Got Your Number: Why Are Aussies Suddenly Searching Online For Polari, The Secret Gay Language?

Some of Australia’s most common searching habits includes sporting scandals, a politician saying something cooked and a celebrity nonsense. But that’s the straights – the queers, apparently, have become very interested in Polari, the secret gay language used before homosexuality was decriminalised.

It’s not exactly top of the list of what I expected to be spiking – so the rise Australia’s online searches for Polari is so bloody fascinating.

Google Trends data for Australia shows virtually no measurable search interest from 2004 until the mid-2010s, followed by isolated spikes in 2016, 2018 and 2019. From 2021 onwards, though, the line starts jumping more often, before shooting to 100 — the Australian chart’s peak — in June 2026.

(By the way, that does not mean 100 searches, nor does zero mean nobody searched. Trends uses a relative scale: 100 is peak popularity for the place and period selected, while very low volume can register as zero. Still, Australians have gone from barely registering on that graph to helluva lot of questions about what, exactly, Polari is.)

Why is interest in Polari surging?

The timing of the significant spike in June this year offers one delicious clue.

In June, Tom Read Wilson discovered that his I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! campmate Martin Kemp spoke Polari. Kemp told him “bona lallies” — great legs — having learned it through BBC radio comedy Round the Horne.

We obviously can’t declare that one camp television anecdote caused an entire nation to reach for its phone, but all the global iterations of I’m a Celebrity are a massive global hits, so the spike landing that month is difficult to ignore. Sometimes queer history returns through an archives and academia; sometimes Martin Kemp compliments someone’s pins in a secret gay language. Both routes are valid, in my humble opinion.

The worldwide graph looks different. Global interest rises and falls regularly from 2004, with its largest spike around 2006. The June lift is notable but not unprecedented internationally; Australia’s pattern is far more sudden, suggesting Polari only recently shifted here from historical footnote to something worth seeking out.

What is Polari? The secret gay language explained

Polari is slang, or cant, built from an unruly mixture of Italian-derived Parlyaree, Romani, Cockney rhyming slang, backslang, Yiddish and other influences. Travelling performers, actors, sailors, sex workers and, most famously, gay men in Britain used it when being openly homosexual could bring arrest, blackmail, violence, and death.

It allowed queer people to identify each other and gossip while hostile strangers — including police — remained none the wiser.

“Bona” meant good; “vada” meant look; an “omi” was a man; “eek” was a face; and “Hilda Handcuffs”, “Betty Bracelets” and “Beryl with a brooch” were all used to mean the cops.

“Got your number” was used to mean either to know what someone is up to, or to identify someone as gay – hence why I thought it worked perfectly for the headline for this story.

“Vada the naff strides on the omi ajax” meant: look at the awful trousers on the man nearby. Historic and bitchy. Perfect.

Also, the fact that “AC/DC” could be used to mean bisexual deeply appeals to me as a big ol’ Bi who loves classic Australian rock. I’ve never felt so seen.

(There’s a thorough dictionary here, if you’d like to brush up on your Polari.)

Its importance runs deeper than camp phrases. Polari was a survival tool, but it also carried humour, recognition and belonging; a way of finding your people while hiding from others. After homosexuality was partially decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967, its use declined.

However, plenty of words survived, and queer people still use them today: including “naff” and “zhuzh”, “dizzy”, “queen”, and many more.

Is queer history — or queer fear — driving the Polari revival?

Perhaps younger LGBTQIA+ people are curious about the lives before them. Many grew up with language designed to make identity visible: expanding acronyms, pronouns in bios, labels discussed openly online.

Discovering that earlier generations needed coded words to recognise one another must feel extraordinary, even if the history is grim as hell.

But I wonder whether fear is part of it. It’s no secret that anti-LGBTQIA+ hate, rhetoric, and violence is rising, while recent years have brought targeted attacks, escalating transphobia, disrupted drag events and organised online vilification.

Learning the secret gay language can feel less like historical cosplay and more like checking whether our elders left an emergency manual behind.

I do not want Polari to become necessary again, and we of course should not romanticise the danger that created it or confuse coded speech with freedom.

But I also think learning queer history absolutely rules. And I think if young queer people are reaching backwards, picking up words our communities used to survive, laugh, flirt and warn one another, and carrying them forward — it’s not because we intend to disappear, but because knowing how our people endured makes us harder to erase now. And that’s a net positive.