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Miss Poubelle regrets that she never got to hear the Julian and Sandy dialogues that aired on BBC radio in the late 60s, as they seem to have inspired a generation of British gay men in a way that persists even now. Julian and Sandy were a pair of gay men who operated one business after another (book publishing, movie-making, travel agents), and in each segment their acquaintance Mr. Horne would come by for a chat.

Julian and Sandy's dialogue was riddled with Polari, a kind of slang once common to gay men and those whose worked in theaters and carnivals. Polari is now nearly extinct, but at the time was apparently widely enough known for the gay men in the audience to get a secret laugh at dialogue that very few straight people could understand. Their various business all had partially Polari names: Bona books ('good books'), Bona bijou/tourettes ('good movies/little tours'), and so on.

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Here's a bit of dialogue from Julian, discussing his concept for a movie version of Samson and Delilah:

"I'll tell you what happens: the film opens with him lying there, spark out on his paliasse. Suddenly there's a movement behind the arras, and who comes trolling in but this palone Delilah. She vadas his sleeping eek, and she pulls out this pair of scissors and lops off his riah."

This is quite difficult for most of us to interpret, but for those adept in Polari it is quite clear. His paliasse is his back, and spark out seems to mean 'flat out'. Trolling means 'walking', but especially 'walking about looking for a sexual partner; cruising'. A palone is a woman. Vada means 'see', eek is 'face', and riah is 'hair'.

As the reader can see, Polari uses English word order and morphology, but adopts an odd mix of vocabulary from a variety of sources. Vada seems to come from Italian vedere 'to see', bona from Italian buona 'good', and palone from Italian pollone 'chick'. Other terms come from English words spelled backwards: eek is the short form of ecaf, which of course means 'face'. And riah is thus clearly 'hair'.

Some bits of Polari also come from French, as we can see in this dialogue where Julian discusses a vacation in the south of France:

"Divine. Sitting, sipping a tiny drinkette, vada-ing the great butch omis and dolly little palones trolling by, or disporting yourself on the sable plage getting your lallies all bronzed-- your riah getting bleached by the soleil!"

Omi is 'man', taken from either French homme or Italian uomo. Plage is 'beach' and soleil is 'sun', both direct from French. Lallies are 'legs', but no one seems to know why. As for sable, your guess is as good as Miss Poubelle's.

Several Polari words come from the incredibly confusing area of Cockney rhyming slang, which always leaves Miss Poubelle scratching her poor barnet. (And obviously barnet means 'head', because Barnet fair rhymes with 'hair', and hair is on top of your head. Is that clear?) In rhyming slang and Polari, arthur means 'to masturbate' because J. Arthur Rank rhymes with 'wank'. Miss Poubelle can piece together that Barnet Fair was once a famous horse fair near London, and J. Arthur Rank was a British lord, from the reference books. But rhyming slang comes as close to incomprehensibility as any form of English she has ever encountered.

In the days when gay people had to operate under the radar of straight society, such slang had utility, allowing discussion of topics otherwise taboo. Less obviously, the use of a Polari phrase dropped into ordinary English could have served as clear signal to other men that you were a member of the team. It may be less necessary in these times to have such elaborate verbal marking of our sexuality, but Polari gives us a fascinating glimpse of the way gay men of another generation created a world of their own through language.