greek wine, the writer made much of the legend of Sappho in a chapter devoted to the game of flatts, saying that she ‘teaches the female World a new Sort of Sin, call’d the Flats, that was follow’d not only in Lucian’s Time, but is practis’d frequently in Turkey, as well as at Twickenham at this Day’.

  A few decades later, Captain Francis Grose’s singular contribution to the lexicographer’s art offered several expressions not to be found in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary. Virtually all of his many sexual references were of the hetero variety, but he did manage to round up the following:

  BACK GAMMON PLAYER. A sodomite.

  BACK DOOR (USHER OR GENTLEMAN OF THE).

  The same.

  WINDWARD PASSAGE. One who uses or navigates the windward passage; a sodomite.

  Thronged with margeries

  THE 19TH CENTURY IN ITS TURN added surprisingly little to the slim roster of gay and lesbian slang words. On 11 April 1833, however, thanks to the testimony of someone giving evidence at the Old Bailey, the earliest recorded usage of the word poof was preserved. Three men were accused of having murdered a boy named Robert Paviour, who had gone missing from his home in East London. The witness said that one of the accused had told him that:

  . . . there was a gentleman who gave a great deal of money for boys – that the gentleman lived somewhere in Horsemonger-lane; he said he was a captain – he said, there was a gentleman in the City, too, that was one of these poofs, as he called them. . .

  I had never heard the word poofs before.

  Interestingly, he was not then questioned further about this term, which suggests that it was already familiar to some in the court.

  The word reappeared as pouffs in a scurrilous guide to London’s nightlife published anonymously in 1855, The Yokel’s Preceptor: More Sprees in London! Being a Regular and Curious Show-Up of all the Rigs and Doings of the Flash Cribs in this Great Metropolis etc., generally supposed to have been written by the pornographer William Dugdale. Its full title ran to roughly ten times that length, promising details of all manner of fleecing holes, dossing hotels and molly clubs. Dressed up as a terrible warning to unwary visitors from the shires, this in fact acted as a guide for the hedonist, gay as well as straight:

  The increase of these monsters in the shape of men, commonly designated Margeries, Pouffs, &c., of late years, in the great Metropolis, renders it necessary for the safety of the public, that they should be made known. . . . Yes, the Quadrant, Fleetstreet, Holborn, the Strand, &c., are actually thronged with them!

  Across the Atlantic, dictionaries of slang and colloquial language had begun appearing with some regularity, John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms – A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States first appeared in 1848. Any modern readers looking here for references to same-sex relationships will be disappointed, but one entry in the third edition (1860) now has an added resonance which the author had not intended:

  TO COME OUT. An expression used among certain religious enthusiasts, meaning to make an open profession of religion. ‘I experienced religion at one of Brother Armstrong’s protracted meetin’s. Them special efforts is great things – ever since I come out, I’ve felt like a new critter.

  Bona Parlare

  THE MID-19TH CENTURY WAS A TIME of much investigative journalism, looking into the lives of the urban poor in England. In J. William Tweedie’s The Night Side of London (1857), the author writes of having visited the Eagle Tavern – made famous in the nursery rhyme ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ – and notes disapprovingly a group of heterosexual youths he describes as ‘gay Lotharios, very disreputable and, to a certain extent, deliriously gay’.

  Perhaps the best-known publication was Henry Mayhew’s monumental series of studies, London Labour and the London Poor (1851 and 1861). In volume three, he examined the lives and language of itinerant Punch & Judy men, puppeteers first recorded two hundred years earlier in the diary of Samuel Pepys on 9 May 1662, Here, Mayhew gave details of a form of slang speech that, in the 1960s, would become closely associated in the public mind with homosexual men, owing to the great success of the Julian and Sandy characters on the BBC radio show Round the Horne (1965–8). In mid-Victorian England, however, this was simply the language of show people, with no particular same-sex associations.

  One punchman explained the basics to Mayhew:

  ‘Bona parlare’ means language; name of patter. ‘Yeute munjare’ – no food. ‘Yeute lente’ – no bed. ‘Yeute bivare’ – no drink. I’ve ‘yeute munjare,’ and ‘yeute bivare,’ and, what’s worse, ‘yeute lente.’ This is better than costers’ talk, because that ain’t no slang at all, and this is a broken Italian, and much higher than the costers’ lingo. We know what o’clock it is, besides.

  This hybrid language was often called parlyaree, but there are many other variant spellings, such as parlare and pallary, and the more modern spelling polari, all seemingly deriving from the Italian word parlare, to speak. Paul Barker, in his book Polari – The Lost Language of Gay Men (2002), distinguishes between polari – the language of a certain section of the homosexual community which had its heyday between the late 1940s and the 1970s – and parlyaree, the much older language used by a variety of itinerant groups for several centuries. That a great many of the phrases which came to form part of polari were drawn from earlier sources is clear in the dictionary which forms the latter part of the book. To call a magistrate a beak is hardly news – Sir John Fielding (1721–80), who presided over Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, was known to Londoners as the blind beak. Similarly, calling the testicles cods would not have surprised Henry VIII or any of his subjects. Kenneth Williams used polari as a gay man in the 1940s, in his diary entry for 24 October 1947: ‘went to the matelots’ bar – met 2 marines – very charming. Bonar shamshes [the latter probably meaning smashers].’

  All of which recalls the dialogue between two punchmen, given by Mayhew in 1851:

  ‘How are you getting on?’ I might say to another punchman. ‘Ultra cativa,’ he’d say. If I was doing a little, I’d say, ‘Bonar.’ Let us have a ‘shant a bivare’ – pot o’ beer. . . ‘Fielia’ is a child; ‘Homa’ is a man; ‘Dona,’ a female; ‘Charfering-homa’ – talking-man, policeman.

  Afraid to palarie a dickie

  SEPARATE FROM THE WORLD of the fairground grafters and punchmen, the language of the real homosexual subculture of the late 19th century surfaced rather in publications such as the anonymous book Sins of the Cities of the Plain, Or Confessions of a Mary-Ann (1881). The tale of a London rent boy named Saul, it was issued in an edition of 250 copies by the publisher William Lazenby, and contained references to margeries, mary arms and pouffs. The word homosexual itself first surfaced as a coinage in the English language with the publication in 1892 of C. G. Craddock’s translation of Psychopathic Sexualis by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing.

  The 1890s also saw the advent of a variety of new slang expressions. This was the time of Oscar Wilde’s public rise and fall, the latter triggered by his disastrous libel action aimed at the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, who had sent him a visiting card at the Albemarle Club in 1895 on which was scrawled ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite [sic]’. The latter word never existed outside of Queensberry’s imagination, but that decade provided a veritable embarrassment of possible alternatives, such as urning (1893), queer (1894), Uranist (1895), fairy (1895, orig
inally US slang) and invert (1897).

  Two years prior to the court cases that precipitated Wilde’s downfall, his publisher, Leonard Smithers, issued the homoerotic novel Teleny, Or the Reverse of the Medal (1893), often credited to a combination of Oscar and various collaborators, although the authorship is unestablished. The language veers between anatomical description and poetic declamations, yet gay slang is not present, and as for parlare, readers would have to turn rather to an entirely different book published that year, Signor Lippo, Burnt-Cork Artiste. His Life and Adventures, by P. H. Emerson. The latter showman’s tale contained words such as bona, with a narrator much given to saying things like ‘though they offered me lots of money to blow the gaff [confess], I felt afraid to palarie a dickey [say a word] for fear of being trapped’.

  Making out extremely well

  THE 20TH CENTURY BROUGHT GREATER AWARENESS of homosexuality among the public in general, and a proliferation of new slang words relating to it. A fair amount of this came from America, including the transformation of the word gay from one which had for centuries had multiple meanings, into the situation existing now in which they have virtually all given way to the one denoting same-sex orientation. In the 18th century, poetry was known as the gay science, and a worldly, hedonistic gentleman was termed a gay man, while the high spirits exhibited at the close of the 19th century caused them to be nicknamed the Gay Nineties.