I’ve been doing research for a new project — Confabulations and Fantabulosas — a body of ceramic altar cabinet works about queer saints, erasure, and the archives that never got made. Part of that research led me down a rabbit hole into Polari.

Polari is mostly a collection of words. It drew from Parlyaree, the slang of travelling entertainers, market traders, and beggars — and picked up Italian, French, rhyming slang, backslang, Lingua Franca, Cant, drug-user slang, and American air force slang along the way. It was used by people on the wrong side of the law, or the wrong side of polite society, and because it was theirs — informal, oral, never written down — it stayed underground.

British gay men used it through much of the twentieth century. It kept them safe. It also made them funny, which was part of the point. Joy as camouflage. Flamboyance as survival strategy.

I built a small machine that translates plain English into Polari — or tries to. It’s a work in progress. Feed it a sentence and see what comes back. The results are sometimes accurate, sometimes completely unhinged, occasionally genuinely poetic. That felt right for the project.

Have a play with it. I’d love to know what you make of it.