Covert Operations: Acts of Secrecy and Homosexual Identity

In the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition, A Secret Service – Art Compulsion, Concealment – held at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2006 that focused on the construction of private worlds or the exposure of hidden facts, Richard Grayson wrote: “This increased currency of the very idea of the secret, the unknown and the unknowable, and its spread between categories – spiritual, political and social – means that the autonomous areas that we have enjoyed as individuals – personal, subjective and secret – are increasingly interrogated by the social and the politic”. I was intrigued by how artists from today and the past, ranging from Kurt Schwitters to Tehching Hsieh, Sophie Calle, Susan Hiller, and Mike Nelson, had responded to ideas within Grayson’s statement in the exhibition. However, one area that I found missing in the exhibition was the idea of concealing identity by keeping one’s sexuality not only private but also a secret from the world. In my case, it’s my homosexuality. It has become pertinent to my exploration of poetry films.  

A poetry film is made up of moving visual images, and words that are either spoken or voiced over while adding another layer of complexity to what is viewed, written or displayed on screen. In July 2022, Fountain Street Gallery in Boston, USA presented See Me: (An Almost) autobiography, a collection of my short performance poetry films. In it, I share my personal history as a working-class, gay, British man to confront the politics of seeing, and underline how validating the seeing can also be a difficulty of not being seen. In this collection, I presented my journey through different relationships with different individuals and communities: my dad (Let Rip: The Beautiful Game), my grandparents (See Shells), teachers, school peers and colleagues (Let Rip: Teenage Scrapbook and Head Boy), the gay community (SEE ME: A Walk through London’s Gay Soho), my alter ego (Camp-Belle), my partner (Nice Cup of Tea, Rufus), and, spaces of queer imagination (The Tale of Benny Harris, Cottage and The Perfect Crime: A Doggy Whodunnit). The collection addressed a range of complex and tricky issues: body shaming and bitchiness within the gay community, self-worth and doing things to ‘fit in’, unrequited as well as unobtainable love, unsatisfying relationships, fear of being left out ‘on the shelf’, the stereotype of gay people being promiscuous and incapable of sustaining relationships, and internalized homophobia and confidence. 

In Clever at Seeing without being Seen (2021), a live solo performance that I performed via Zoom by combining performance art, moving imagery, and spoken word poetry, I explored the possibilities of media re-use, feeding-back and looping round of text, and the layering of the voices. It was a multi-layered multimedia socio-creative performance of a colourful, immersive, textured, organic and disorienting montage of young queer experience told through my autobiography. Clever at Seeing without being Seen was a sharp and poignant evocation of the feelings that I experienced while discovering my own sexuality in adolescence. 

As a teenager, one does not really know who they are. For me too, it was a process of self-reflection – a journey through identity and a ‘this is what it was like’ to come to terms with my homosexuality; of me finding somebody attractive (men) but not really knowing what I am. I spoke my personal truth in the performance. The performance was an attempt at nailing down a specific talent that queer people need in order to acquire the title. As I have stated in the performance, LGBT people, including myself as a gay man, across the world, are ‘very clever, very clever at seeing, without being seen’. That way, it’s an attempt at exploring visuality and the politics of seeing as well as not seeing. I have developed a long historied body of practice exploring these themes since 2000. While exploring my solo art practice, I shifted the subject matter of my practice and research interests away from the ‘other’ to the ‘self’, and started making my own poetry films and live poetry performances based on these films. At the core of my work has been ‘seeing and not seeing’ towards my own self-hood as gay, male, British, working-class, now in his forties. To explain in further detail, I got myself into some hot water ethically about my own subjectivity as a sighted person working with the blind community while conducting a  research project called You Don’t Need Eyes to See You Need Vision. The project contributed to connecting the idea of blindness with seeing and not seeing. I then replaced the ‘other’ with the ‘self’ to that of my own subjectivity. I began positioning myself within an autoethnography by making poetry films. The chosen themes within these broader narratives helped me self-reflect and better understand what it means to be a gay man in terms of acts of looking, seeing and being seen and not seeing/not being seen before ‘coming out’ as a gay. 

Storytelling for Subversion

The underpinnings of my work are the mechanisms of comedy and humour, the autoethnographic act of storytelling to subvert and challenge the sophisticated usage of slang, camp, innuendo and double-entendres to speak of personal narratives that are often raw, painful but generous and authentic. For example, the double of the term ‘tackle’ in my poetry film Let Rip: The Beautiful Game. One meaning of the term ‘tackle’ is to challenge an opponent and the other meaning in British slang is a man’s penis. I write: 

Football with my dad 

Chelsea v Arsenal

Dad watched the match 

I watched the players 

Dad remembers the midfielder’s tackle

I remember the midfielder’s tackle

Balls and sports

Men in shorts

Football with Dad, both happy and sad

Dad watching one way, me quite the other

Nothing beats a good tackle when seen undercover

Another example is the use of the gay male slang: ‘bears’(a hairy plus size man) and ‘cubs’ (a younger bear) referring to the body shapes and age groups that I mention in my poetry film, Spinach and Eggs (2021).

The humour in my films and the poems is also related to the nostalgia of me looking back at my experiences. It is only now, 30 years after my teenage experiences of concealing my sexuality, that I speak about them in Clever at Seeing without being Seen and Covert Operations in retrospect. A friend who watched a selection of these films recently suggested that the discomfort of observing myself and finding something funny about it is really interesting. His observation was that my work operates between discomfort, humour and seriousness. “Would it have been really so bad if your parents or friends discovered you were gay? They probably knew anyway!”, he said. 

I view humour as a tactic to subvert and challenge the issues of homosexual identity and its representation in relation to the themes addressing seeing/not seeing etc. I use the mechanisms of comedy and humour to engage, disarm, and highlight the gay male subcultural milieu of how the certain subsets in the gay male community body shame other gay men, including me. The gay male community is very controlling about what you should look like and how you should behave – why is the community stereotyping itself? Certain subsets of gay subculture promote themselves as generating inclusive spaces whilst containing aspects that discriminate. The gay male subcultural milieu needs critique for creating such stereotypes. 

Since 2020, I have been curating Homo Humour, a one-hour programme of short films by gay male artists and filmmakers along with an interactive one-hour workshop about Polari (slang language used by gay people). When it was illegal to be gay, they had to talk in a coded language- Polari. Homo Humour explores the history of comedy as a queer identity defence mechanism, a means of expression and storytelling and the subversive and surprising ways that humour can be used on screen. It could be argued that a lot of queer films are very representational and serious which is why humour in terms of queer representation should be celebrated. During a screening of Homo Humour at Frise in Hamburg, Germany in March 2022, Stefan Moos led a discussion that encouraged the audience to think about using humour as a means of survival; as queer people grow up, we develop quick humour as a coping mechanism to shield ourselves against some of the behaviour we receive from people. This theme was also prevalent during the next screening of the showreel at Open Eye gallery in Liverpool in May 2022 where Greg Thorpe encouraged the audience to reflect upon gay humour as a ‘trope’ and a ‘survival tactic’, suggesting that for many queer people, ‘their survival is incumbent on being able to use humour’. After the screening in Liverpool, I presented a reflective presentation of the project so far at the conference, Queer Pedagogies organised by the Queer-Feminist Interdisciplinary Working Group at The European University Institute in Florence at the end of May 2022. While Professor Benno Gammerl acknowledged my referral of gay humour as a coping mechanism/survival tactic, he also highlighted an alternative side of gay humour: its ugly and dangerous side. “I remember being scared of the wits by some members of the gay community in Berlin, in the 1990s”, he recalled, “a biting humour, an exclusive humour, a humour that actually ridicules people. I experienced it as very problematic and dangerous. It scared me a lot. I remember that very clearly. That ambivalent and also problematic side of gay humour”. In response, I mentioned that I am also aware of this problematic usage of humour by some gay men and how certain subsets of gay subculture promote themselves as generating inclusive spaces whilst containing aspects that discriminate. I too think that gay humour can have a very nasty side, a cruel form of empathy. I referred to my poetry films that show me laying myself bare using cultural expressions to talk about queerness as a community and its challenges. I gave the example of Bears with Bananas and Bubbles in their Boxers (2022) which talks about how the gay male community is very controlling about what you should look like and how you should behave, and in doing so, use humour to make fun of those who do not fit into its ideals around body image. I read out these lines from the poem in the film: 

I remember my first time in The King’s Arms pub

Where I soon learnt gay men can be labelled ‘bear’ or ‘cub’

Surely, it’s time to turn the tables

on gay male body shaming and this obsession with labels?

Men seeing and being seen. Brother to brother

But their labelling whilst cruising is bruising each other

Burst the bubbles, ease the troubles

Let’s build a love for our own bodies out of the rubble

 I also read out these lines from my poetry film Spinach and Eggs about a guy who I thought was chatting me up (seducing me) in the Kings Arms pub in Soho years ago, but, in reality, was ridiculing me: 

Through his Bacardi and coke and cigarette smoke, 

this excuse for a bloke cracked joke after joke. 

(He said) 

‘Blue eyed boy Lee, I love your dark hairy legs 

Shame the rest of your frame is like pie from Greggs 

Be more like me, on spinach and eggs

You can’t be a cub, you’re far too old!

Put those legs out on show if you want to get sold!’

I’m getting quite tripped 

on these bodies all ripped

Imagine mine stripped 

and everything flipped

Mr Spinach and Eggs,  

stick your rules and regs 

in the hole 

at the back

of the top of my legs! 

My films, namely Covert Operations, The Tale of Benny Harris, and Reclaiming my Voice offer different ways of understanding how gay people have developed ‘covert operations’ to conceal their identities. I drew upon my own experiences while looking at other’s lives. The poetry adds humour and critique to the imagery and sounds the audience sees/hears. I have chosen the first film as it specifically talks about homosexual desire in relation to secret acts of viewing, gazing and associated terms for ‘seeing’. This film is grounded in personal experience, and whilst factual, does contain elements of fiction,  which nevertheless are based on real-life personal experiences. 

The second film, The Tale of Benny Harris offers a different perspective on secret acts of homosexual desire by focusing on listening, hearing, and the verbal communication that gay men had with each other using gay slang Polari. Rather than focusing on my experience, I focus on the experience of other gay men from a specific period in history when Polari was the only way men could communicate with each other without the fear of being arrested. 

The third film, Reclaiming my Voice combines aspects of the first and the second films. It begins with me talking about looking at my friend and realising I found him sexually attractive, however, the emphasis of the film is on voice, and how I felt like I needed to change my voice so that others would not realise I was gay. The film ends with a self-acceptance of my voice as a form of both emancipation and self-reclamation. 

Covert Operations was made using my drawings, paintings, and sound and moving images, made and collected over more than 25 years. It is about sharing my personal stories as a  gay man, and the different ways I have had to navigate my homosexuality through ‘covert operations’. It charts difficult and awkward situations at high school. Juxtaposing the politics and practices of cruising and spaces of production, a section of this film also explores some of the complexities involved in men looking for other men– not just in cruising spots like the woods or public toilets but on the internet and telephone chat lines, and in particular, at work. I draw upon my personal experience of fancying a guy on the train in the London Underground in 1993. A playful reflection on everyday temporary and fleeting pornographic encounters and temporary acts of looking, desiring, and fantasising that are often covert. The constant blowing and bouncing around of a balloon stands in for imagined (homo) sexual adventure. Using the language of consumerism (bargain basement, reduced, top value, sale, blue X) in the film, the character Bobby spends all day cruising gay dating websites. His character refers to how many gay men put themselves ‘on sale’; the nasty side of cruising: cheapening/ ‘reducing’ yourself, or selling yourself cheap. The fictional characters were also developed around ideas of how the dynamics of cruising produces and constantly reproduces relations. Shannon Philip writes: 

‘Cruising is a political act …it’s not just about desire… there is a social and political dynamic there too. In the case of ****, he only cruises from a particular class, gender and sexualised-abled body position so for him desire is constructed in a particular way which then shapes cruising. Men like him don’t desire poorer looking bodies, hairy bodies, non-muscular bodies – there is a particular kind of aesthetic/structure that is being normalised through neoliberalism – manifesting a very unequal society. Caste. The encasted body. Caste and class have a lot of co-relations. Men want to be neoliberal and say they don’t believe in caste when actually they only date men from the upper class/caste, looking at those with lower-class bodies with disgust and distrust.’  

Polari Language

The fictional character of Andrew, the timid office worker who has a ‘double life’ in Covert Operations, makes a re-appearance in The Tale of Benny Harris, which is written in Polari. It tells the tale of a fictional character called Benny Harris (in Polari, a ‘bene aris’ means a guy has a ‘nice bum’). In this section of the film, Benny has his eyes on Andrew (referred to as Andy in the film) and the barman gives him some advice. I write:

Benny’s excitement soon ended in scharda (disappointment) 

when the barman took him aside and told him to nellyarda (listen) 

‘Benny, mais oui, that number is nice to vada (look at) 

But take it from me, Andy only tips the brandy (rims as in ‘anal rimming’) 

rather than charver an aspro-arva

Have a shot of Vera (Vera Lynn – gin) You’ll vada (see) things clearer 

She’s (He’s) part time in the life (a part-time homosexual), got chavvy (child) and wife 

Not full time so (homosexual), she parkers the measures

to feel what it’s like to have omee (homosexual) pleasures

Look she’s on the Polari pipe (telephone) now dear, nelly (listen) her mutter (speak) 

Her taxi driver back home is her pastry cutter’

Polari was used by gay men in Britain, when it was harder to be gay in public, in order to communicate with other gay men covertly. While Polari is often associated with ‘camp’ comedians like the British comedian Kenneth Williams and is thought of as a language where gay men sound camp and effeminate, the subject of this short film plays around with gender, masculinity and identity; most notably in the poetry section where a ‘butch’ policemen reveals he is gay and wants sex with another man (the main character in the film called Benny Harris) by speaking in Polari to Benny. The poetry also uses Polari’s clever way of (gay men) hiding that the subject is male by replacing ‘he’ with ‘she’. A simple but clever subversion where one gay man is telling another gay man about a closeted gay man having sex with other men. 

Comedy historically comes from a queer identity defence, when it was harder to be gay in public, to be funny like Kenneth Williams who used Polari to communicate with other gay men covertly. Criminals, prostitutes, luvvies and homosexuals all used Polari in different ways. Gay men used Polari to communicate about things in public that they didn’t always want people to know about. Polari hovers between being blunt and not very blunt, and allows users ‘to get away with’ being very rude. Historically so, when used in abundance on mainstream radio e.g., Round the Horne with Julian and Sandy on BBC Radio when the majority heteronormative listener would be oblivious to the innuendos they were listening to/laughing at. Most folk assume Polari is about puns, being flamboyant and camp for the sake of it, and being rude but actually often those speaking Polari are not being rude, it’s just that it sounds rude. People often laugh on hearing Polari because there’s an implication that it is innuendo. One of the charms of Polari is that you can say anything and make it sound filthy. What is so fascinating about Polari is that some words are for things that you can’t talk about, and others seem just for fun or play. 

My interest in Polari started in 2018 when I attended Polari Creative Writing Workshop for Gay & Bi Men at Islington Mill in Manchester where I was encouraged to write my own Polari phrases by workshop host Adam Lowe. Prior to that, I had come across Polari when I was researching different forms of humour in terms of spoken language when I was doing my PhD back in 2011. Polari in its current version started in the 19th century. Its precursors include Thieves’s can’t, a cryptolect – the language and code used by criminals and thieves so people didn’t know what they were talking about; lingua franca used by sailors and those in maritime industries; and also words from Romany primarily through carnivals and festivals because a lot of theatre at the time was involved in carnivals which moved around the country. The language was a colourful melting pot of all kinds of influences with different versions spread by the sailors. There is also a South African equivalent – Gayle, which has a unique way of using women’s names to refer to things, for example, ‘Aunty Ida’ (AIDS), ‘Amanda’ (amazing), ‘Agnetha’ (acne) and Diana (disgusting). 

At Queer Pedagogies, the conference mentioned above, I met Dr Kaustav Bakshi who taught me about an Indian equivalent of Polari – Ulti Bhasha, which roughly translates to a language upside down. ‘Ulti’ means upside-down or reverse or alternate, and ‘bhasha’ means language. Ulti Bhasha is a specifically working-class language and has (other) commonalities with Polari as both languages have many different terms for ‘police’. It is still prevalent today in the LGBT community in India and acts as a ‘rite of passage’. In London, there were two different versions of Polari; an East end version which emphasises Cockney rhyming slang elements like ‘Vera’ (from cockney slang ‘Vera Lynn’ = gin) and ‘brandy’ (from cockney slang ‘brandy’ brandy rum = bum) and a West End version which was allegedly more classical, drawing more on the Italian and the lingua franca (the language of sailors etc). Often the East End and West End Polari speakers did not understand each other as the East End speaker was far more flamboyant and over the top with their language. If we look at a Polari dictionary, we notice words like ‘naff’ used in everyday language which makes us question: did these words come from Polari or was it the other way round? Polari is a language that can be played with and can be used to stretch language to almost its limit. Maybe its simplest covert is substituting ‘he’ for ‘she’ when a gay man wanted to talk about a man he liked the look of in public etc.  

Earlier in the article, I mentioned a Polari writing workshop as part of my curatorial project Homo Humour, and The Tale of Benny Harris (2022) is one of the films in the current Homo Humour showreel. Having watched the film, the workshop acts as an extension to the film and is designed to engage participants to learn about Polari (gay slang) and its socio-historical significance. I help them engage in a creative writing exercise using Polari at its base and develop skills in sharing their writing in an informal, non-judgemental and fun way. Participants are given printed out copies of the Polari dictionary which I use as a basis for discussion including identifying Polari words that they may already be in use. I encourage participants to notice how words like ‘naff’ are used in everyday language which makes us question whether these words come from Polari or whether it is the other way round. I invite participants to write their own rhyming Polari poems and then, I invite participants to speak their poems out aloud for everyone to enjoy. This event has so far taken place at The Margate School and the University of the Arts, London (UAL), and has received a fantastic response from participants. In one iteration of the workshop (images below) at Wimbledon College of Arts Library at UAL in March 2022, one participant even translated her favourite lines from Star Wars into Polari!

The covert operation in Reclaiming my Voice (2022), that deals with the difficulty of a teenager gay growing up in a heteronormative environment relates to me trying to disguise myself. Looking back, I laugh at the ridiculousness and absurdity of it all: 

Sound manly, act the geezer on my Harley

Hide that in my bedroom, I learnt the language of gay Polari 

Be the bloke when I spoke 

‘Alright mate’, ‘Alright Dad’

I tried to sound more ‘lad’ 

When I opened my mouth to speak

The poem finishes with me sharing how I overcame these difficulties and no longer worry about how I act/behave, or about soundinging camp:

My voice no longer haunts me, it liberates 

It’s no longer me and them

It’s we

And so now I choose to open my mouth

and take pride in its texture when I speak 

Appearance of Words

The lettering that appears in Covert Operations, The Tale of Benny Harris and Reclaiming my Voice is generated by me screen recording myself creating words using the pen/pencil on my iPad and then using the recording as a green screen layer within the films. I like the way the words reveal themselves: sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly across the screen. They don’t just sit on top of the imagery but often become images within themselves. Especially so, in terms of the way they bleed into the imagery within Reclaiming my Voice during the ‘dipping my toe in but never my feet’ section. You can see the words ‘dipping my toe in’ on the screen. This corresponds to what I talk about in the poem: my straight mate Danny experimenting with his sexuality (‘dipping his toe in’) but not going as far as being a ‘full time full-blown gayboy’. The appearance of black text on a white background in the following sequence in the film containing the words ‘never my feet’ underlines Danny’s affirmation that he is straight (or so he claims) in black and white. A full stop. Whereas in Covert Operations, the double-entendres and word play puns such as ‘tackle’ relate to my experience of hiding my sexuality, and in The Tale of Benny Harris, coded language is used by gay men to communicate covertly. The innuendo, double-entendres and word play puns are used by Danny who is a heterosexual straight male who can’t seem to (possibly through his own discomfort) speak directly about homosexuality or having same sex desire. The usage of cryptolect (coded language) here is reversed. Some of the cryptolect here is the well known British working-class slang and in other cases (like ‘dipping my toe in’), I have invented for the purposes of the poem: 

‘Don’t bother me mate’ he said, ‘that particular street’ (being gay) 

But I hope I don‘t catch it (discover I am homosexual)

Did you get it from something you eat? 

It don’t make me a gay, I was just having a peek 

at the size of Ben’s tackle (penis) whilst he was having a leak 

I might listen to Kylie and boogie to Chic

And got a big hard-on (erection) when Ben did a streak 

Running stark bollock naked at the footie last week, him running over the pitch when The Gunners got beat

All of us lads admired the size of his meat (penis)

But me, a full time full blown gayboy (a guy who has come out as homosexual)

Sure, I’ve thought about dipping my toe in but never my feet’ (experimenting with homosexuality, with limits) 

Conclusion

My attempt in this piece is to demonstrate how gay men have used ‘covert operations’ or the acts of secrecy to hide and shield themselves from others. In my first film Covert Operations, I have given an account of my teenage years when the acts of ‘secrecy’ were rooted in making use of what was available to me at the time (pre-Internet times of the early 1990s) and making things ‘queer’.  It was about how others reacted to making things ‘queer’ when I mention the time I bought a copy of Playgirl (a pornographic magazine of men aimed at a female audience). I extend it into when I finally had the confidence to buy material aimed at the gay community. I talk about smuggling copies of the magazine Gay Times into my bedroom ‘just to see guys like me’ and hiding them from my parents. In the next film, The Tale of Benny Harris, rather than talking about my viewpoints drawn from personal experience, I present the viewpoints of gay men in history who used the covert language Polari, to communicate with one another. The third film Reclaiming my Voice refers to how I tried to modify my voice in order to fit in within my straight mates at the time. The most pertinent act of secrecy in this film is from the point of view of Danny, my straight mate, who uses the covert language to hide his internalised homophobia as well as the suggestion that he has in fact engaged in (and probably enjoyed) homosexual desire himself. As the saying goes, the more you try and hide something, the more visible or obvious you actually make it. Indeed, I laugh at myself (in a funny but slightly painful way) thinking about how I tried to sound less ‘camp’ to my mate and more ‘lad-like’; the irony being that I probably sounded so ridiculous that it made me sound even more camp!