changes in the argot and nature of male prostitution in New Zealand
1867-1990

aspro bat boy battler bona roba bumboy call boy car-go joey chippy cocktail
COD
(cock on delivery)

aspro commercial bat boy crack salesman battler dick peddler bona roba dilly boy bumboy he-whore call boy gobble goop hockey box car-go hustler joey illegal Tegal chippy iron hoof cocktail jolly for polly
COD joy boy
(cock on delivery) juvie

aspro commercial bat boy crack salesman battler dick peddler bona roba dilly boy bumboy he-whore call boy gobble goop hockey box car-go hustler joey illegal Tegel chippy iron hoof cocktail jolly for polly
COD joy boy
(cock on delivery) juvie
Kleenex merchandise pro male escort
Moro merchandise trader wheeler tima moll private rent queen renter rental box

aspro commercial bat boy crack salesman battler dick peddler bona roba dilly boy bumboy he-whore call boy gobble goop hockey box car-go hustler joey illegal Tegel chippy iron hoof cocktail jolly for polly
COD joy boy
(cock on delivery) juvie
Kleenex merchandise ship boy pro rent boy speiler male escort
Moro streetie street mechanic merchandise street oyster trader wheeler street solicitor shingler tima moll private rent queen renter rental box trade trash venereal boy working boy worker

Based on interviews and oral history recordings of 50 men whose employment in the trade, or use of male sex workers has spanned 85 years.
This presentation briefly profiles extraordinarily shifts in a language form that has operated just under the surface of New
Zealand society.

thieves cant polari boob slang gay slang

thieves cant polari boob slang gay slang

thieves cant polari boob slang gay slang

1867 193o
1867 Offences Against the Person Act
Reverend Yate
Spielers, bludgers and light mannered men grottos and stations thieves’ cant coding

1867
Offences Against the Person Act (31 Vict. 5)
(s.58):
Whosoever shall be convicted of the abominable crime of buggery committed either with mankind or any animal shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be kept in penal servitude for life or for any term not less than ten years.
The act further provided (s.59) for imprisonment for between three and ten years for attempted buggery.

Reverend William Yate dismissed from the
Church Missionary
Society over allegations that among other things, he paid for sex with young Maori men using a pound of tobacco as payment.

noun: Cant or pelting speech contained words for criminal strategies, tools, spoils and the law.
‘family’, cruise, pickup, troll, omee, nantee, pegger, trade

noun: Cottage first appeared as a term for toilet at the close of the nineteenth century [Baker, 2002]. The term was British in origin and generally referred to toilets that were built in parks to resemble miniature country cottages.
To go cottaging meant to cruise public toilets seeking paid or unpaid sex.

noun: an environment where paid sex/soliciting occurs.
Beat is particular to both New Zealand and Australia.
Partridge (1961 p. 56) notes the word’s use as far back as 1788 where it described a normal route taken by a prostitute or policeman.

Hanging Gardens , the Garden of Eden, the Cottage Gardens , the Black Forest , Bluebell Dell , Cherry Lane , and the Country Club

1860s
noun: ‘ pimp who assaults or bludgeons.
In Australia and New
Zealand by the 1930s it had come to mean one who, without working lives off the earnings of another .
account executive purple Bob, hock

1887
‘ “disreputable, overdressed, and given to high levels of ‘indiscriminate immorality’.”
1890s
“some of the younger and more attractive of these men probably provided occasional homosexual favours.”
Eldred-Grigg, S. (1984). Pleasures of the Flesh: sex and drugs in colonial
New Zealand 1840-1915

June 1896
“What can be done to rid the streets of these giddy, lightmannered boys … who patrol arm in arm, giggling and shrieking and pass on going down to the side street.
One of our leading papers calls them ‘juvenile prostitutes’ and thinks the police should have power to clean the streets.”
‘White Ribbon. Vol.1 no. 12 (p. 7)

In
1893 the criminal code
(57 Vict. No. 56) Section 137 provided for up to ten years imprisonment, with flogging or whipping for attempted buggery, assault on a person with intent to commit buggery or for anyone
‘who being a male indecently assaults any other male’, noting ‘It shall be no defence to an indictment for an indecent assault on a male of any age that he consented to the act’.

1941- 1969 slang
British polari regency & feminisation
Amendments to part 7 of the 1961 Crimes Act

verb: to steal, but specifically to steal from a man while having sex with him. The verb appears in New Zealand and
Australian prostitutes’ slang dating back to the 1940s (Partridge,
2002, p. 464)
A more contemporary term is to
‘ roll a client’ . Other terms like half inch appear in lexicons of contemporary New Zealand prison rhyming slang (Looser, 1999, p.
32), and the now obsolete term bilk is listed in 1897 in Stephens and O’Brien’s unpublished
Dictionary of New Zealand and
Australian Slang .
bilk, five finger, roll, half inch

noun: a male prostitute who services or associates with both women and men ca. 1940s.
The term probably comes from the
British rhyming slang iron hoof , meaning poof.
Partridge (2006, p. 950) defines a half iron in more general terms, describing him as “a heterosexual or bisexual man who associates with homosexuals.”

noun: a man kept by a male sex worker
( kwn 1940s). Sometimes also called a bludger .
In many cases they were recently released prisoners. Upon release they would sometimes put in with a gay man or prostitute and live off their earnings.
Simes (1993, p. 163) notes the term’s concurrent use in Australia in the 1940s.

Amendments made to part 7 of the 1961
Crimes Act that reduced the penalty of imprisonment for “indecency” between consenting males.
However, consent was no defense. Indecency between males (consensual) and indecent assault on a male by another male (non-consensual) were considered equally severe (s. 140, 141) and carried penalties of five to seven year’s imprisonment.

verb : to work as a male prostitute, ca. 1960-70s. The term may be compared to the Australian verb ‘ hawking the fork’ meaning to work as a prostitute.
Hawking probably has origins in the older noun hawker meaning “one who goes about offering goods for sale” (Chambers 1985, p. 442).
In New Zealand the verb appears in sentences like “I saw a couple of washed out little queens trying to hawk it outside the Gladiator on their way home from the Aquarius Club.”

noun: a male homosexual prostitute.
Although more commonly used in
Australia (Thommo 1985, p. 136), the term was known by ship boys working between Auckland and
Sydney in the 1940s and 1950s.
Its origins may come from hock, which in New Zealand and Australian boob slang [prison slang] describes a man who seeks active homosexual contact but is not classified as a queen or cat .
Newbold (1982) describes hock in
New Zealand prison slang as an
“ aggressive homosexual ” (p. 249).
The word box is a homosexual term for anus.

[or stale] meat noun: a worker who has operated for a long time on the same beat, or more commonly, an aging worker. Dead/stale meat is an antonym for fresh meat .
Stale meat began to fade from use in the mid 1950s, but up until then it could also be used to refer to older clients. At that time, other terms for these men included: old queens, Aunties, pension book crowd, overripe fruit, geriatricks , duchesses .

is a secret language mainly used by gay men living and working in England’s large cities. Polari appears to have come into New Zealand via the U.K. Merchant Navy and the
Juilan & Sandy sketches broadcast on Radio New Zealand in the 1960s.
Baker (2002) suggests that Parlyaree probably acted as a bridge between thieves’ cant and Gay Polari.

[trade queen, wall queen, watch queen, munge queen]
[a collective noun for an exodus of men leaving a public toilet at the time of a bust]
[or ‘Mother’] an older man who protected or watched over the welfare of young sex workers.

verb : forced to leave a public toilet.
verb: to be in a public toilet and looking for sex.
of the urinal.

noun: the two cubicles with the clearest view of the urinal.
noun: the cubicle adjacent the urinal.

circa 1963

197o - 1990 entrapment & harassment
Carmen’s coffee lounge agencies language of the worker

noun: agent provocateur in a public toilet. By the late 1970s and early 1980s feminised names for the police were being replaced by more aggressive or descriptive terms including cleaner,
Commodore, D, demon, lace-up , shaker, snake and Waitomo .
Urinal sniffers got their name from the police habit of kneeling down on the hands and knees at a urinal to check the numbers of feet in adjacent cubicles. A urinal sniffer could normally be identified by their overly clean-cut appearance, their overt sexual propositioning, poor taste in shoes and pants, tan lines on their finger where their wedding ring has been removed, or absence of the smell of alcohol.

noun: unmarked police car. Evidence that D’s were in the vicinity. The New Zealand Police bought the first of these vehicles in 1980-81.
Often the cars were naively parked near beats and inadvertently alerted workers to police activity or potential entrapment. In many small towns, regulars knew number plates of these vehicles, c.f.
ghost car , U.S. slang [Rogers, 1972].

86 Vivian St.
cup code male: saucer on top of a cup.
transsexual, transvestite or drag queen: cup on its side straight: cup upside down on the saucer

Quinns
Tony’s
Adam’s
Zodiac
Discretion
Angelo’s
Brett’s
Brett’s boys
Heart & Soul
WFF

Cover Boy
Rich & Famous
Buddies
Adonis
Matador

off site on site client worker private operator double time agency

off site car-go, battler, tima moll, rental box, call boy, dilly boy, Kleenex,
KFC, street chicken, jail bait, bog on site trade, water front boy house boy client steamer, punter, john, trick, aunty worker queen, pension book crowd, overripe fruit commercial, trade, rent, hustler, merchandise, juvie, school bag, hockey box, call boy, pro, COD, private operator rental box, as-pro, venereal boy.
double time street-solicitor agency minder, hock, purple Bob