Bona Beyond Belief

Like most people who weren’t gay men in London in the 1950s and early ‘60s, my first introduction to Polari was Julian & Sandy on Round the Horne. Bona to vada your dolly old eek, and so on, all very amusing in context and radical in its day, even though Kenneth Williams was, as far as mainstream audiences were concerned, so far into the closet he was virtually in Narnia. I almost felt like greeting the congregation in Polari this morning, but wasn’t sure very many people would get the joke. Still, I have been known to use the word ‘bona’ in a wide variety of inappropriate situations. It confuses my American friends, I can tell you.

What a fuss there’s been about the Polari Evensong service celebrated a couple of weeks ago at the august Anglican vicar-factory, Westcott House in Cambridge. So much so that the College authorities have apologised, crawlingly, for this ‘experiment in queering the liturgy’, which seems a bit rough on the students who put the service together. No, I wouldn’t have felt very comfortable addressing the Holy Trinity as ‘the Auntie, the Omi Chavvie, and the Fantabulosa Fairy’, but it’s not as though it was some kind of officially-sanctioned liturgy that’s going to be added to Common Worship in the next revision. It really doesn’t matter that much. I’ve had to grit my teeth through an act of worship in which the Lord’s Prayer was ‘re-gendered’ and the focus of our adoration was a pebble in a bowl of water, and I still survived the experience. It’s fine.

Others have defended the jokey service in vigorous terms. ‘What’s the difference between a service in Polari and one in Cockney Rhyming Slang?’ they ask at the parish of Kilburn and West Hampstead. ‘A: The Church wishes gay people didn’t exist.’ This blog argues that ‘what makes people cringe’ about the Polari-rendering of religious language and imagery, changing the mode of addressing God from Lord to Duchess, is gender, and reveals the profound discomfort the Church has not so much with gays as with the Female.

Now, I went to a theological college where male students were referred to by girls’ names and the moniker awarded to our Father Principal when he was a student was a whispered secret, revealed to us by a visiting priest who’d known him in those days (it was Sylvia Stardust, allegedly). I am, therefore, no stranger to camp, and recognise its dangers. What the defenders of the Polari Evensong miss is that it isn’t actually an exercise in homosexuality or femaleness, but camp. The use of feminine titles for God is a different argument which we can have another time: the issue with calling God ‘Duchess’ or ‘Auntie’ is that it arises from a culture whose self-defensive humour involves not actual femaleness, but the burlesquing of femaleness by men. It’s intentionally parodic, exaggerated, ludicrous. Camp is a complex mode of humour which is used to negotiate ambiguity, discomfort, and dichotomies between ideals and realities: no wonder it finds an honoured place among those training for the priesthood. The Christian life involves an inevitably painful awareness of the distance between what we are and what we are supposed to be. But let camp anywhere near actual matters of faith and its humour becomes less a way of defending oneself against outside persecution – which is what Polari was supposed to do – than defending oneself against truth, avoiding dealing with painful matters, not engaging with anything that might demand we change and develop. Of pushing God as far away from us as we can manage, making him (sic) safe and controlled, locking him in our own box. That's the problem.

I’m not telling you what my ‘name in religion’ was, by the way.