Vulgar Tongues Read online

  In 1931, the American comic Boy’s Life ran a serial about the adventures of a high-school student working at an amusement park, whose introduction would strike several conflicting notes if used today: ‘Frank Madison. . . secures a job at Gay Acres, as a bathhouse attendant, and is making out extremely well. . . ’. Meanwhile, back in England, readers were treated to the publication of Gay Agony (1930) by one H. A. Manhood, ‘The author of Nightseed’. Seemingly addicted to unwittingly suggestive titles, the same writer then put out a book of short stories called Crack of Whips (1934).

  In a similar vein, while the Greek poet Sappho (and her home, the Isle of Lesbos) had for some time been associated in literary quarters with suggestions of female same-sex relationships, it was not until the 1890s that the word lesbian was first applied by psychologists to such behaviour. Among the general public, it took some decades for the word to gain recognition, so that, for instance, if you turn to the Daily Mirror for 16 January 1917, you will find a report of the sinking by a German U-boat of the British cargo steamer Lesbian, owned by the Liverpool-based company Ellerman Lines.

  British newspaper readers during the First World War might have found nothing remarkable in this name, but when Louis E. Jackson and C. R. Hellyer compiled A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang in Portland, Oregon, in 1914, some of their examples seem to have come from a more modern-sounding, cynical world. In addition to entries such as ‘SNOW – current chiefly among cocaine fiends’, and ‘JOINT. . . a business establishment, a hangout’, can be found the following:

  DRAG. . . Amongst female impersonators on the stage and men of dual sex instincts ‘drag’ denotes female attire donned by a male. Example: ‘All the fagots (sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight’.

  Although in this instance written with one ‘g’ instead of two, this is the first recorded instance of the term faggot, an Americanism later commonly shortened to fag in the 1920s, giving rise ever since to a certain confusion in transatlantic conversations with British people asking for cigarettes.

  The word sissy – usually denoting an effeminate man was obviously felt to be well enough known at the time to help explain the word faggot In the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic, sissy was a common term of address for a woman, derived from the word sister, but by the 1890s had also acquired this extra meaning in the US. By the twenties, it was enough of an accepted slang word that it appeared, for instance, in the title of a song by blues vocalist Ma Rainey, who recorded the ‘Sissy Blues’ in Chicago in June 1926. Black American songs of that era pulled no punches, and played to an audience who had few illusions about life, so they provide a useful guide to the kind of slang words current in that community. Even so, not everyone went as far as Kokomo Arnold, with the openly bisexual lyrics to his song ‘Sissy Man Blues’ (Chicago, 15 January 1935), which not only speak of waking up with his ‘pork-grinding business’ [penis] in his hand, but ask the Lord if he can’t send him a woman, then let him have a sissy man.

  Steaming hot tea

  IN ENGLAND IN THE FIRST DECADES of the 20th century, often the mere mention of Oscar Wilde’s name stood as a shorthand for things which ‘polite society’ did not care to investigate, or, to use a phrase from the poem ‘Two Loves’, written in 1894 by Wilde’s sometime lover Lord Alfred Douglas, the love that dare not speak its name’. Douglas himself later completely rejected the memory of his former friend, as a defence witness at a high-profile trial of the MP Noel Pemberton Billing, who claimed in his own magazine, Vigilante, that there was a vast German-backed hostile conspiracy involving 47,000 prominent homosexuals and lesbians. Supporting this view at the trial, Lord Alfred Douglas said of Wilde that ‘he was the greatest force for evil in Europe for the last 350 years’. Yet to many younger readers of girls’ boarding-school stories that year, Lesbia was simply the name of the heroine of Angela Brazil’s new novel, For the School Colours (1918), who, as the narrator says, has ‘a great sympathy for girls’.

  As a schoolboy at Marlborough College in the early 1920s, future Poet Laureate John Betjeman entered into a correspondence with Lord Alfred Douglas, until Betjeman’s father objected. Then, in 1930, John wrote home to a friend while on a trip to Berlin that ‘I have drunk tea in my life, but never have I wanted to drink it so much as in this town’, saying that it was ‘obtainable’ and ‘steaming hot’. According to his biographer Bevis Hillier, tea was ‘homosexual slang for boy trade’. Weimar Berlin at that time was known for its sexual tolerance across the spectrum. However, over in New York, where matters were conducted somewhat more discreetly, clubs and bars where homosexual people could meet would often advertise in the newspapers using the coded phrase ‘we cater to the Temperamental Set’.

  Since 1927, a new term for anyone displaying such an orientation was the suitably vague one of those, yet this was obscure enough to not ring any bells with the Cincinnati publisher of the anonymous crime magazine Confessions of a Stool Pigeon (1931), whose subtitle simply said, By One of Them. Mind you, readers of the pulps at that time were generally thought to be aware of such things. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon first appeared between September 1929 and January 1930 in Black Mask magazine. In it, the character of Joel Cairo – later immortalised by Peter Lorre in the 1941 film adaptation – is flamboyantly gay, and introduced as such to the reader in Hammett’s opening description, after Sam Spade’s secretary Effie Perine has forewarned him, ‘This guy is queer’ (later in the book he is described as ‘the fairy’):

  He held a black derby hat in a chamois-gloved hand and came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of chypre came with him.

  Omee polones

  PARLYAREE SURFACED PROMINENTLY in 1934 with the publication of the bestselling book Cheapjack by Philip Allingham, a memoir of his itinerant days working at fairs and markets up and down England as a ‘fortune-teller, grafter, knocker-worker and mounted pitcher’. The brother of crime writer Margery Allingham, he worked his pitch wearing evening dress and a top hat.

  Allingham’s book came complete with a glossary, which included the first recorded use of the word polone, meaning ‘a girl’. Also present was omee, or homey, ‘a man’, which became familiar in post-war polari, although there was no sign of omee polone, meaning an effiminate man or homosexual. Other words here which eventually became part of gay slang were nanty, ‘beware’, and bevvy meaning ‘drink’. These people used a reasonable selection of cockney rhyming slang – such as daisy roots for boots – as well as words from Romany, Yiddish and Italian sources, with a fair amount of criminal slang. Yet while there were a couple of characters who the author says ‘had no use for women’, this was not in itself a homosexual world.

  The 1930s saw the appearance of the expressions bent, and, in America, fruit. Then the word gay first appeared with its new meaning at the start of the Second World War. It began as an American slang term for homosexual, just a few years after the latter term had been shortened in some circles to the word homo. The House of Lords in 1937 got into the act during a debate on whether homosexuality should be grounds for divorce, with Viscount Dawson of Penn saying that the word sodomy as a legal term had become ‘inadequate and unsuitable’, since it ‘involves the question of a rather vulgar crime which is only open to the male’, whereas ‘homosexuality refers to both sexes’. This highlights the fact that there were still hardly any words for female same-sex relationships, although sapphist had gained currency during the previous decade.

  Gay, however, certainly did not replace the existing terms overnight. Christopher Isherwood, who kept extensive diaries from the time of his emigration to America in 1939, was recording American slang words like faggot by the following year, and the word sissy also showed up occasionally. Mostly, however, he would use the word queer, and despite living in America, did not write gay until the 1950s.

  However, George Melly, aged eighteen and conscripted into the Royal Navy in the closing years of the Second World War – where he said his open homosexu
ality was neither frowned upon nor uncommon – encountered this usage of the word gay some time around 1944. According to his memoir of those times, Rum, Bum and Concertina (1977), having written an article for a newspaper in which he said ‘when on leave in London, I have a very gay time’, he was cautioned by an older homosexual friend about the implied double meaning, as he recalled: ‘I’d never heard the word “gay” at that time, “Queer” was in more general use among homosexuals.’ Four years later, Gore Vidal was to note in his novel The City and the Pillar (1948) that in New York at that time the words fairy and pansy were no longer acceptable, and ‘it was fashionable to say a person was “gay”’.

  The Gay Bombardier

  MANY YOUNG MEN HAD LATELY TRAVELLED the globe courtesy of the Second World War, which would certainly have helped spread such slang. Out in Singapore in 1947 with a touring concert party of the British armed forces, the young Kenneth Williams found an equally tolerant attitude among his fellow soldiers to his sexual orientation to that which George Melly had encountered in the navy. In addition to using polari words in his diary entries of that time, he wrote comments such as ‘went round to the gay bar which wasn’t in the least gay’. Williams also described something as ‘so camp it wasn’t true’, using an expression that had first surfaced in Edwardian times, and which Quentin Crisp later recalled being used in that context in the 1920s. A fellow member of that concert party was future playwright Peter Nichols, who recalled in his superbly named autobiography Feeling You’re Behind (1984) his first task upon joining the unit:

  I had more than enough to do mastering the new lingo. The vocabulary was of mostly familiar words with new meanings – camp, drag, chopper, gay and auntie. Some were from Romany or Parlyaree – vada, bona, roba.

  The last term is of particular interest; a slang name for a woman dating back to Elizabethan times, being a shortened version of bona-roba, and defined by Dr Johnson as ‘a showy wanton’.

  As the forties became the fifties, even though laws punishing sodomy were still in force across America and in the UK, mainstream novels began to appear whose central characters were homosexual, often written by authors who were themselves gay. Angus Wilson, for instance, having used the slang expression lizzie for lesbian in his debut short story collection The Wrong Set (1949), then explored the life of a married man coming to terms with his homosexuality in the novel Hemlock and After (1952), The following year saw the publication of a very well-informed novel called The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland (Adam de Hegedus), set squarely against a background of London’s homosexual bars, clubs and parties, with a particular focus on Soho. Yet polari is nowhere to be seen. The activity which in more recent times has become known as cruising is often described, but the name used here is hunting. Sexual activity is mostly called play, while effeminate homosexuals are generally called poufs or pansies, and those less so are termed inverts, queers or, very occasionally, homosexuals. Much is made of the attractions of tough men of the working class, but they are not yet referred to by the later term of rough trade. No sign of the word gay, perhaps not surprising in the same year that the Royal Navy still felt confident enough to proudly name its newly launched 75-foot motor torpedo boat The Gay Bombardier.

  A variant American slang term for homosexual men appeared in The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, when Holden Caulfield says:

  The other end of the bar was full of flits. They weren’t too flitty-Tooking – I mean they didn’t have their hair long or anything – but you could tell they were flits anyway.

  Mostly, though, the usual American expressions saw service in general conversation, such as this exchange in Alfred Bester’s fine novel of the New York television industry, Who He? (1953):

  ‘What about Charlie Hansel, the undercover queen? Trying to pass with that hoofer he married’.

  ‘She’s married? That fag?’

  Familiar as these terms might have been to the average reader, Bester’s story also included the more esoteric cruising, in its homosexual sense of trying to pick up a date – which was very different from the meaning intended by Gene Vincent two years later, when he and his Blue Caps recorded a track called ‘Cruisin”, in which the singer was cruising for a bruising, looking to start a fight.

  Taking the biscuit

  IN THE MID-1950S, THE NEW USAGE of the word gay was brought to the attention of the general British public in the aftermath of a high-profile court case in which several men, including Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, were charged with having engaged in homosexual acts. One of the accused, the journalist Peter Wildeblood, published a book about these events in 1955, entitled Against the Law, in which he explained that the word gay was an American slang expression for homosexuality.

  In 1957, a British government Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, headed by John Wolfenden – which had been set up in 1954 partly as a result of the publicity given to the prosecution of Lord Montagu – published its recommendations in a document generally known as the Wolfenden Report. During their investigations, they coined a pair of slang code words of their own, referring privately to their subjects as huntleys (gay men) or palmers (prostitutes), after the English biscuit manufacturer Huntley & Palmers. The far-reaching report recommended that homosexual sex should no longer be a crime in the eyes of the law, a suggestion which was often cited as an inspiration in America in the 1960s, and helped lead ten years later to the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalised such activities in England and Wales. The famous Stonewall riots in New York took place a full two years later, and in many American states homosexual sex was not only illegal then, but remained so until 2003.

  The Wolfenden committee delivered their findings to a country in which you could regularly find large adverts on the front page of the Daily Mirror from a company called Go Deodorants for a product called Go Poof Body Powder. Indeed, on 9 April 1957, one appeared directly below another for Gor-Ray skirts, who were tempting their own customers with the slogan ‘Come Out in Style’. Into this allegedly more innocent world where words could nevertheless mean several things at once stepped the benevolently laconic figure of comedian Kenneth Horne, whose radio show Beyond Our Ken began broadcasting in 1958. Its mid-1960s follow-up, Round the Horne, brought unreconstructed polari into the homes of the nation with the characters Julian and Sandy, played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams respectively. Beyond Our Ken prefigured this with the same two actors appearing as a pair of camp characters named Rodney and Charles, and – although they did not use polari – their orientation was never seriously in doubt. Even when working in a coal mine, Kenneth has brought along his own ‘special’ miner’s lamp:

  Williams: ‘It is rather swish, isn’t it? Don’t you just adore the way it keeps changing colour?’

  Paddick: ‘Yes. What a novel idea to have it set in a Chianti bottle.’

  Three ways in front of the mirror

  AS FICTIONAL GAY MEN WERE APPEARING on national radio, lesbians made an appearance in one of the most successful series of novels of the 1950s, the James Bond books. Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger (1959) pitted 007 against ‘a Lesbian organisation which now calls itself “The Cement Mixers”’, led by the subtly named Pussy Galore. Goldfinger himself claims that they are respected by the main mafia gangs, but, some time later, mobster Frank Midnight takes a more jaundiced view, as Pussy attempts to chat up Tilly Masterton:

  Cheezus how they bore me, the lizzies! You’ll see, she’ll soon have that frail parting her hair three ways in front of the mirror.

  Frail was general 1920s jazz-era slang for a woman, but lizzie for lesbian was a more recent development. There still remained few specific slang words for female same-sex behaviour. Terms such as muff-diver had been around since the 1930s, while dike, spelled either with an ‘i’ or a ‘y’, appeared some time during the Second World War. Soho habitué and chronicler Frank Norman used various of these phrases in his book Stand on Me, published the same year as Goldfinger. In his regular han
gout, a Soho cafe called the 86, he observes of the owner Gregorius:

  . . . he was a bit kinkey about watching these birds dance together, but that is neither here nor there really because nearly every one is kinkey on dykes for some reason.

  In an otherwise excellent book about cockney speech, The Muvver Tongue (1980), East Enders Robert Barltrop and Jim Wolveridge made the assertion that ‘There is no Cockney word for homosexuality; it was virtually unknown before being publicised in recent years.’ Both authors were born at the beginning of the 1920s, but their statement would very likely have surprised Frank Norman (born 1930), who wrote of his acquaintance in the fifties with a wide variety of what he termed queers, lezzes and dykes. In cockney rhyming slang, ginger beer, meaning queer, was certainly current at the end of the 1950s, as was iron, or iron hoof (poof), which dates back before the war, and appears as such in Jim Phelan’s prison novel Lifer (1938).

  Over in America as the sixties began, the word gay went public. In Christopher Isherwood’s diary, he speaks of ‘gay bar owners’, while in Cothburn O’Neal’s 1960 novel of San Francisco beatniks, The Gods of Our Time, one character says, ‘It’s just the gay boy coming out in Kurt. Fags are the most jealous-hearted creatures in the world.’ The word gay could still refer to both sexes, however. Judson Grey’s lurid slice of lesbian pulp, Twilight Girls (1962 – ‘Down with men! That was the battle cry of the lascivious, lady-lusting League of Amazons’), although inexplicably overlooked by the Pulitzer Prize committee, certainly preserved a fair amount of current slang expressions in among the sleaze. One female character describes herself as a gay girl, while another is described as a bull-dyke, and an effeminate homosexual man is termed a swish, ‘Your little Edie is a Mary-Jane,’ says a lesbian. ‘A chicken for some dyke.’