When Queer People Communicated in Codes

In 1980, the British comedian Kenny Everett opened his variety show, The Kenny Everett Video Show—an idiosyncratic combination of sketches and musical performances—with a special welcome. “Hello all you friends of Dorothy,” he said. 

To many viewers, the phrase probably meant nothing in particular—just more evidence of Everett’s penchant for zany language. But gay viewers instantly understood what he meant. To ask, “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” was, for decades, a coded way for gay men to identify each other. Although Everett wouldn’t come out publicly until 1985, gay viewers already understood the message he was sending them. After the episode, the newspaper Gay News asked, “Is Kenny Everett trying to tell us something?” 

For over a century, when homosexuality was illegal and it wasn’t safe to openly broach the question of identity, queer people located each other through codes like this. Wearing green carnations became a way for gay men to signal their identity to one another, a symbol that traced back to Oscar Wilde’s 1892 instruction to his friends to wear the flower to the opening of one of his plays. Colored handkerchiefs denoted not just queerness but also specific sexual preferences or roles: gay leather bars in the 1970s popularized this so-called “hanky code” before it was widely codified in Larry Townsend’s 1983 Leatherman’s Handbook. 

But the most powerful form of coded identification was always rooted in language. Whether through stock phrases or entire vocabulary systems, queer people have long found ways to speak to each other—including in front of hostile eavesdroppers, like police—without anyone intercepting their messages.

“Are you a friend of Dorothy?” became a kind of stock opener across the queer community, a way of asking, without really asking, if a stranger they encountered was safe. The exact etymology of “friend of Dorothy” is contested. Some link it to Dorothy Parker, the Vanity Fair writer who, in the 1920s, invited countless gay men to her parties to liven up the social scene. But the more widely accepted explanation is that the term relates back to The Wizard of Oz. The film’s lead, Dorothy, was played by a young Judy Garland, who went on to become a central figure in gay culture. Multiple hallmarks of contemporary queer iconography, including the rainbow flag and the phrase “come out,” have been linked to The Wizard of Oz references. 

More elaborate than a one-off phrase was gay people’s development of entire specialized vocabularies, which scholars today sometimes call “lavender languages,” to communicate in secret. Perhaps the most famous lavender language, the British-based Polari, combined vernaculars from criminals, sailors and Romani people, the historian Paul Baker writes in his book Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language. 

Polari drew on rhyming slang, reversed words and borrowed vocabulary from a variety of sources to create a distinctive coded language. The point was for gay men and some lesbians to speak to each other, including in front of outsiders, without anyone understanding them. In Polari, gay men referred to police as “Lily Law” or “Jennifer Justice” to warn each other about vice cops without attracting unwanted attention, according to Baker’s book.

Each lavender language had its own system of logic for camouflaging words. In Peru, a lavender language called Lóxoro grew out of trans and sex worker communities. Often, in a process called crytptolalisation, Lóxoro speakers would add syllables to regular Spanish words. In Lóxoro, tenedór—the Spanish word for "fork"—became tenedósoror; loca, meaning "crazy," became lócuti. Much of the South African lavender language Gayle centers on adding women’s names to existing English or Afrikaans words. In Gayle, a “Polly Papagaai” is a gay man who loves gossip—a play on papagaai, which means “parrot” in Afrikaans. 

Pop culture references tended to suffuse lavender languages. In the Philippines, a lavender language that emerged in the 1970s called Swardspeak blends pop culture references with Tagalog words. Instead of saying “it’s raining,” a contemporary Swardspeak speaker might simply say “Julanis Morissette”—a phrase that combines the Tagalog word for rain (“ulan”) with a playful alteration of the singer Alanis Morissette’s name.

These cultural touchpoints are also a hallmark of Gayle, which was created by mostly Black hairdressers in Cape Town in the 1950s. In Gayle, to “patsy” means to party, a reference to the American country singer Patsy Cline, according to Tracey McCormick, a linguistics professor at the University of Johannesburg who researches Gayle. These meanings are hardly stable: As celebrity iconography shifts, so does the queer vocabulary.

“'To cry' in the 1960s it was like, ‘don’t Carol Burnett,’” McCormick says. “In the 1970s, 'to cry' became 'Carole King.' And then in the 1980s, it became Kylie Minogue, don’t 'Kylie Minogue, don’t cry.'” Politics had a way of seeping into the vocabulary of Gayle, too. “It reflects the changing politics in South Africa,” McCormick says. “For example, a Winnie Poo is a small wind, but a Winnie Mandela is a massive wind, if you see what I’m saying.”  

In recent decades, as queerness has become more visible and less criminalized, the old codes have shed their significance. Green carnations probably don’t mean much to the typical queer person, and few speak lavender languages. Polari in particular largely disappeared from common parlance in the 1970s, though several Polari words still linger in the English lexicon. When people say “zhuzh,” meaning to spruce up something or make it more stylish, they are, probably unknowingly, recycling a beloved Polari word. 

But that doesn’t mean all of these queer linguistic codes have faded. In recent years, Gayle, for instance, has grown in popularity. It was always a deeply political language, a means of signaling membership in the queer community, but now it is a way for people to find solidarity, even if they aren’t queer. 

“Some of the research has shown that women learn Gayle,” McCormick says. “So when they’re in a straight club and some men are starting to be threatening, they’ll speak Gayle to each other.”