Polari: The secret gay lingo
Polari is a lingo or jargon whose heyday was pre–Gay Liberation England, when there was a need not only for a gay slang, which has always existed in English, whether it be British, American or Australian, but for a disguised language which could fool straight — that is, those who were not the intended audience — eavesdroppers into thinking they were hearing a foreign language. (And what usually happens when monoglots hear a string of words they cannot make head nor tail of? They often dismiss it is gibberish and pay no further attention, thereby giving the Polari speaker the cover that he — and I suspect it was for the most part “he”, even though “she” was the requisite and ubiquitous pronoun used; more on that later — that he so desired.)