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Polari - a Very Queer Code

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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Janet Gibson .

Polari was a form of language, developing across the 19th and 20th centuries among a queer subculture that newspapers of the time referred to as the “twilight world of the homosexual”. It acted as a secret code, allowing speakers to converse in public spaces, to identify one another and to form identities.

In the 1960s Polari became famous when it was used in a popular BBC radio comedy series called Round the Horne but by the 1980s it had all but vanished.

Paul Baker has researched Polari for the last 30 years and he tells the fascinating and hilarious story of its rise, fall and rediscovery, charting its fortunes alongside tumultuous changes in British LGBTQ + representation and visibility.

Paul Baker is Professor of English Language at Lancaster University. He has written 25 books which focus on the relationship between language, society, identity and media. He is editor of the journal Corpora, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Lecture Series series.

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