I’ve been thinking recently about how different it is for people to come out of the closet these days compared to my own experience in the early 1960s. This quintessential rite of passage is never easy, of course, but young people today do have access to information about being lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans - from movies and television, from books and the internet - and many will, perhaps, already have friends or peers who self-identify as queer.

It was different for me. When I came out, gay sexuality was still the love that dared not speak its name. In England, where I lived at the time, to be gay was to be labelled a criminal by the state, a sinner by the church and mentally ill by the medical establishment. There were no publicly out gay male or lesbian role models that I could look up to, to give me some positive hope of what my future life as a gay man might look like. It was the same situation in Canada and other English-speaking countries.

So I had to learn what being gay was all about, along with what was acceptable and what was not, from other gay men I met. This, however, had to wait until I’d plucked up the courage to drop into one of the few gay bars that at that time were barely tolerated by the authorities. Eventually, I learned from my peers how to socialize and make friends, how to behave so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself and, most importantly, how to meet other guys for sex or a possible relationship.

One of the things I didn’t expect to have to learn was a new language. But here were other guys in the bars talking about their friends and their daily lives using words I couldn’t understand. But like other gay men of my generation, I quickly learned how to speak like my peers.

What I was hearing and learning was Polari, an argot used by British gay men in the dark and difficult days between the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and the end of the 1960s, when, as in Canada, the U.K. parliament partially decriminalized sex between males. It probably grew out of the theatre world, where many gay people worked, and combined elements of Italian, Occitan (southern French), Romany, Yiddish, American air force slang and Cockney (working-class London) backwards and rhyming slang. It was a way of speaking among gay people so that others would have no idea what you were talking about. This was a necessity in an era when gay men were frequently arrested by the police (“lilly law” in Polari) and subjected to electric shock treatment in a misguided attempt to cure them of their homosexuality.

As linguist Paul Baker has written: “In a world where homosexuality was stigmatized through the institutions of law, medicine and religion, [gay] men needed a way to express themselves without getting caught. Consisting of sixty or so core words, Polari described types of people, their body parts and clothing and evaluated them in terms of their attractiveness and sexual availability. So dropping the odd Polari word into a conversation with a new, handsome acquaintance was one way of working out if they might be interested.

“Polari also acted as a form of initiation into the gay subculture, with older gay men teaching the newbies all of the words and “christening” them with their own camp name - Nathan becomes Nanette. Some Polari words labelled the technicalities of cruising, gay sex and various sexual identities - words mainstream society had not bothered to provide words for (or if they had they were nasty ones); others gave new words to existing concepts.”

In his memoirs, the the gay journalist Peter Burton uses Polari to describe an evening in a gay bar during those difficult years:

“As feely ommes...we would zhoosh our riah, powder our eeks, climb into our bona new drag, don our batts and troll off to some bona bijou bar. In the bar we would stand around with our sisters, vada the bona cartes on the butch omme ajax who, if we fluttered our ogle riahs at him sweetly, might just troll over to offer a light for the unlit vogue clenched between our teeth.”

Translation: “As young men...we would style our hair, powder our faces, climb into our fabulous new clothes, don our shoes and wander into some fabulous little bar. In the bar we would stand around with our gay companions, look at the fabulous genitals on the butch man nearby who, if we fluttered our eyelashes at him sweetly, might just wander over to offer a light for the unlit cigarette clenched between our teeth.”

By the time I came out, although Polari was still widely spoken, it was on the decline. It was the 1960s and many of the old stereotypes regarding homosexuality were slowly disappearing. Ironically, Polari burst out of the closet in a popular BBC radio sketch comedy show, Round the Horne, on air from 1964 to 1969. It had a weekly audience of about 15 million people who listened in during a popular Sunday afternoon “family hour”. Broadcast live before a studio audience, it featured an avuncular straight man (in both the sexual and comedic senses of the word), Kenneth Horne, playing himself, who always seemed to be looking for some service or other. He inevitably opened the door of some new retail or service establishment, always called “bona” (meaning fabulous, as in gay, as opposed to “naff”, meaning boring, as in non-gay) this or that - Bona Pets, Bona Books, Bona Caterers, etc. - to be greeted by Julian and Sandy, two out-of-work actors who were trying their hand at a new business venture.

Kenneth Horne: “Hello, is anybody there?”

Julian: “Oh, hello, I’m Julian and this is my friend Sandy”

Sandy: Oh, it’s Mr Horne! How bona to vada your dolly eek again. (Translation: How great to see your pretty face again.)

Julian and Sandy, explicitly camp and implicitly gay, were played respectively by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams. Gay themselves, they were able to squeeze every ounce of meaning from their use of Polari words and double entendres. In an era when gay people were often portrayed negatively, their humour was very funny and outrageously over-the-top yet it contained no hint of homophobia.

You can hear a clip from a Julian and Sandy sketch at the end of this post. The Polari words used in it are:

•  omee (man)
• bona (great, nice)
• vada (to look, to see)
• dolly (pretty, nice, pleasant)
• eek (short for ecaf, backslang for face)
• trolling (walking, cruising for sex)
• bold (daring)
• palone (woman)
• lallies (legs)
• nanti (not, no, nothing, don’t, beware)
• cottage (a public washroom used for sexual encounters)
• fantabulosa (fabulous, wonderful)

While Round the Horne popularized Polari among its non-gay listeners, it inevitably contributed to its demise. After all, when even great aunt Agatha got the jokes and understood the meaning of the coded words, the language lost its raison d’être. But Polari’s real death knell was the advent of the politics of gay liberation. A new generation rejected the ghettoized camp stereotypes of their elders and replaced them with a new esthetic of hyper-masculinity that became epitomized by the clone look affected by many gay men in the 1970s.

While Polari was a particularly British phenomenon, a number of Polari words did cross the Atlantic, the most notable of which is the word “gay” itself. Other words that entered popular North American gay slang, though most Canadians and Americans will probably not recognize their Polari origins, include:

• basket (the bulge of male genitals under clothing)
• butch (masculine)
• camp (effeminate)
• chicken (young man)
• drag (clothes, especially women’s clothes worn by a man)
• fairy (gay man)
• fruit (gay man)
• mince (affected, camp walk)
• queen (gay man, often used deprecatingly)
• trade (sex, sex partner, potential sex partner)
• rough trade (a tough, thuggish or potentially violent sex partner)

Although I miss the camp humour and the sense of special comradeship that Polari provided in my youth, I don’t miss the homophobia that led to it. And I’ve no desire to return to the closeted life that was the lot of almost all gay men and lesbians in those days. Recently, though, I was reminded how easy it is to assume erroneously that this kind of prejudice and discrimination is no longer present in the world today. An recent article in Xtra!, a Canadian gay and lesbian newspaper, described the lives of two gay Liberian refugees living in a camp outside Accra, the Ghanian capital. Paula Stromberg, the author of the article, asked one of the men how guys communicate about sex:

“ ‘Nothing is ever said. When a [bottom man] meets a guy...’ He grabs my hand in a handshake and presses one finger into my palm. Then he switches, pressing his thumb repeatedly on the back of my hand. ‘The top [guy] signal.’ [Such coded communication] is important here. Mistakes can mean lynching, jail or death.”

So let’s continue to make sure that when we in the West wave our rainbow flags and celebrate our queer identities we never forget our less fortunate brothers and sisters in the rest of the world who can only dream of such freedoms.

References

• Baker, Paul (2002). Polari. The lost language of gay men. London: Routledge.
• Burton, Peter (1985). Parallel lives. London: Gay Men’s Press.
• Stromberg, Paula (2011). A good day in Ghana; gay Liberian refugees survive in West Africa. Xtra! No. 702.

A two-disc CD of sketches from Round the Horne, The Bona World of Julian and Sandy, is available from Amazon.ca and BBCshop.com

June 1, 1981: the first cases of HIV were reported here in both the City and County of Los Angeles. It was the summer before my 7th grade year at Lincoln Jr. High School in Santa Monica.

June 1985: the first comprehensive HIV care clinic opened its doors at 1807 East 120th Street in Los Angeles. This clinic opened some five years later towards the end of June, the summer leading into my Jr. year at Santa Monica High School in Santa Monica. For over 25 years Oasis Clinic has been the only primary HIV care clinic located in the heart of populations hardest hit by HIV and AIDS.

May, 1987: the summer leading into my freshmen year in college, I got a call asking me to take a long time family friend to County USC Medical Center to see her son. For me this would be the first time I came face to face with AIDS. To say the very least, it blew me out the water and in the back of my mind I thought “Oh my God, this is going to happen to me!”

As I drove his mother back to Venice, she sat next to me crying and begging God to give her son peace. “I know Jesus, but give my boy peace. Give him peace, I said.” Simply typing this makes me cry because she took care of him alone with very little help. She would later go on to care for her own brother who also died from AIDS and again she did it alone. Sometime later she died from cancer.

April 3, 2008: at Harbor UCLA Medical Center I was diagnosed with HIV and in an instant what I feared became a reality. However my fear was not driven by any stigma, guilt, shame or ignorance, but by not having access. When I was diagnosed I was already over a year into homelessness. By the grace, mercy and favour of God with support from the few friends I had, I am still here, not currently in HIV meds, in great health, with great care from Dr. Ardis Moe and North East Valley Health. But the road to where I am now has not been an easy one.

Since my diagnosis I've done all I can to educate myself and as many people as possible about HIV and AIDS, but along the way I kept asking the same question and I kept hearing other Blacks and Latinos ask the same question. “Why is there no access to education, prevention and care in neighbourhoods hardest hit by HIV and AIDS?”

Study after study, report after report, article after article  - all I saw was how HIV and AIDS affect people of colour, but never did I see any real efforts to bring education, prevention and care to people of colour. I was raised with the thinking “you can't help people when you don't speak to them or meet them where they are.” Just like we can't end homelessness with buildings that are nothing more than prisons with keys, we can’t end HIV and AIDS as we know it by simply spitting out reports or locating billboards in the neighbourhoods where HIV and AIDS have gone unchecked and unchanged for over 30 years. Oasis Clinic can not be the only blessing in the storm and we can not continue to blame Black and Latino families and churches for the cause of all of this, when we know access to basic HIV and AIDS care is absent. Stigma comes from absence of care and this plays a larger role than is talked about.

September 26, 2011: I had the pleasure of witnessing a real effort to truly address the issue of access when AIDS Project Los Angeles under the careful and thoughtful leadership of Vallerie Wagner took the bold step toward change and opened the doors to a new Health and Wellness Center in the heart of populations hardest hit by HIV and AIDS.

I've always said that people need to be able to relate to who is speaking for them and to them. They need to feel like they can trust them, so back when I first met Vallerie Wagner, Director of Education at APLA, I was both happy and encouraged by the fact the fact that she would be leading the way.

Experiencing her humble spirit, but her “the time is now” attitude, backed by that trademark smile was so awesome to see. She has worked and fought hard to bring this center to where it is today and I am damn proud of her for taking a stand, and doing what is right for people who have suffered the most and continue to be disproportionately affected by this global pandemic. Moreover the guilt, shame and stigma that has been fueled not by HIV or AIDS, but the absence of access and the arrogance of each and every report that has demonized Black and Latino families and churches.

When I look at who is going to be doing all they can to change things for populations hardest hit, I see people who know what struggle looks like, what feels like. I see people who know what it's like not to have money to get on the bus, pay their rent or bills. I see people who are not going to make excuses, but offer options. I see people who truly get it. People who can best represent and who will do all they can to correct and repair the damage that has been done, not just by HIV and AIDS, but from the absence and the arrogance of “community”

After returning home I called my great aunt and told her of the opening. She was quiet for a while and right as I was about to ask if she was still there I heard her crying “It's too late for my baby, but on time for someone else. I hope they've learned how to support mothers like me so no other Black mother is left with reading how they've failed their children.”

I am left with a great Aunt who after reading and hearing many reports that she somehow failed her son and is the cause of his death and encouraged by the fact that thanks to Vallerie and team at the new Health and Wellness Center that no other Black, Latino or poor family will have to go it alone. Encouraged by the face that when someone receives a HIV diagnoses that there are now people in place that will help them on the spot. Encouraged that access is now located in the hood and even encouraged by the prospect of there one day being another full service HIV care clinic located in OUR neighbourhood.  

September 15, 2008 found me feeling rather lost and out of place in a dull-looking buidling, at least from the exterior, but which housed an impressively professional looking movie studio.  We were in an industrial area of East York (Toronto). I was there to film an interview for Top Drawer Creative, the ad agency GMSH (Gay Men’s Sexual Health Alliance) had engaged to produce the campaign for us.

It was an intimidating set-up. Real lights, drapes, BIG cameras, sound booms, a crew of half a dozen or more, a make-up studio. You can see the set-up in two of the pictures below.

Myself and the other interview subjects destined to appear on the campaign website, talking and blogging about stigma, weren’t even exactly sure what we were going to be asked. The decision had been made that spontaneous answers were the key. But James Murray, a colleague from GMSH who I trusted implicitly, was to be the interviewer, so that helped dampen the nerves.

There were eight of us in that campaign – four negative and four positive gay guys. I think there were four of us scheduled to be filmed that day.   I knew them to varying degrees. One of them was Brian Finch. We’d met briefly before; when I came in to the make-up room, it being almost time to go on, he was being worked on.

The rest is history. We did the interviews: you’ll see two of them below including Brian’s and the one from Murray Jose, the talented ED of PWA, both of whom did a great job. The Top Drawer people made us all look good in fact. I loved the edgy look they brought to the campaign that you’ll get a taste of in the interviews.

The stigma campaign (unfortunately the campaign website is no longer up) turned out to be an unexpectedly intense experience for all us, blogging for a full and sometimes exhausting six months about HIV stigma and its impact on HIV transmission. The campaign was web-based and designed to create a dialogue, using the slogan “If you were rejected every time you disclosed, would you?”  Those words, intentionally provocative,  came out of the sense that gay men don’t talk enough about their status – positive or negative – which leads to assumptions being made about status - and risk taking. Creating a dialogue around stigma was seen as a way to contribute to reduced risk taking, in fact. That dialogue was to be largely by way of blogging – a somewhat innovative approach at the time.

As the evaluation indicates – it’s referred to in the article below - that dialogue was especially rich. For this blogger at least, it was also transformative. The responsibility of fronting such a high-profile, province-wide campaign weighed heavily; we watched our words a lot, and often engaged in lengthy discussions about individual responses. (PositiveLite blogger Stephen Lincoln was our amazing coordinator/confidante in that process.)  In short we became immersed in all things HIV stigma for the length of the campaign, and even afterwards when some of us took it on the road.

I don't think many of us realized initially how big everything would become.  There was an enormous print and outdoor advertizing campaign aimed at directing people to the site.  Wellesley subway, the TTC (Toronto Transport Commission) station that serves Toronto's gay neighbourhood, was virtually taken over, for instance. You can see photos of this massive advertizing campaign throughout this post.  We were kind of in awe of it all at the time.

But it was all good. Particularly, the evaluation which indicated we did in fact make a measurable difference. You can read about that in the article which follows.

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(This article by Roger Pebody first appeared in aidsmap September 21, 2011.

Media campaign on disclosure and stigma changes gay men’s attitudes

A Canadian campaign which asked gay men “If you were rejected every time you disclosed, would you?” appears to have raised men’s understanding of the dilemmas which men with HIV face. The campaign also succeeded in reducing the number of men who try to avoid infection by relying on men with HIV disclosing their status, researchers report in the October issue of Health Education Research.

The campaign was not intended to broadcast a ‘message’ or give instructions, but to stimulate dialogue within local communities. Moreover the authors suggest that the extensive community consultation which went into its development contributed to the campaign’s success.

Staff from frontline HIV prevention work, public health, government and academia participated in the consultation which identified HIV-related stigma as a priority issue. Moreover they focused on stigma within gay communities as it is manifested in the attitudes of some HIV-negative men towards potential sexual partners who have HIV. The campaign developers believe that there are links between the problems of stigma, disclosure, conflicting assumptions and risk taking.

In particular, some of those involved in this project have previously researched gay men’s sexual interactions in which “potential partners interpret risk by bringing sometimes conflicting and inaccurate assumptions to bear in making decisions about safe sex”. For example, men may make different assumptions about a partner’s willingness to have unprotected sex, with some HIV-positive men assuming that only another positive man would do so, and some HIV-negative men thinking the opposite.

To further complicate the expectations and understandings of men seeking sexual partners, the Canadian judiciary has also asserted that disclosure of HIV status is an obligation for people with HIV before any sex in which there is a significant risk of HIV transmission.

Given the incompatibility of these different assumptions, the campaign was intended to allow men to move beyond the conversations they had within their own social circles and engage in “a more broad based community discussion” about stigma, disclosure and sexual decision making.

The campaign drew attention to itself through press advertising, outdoor advertising, online promotion and community outreach activities.

It was centred on the question “If you were rejected every time you disclosed, would you?”. This question was intended to be sufficiently provocative that it would encourage public reflection and conversation.

Moreover a key part of the campaign was its website. Blogs on the website written by eight different HIV-negative and HIV-positive men invited men visiting the site to respond to the issues raised and to post comments.

Over five months, the web site had 20,844 unique visitors (80% from Ontario), who stayed an average of six minutes per visit. Some 4,384 visitors came back to the site ten times or more.

The researchers describe the blog discussions as “lengthy and lively”. Topics included the sources, forms and consequences of HIV stigma; how to separate rejection of the virus from rejection of men who have the virus; the ethics and practicalities of disclosure of status; challenging stigma; and responsibility and consent in HIV transmission.

Evaluation

Despite the central role of behaviour change media campaigns in many countries’ HIV-prevention programming, careful evaluation of their impact remains rare.

The evaluation described here is not a randomised control trial (which provides the most reliable form of evidence), but assessed the impact of the campaign by means of cross-sectional surveys before and after the intervention. The campaign was promoted throughout the province of Ontario (including Toronto, a major gay centre) and was largely delivered via the internet, so it would have been difficult to identify a control group of gay men who were not exposed to the campaign and who had similar characteristics to those in Ontario.

Recruitment to the before and after web-based surveys was by identical means (an e-mail to local subscribers of a cruising website, www.squirt.org), and this was separate from delivery of the media campaign. A total of 1942 and 1791 men took part in the first and second survey, respectively. The characteristics of those taking part were broadly similar on each occasion.

Of those completing the second survey, 42% were aware of the campaign. Awareness was higher in gay-identified men, residents of big cities, men under the age of 45, better-educated men and men who reported unprotected sex with casual partners. Awareness did not vary by ethnic group or income. But far more HIV-positive men (68%) than HIV-negative men (42%) or men of unknown HIV status (31%) recalled the campaign, perhaps suggesting that its themes were particularly salient for men with HIV.

In terms of attitudes towards disclosure, the men who completed the pre-campaign survey had similar responses to the men who completed the second survey but weren’t aware of the campaign.

Moreover, comparing respondents of the second survey who were aware of the campaign with those who were not, there are statistically significant differences in their attitudes, even after controlling for confounding factors such as age, HIV status and sexual risk behaviour. The researchers believe that this shows the impact of the campaign on those who saw it.

Men who were aware of the campaign were more likely to agree that “gay men with HIV face stigma and discrimination within the gay community” (odds ratio 1.82) and that “gay men with HIV are reluctant to disclose their HIV status to their sexual partners because they do not want to be rejected” (odds ratio 1.48).

They were less likely to use terms like ‘clean’ or ‘disease-free’ when cruising for sex on-line (odds ratio 0.64) or to seek sexual partners with the same HIV status as a way to prevent HIV transmission (odds ratio 0.67).

They were also less likely to agree with the following statement: “If a gay man has HIV, there is no excuse for him not to talk about his HIV status before having sex with a new partner” (odds ratio 0.63). Nonetheless a large majority of respondents did agree with this statement – 85% of those unaware of the campaign, and 73% of those aware of it.

The authors believe that these results, along with the extensive activity and postings on the campaign website, “indicate that the site struck a chord with many community members and stimulated dialogues that likely spilled over into other contexts of daily life… Those who were aware of the campaign were significantly more aware of stigma and its role in HIV transmission at the conclusion of the intervention.”

Reference

Adam BD et al. hivstigma.com, an innovative web-supported stigma reduction intervention for gay and bisexual men. Health Education Research 26: 795-807, 2011. Click here for the free abstract.