Lee will engage visitors in a multimedia experience combining live performance poetry and moving visual imagery to introduce them to the underpinnings of his work. How he uses the mechanisms of comedy and humour to create a form of autoethnographic storytelling that subverts and challenges. The experience will demonstrate a sophisticated usage of language in the form of camp, innuendo, and double-entendres to speak of personal narratives often raw, often painful but always generous and authentic.

Lee will then explain how his interest in Polari was triggered when he attended a Polari-writing workshop in Manchester several years ago where he was encouraged to write his own Polari phrases and how this led to the eventual development of a poem he wrote called The Tale of Benny Harris written entirely in Polari slang this year. 

Visitors will then be given printed out copies of a Polari dictionary which Lee will use as a basis for discussion including identifying with visitors Polari words that they may already be using. Lee will then invite visitors to write their own rhyming Polari poems and then, invite visitors to speak their poems out aloud for everyone to enjoy.

Stay after the lecture + workshop to hear Professor Sue Sanders, co-founder of LGBT+ History Month, speak to us about LGBT+ History.