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| - An African-American man writes: Banjee. That was the identity I was given back in the summer of 1991, when I, half out/half in approached the colored museum of the Christopher Street piers. I was new to the life, so I had no reference for what people were talking about, but I soon gathered that "banjee" meant that I wasn't a "queen." Whatever the terms of identification, all I knew was that there was one thing that brought both the banjees and the queens (and whatever lies between) to the pier: we were men who loved men. An anxious 19 year old, I wore my banjee realness designation like a badge of honor. [...] a queen schooled me on how my masculinity was something that carried great weight, not only in the gay world, but the straight world as well."
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| abstract
| - An African-American man writes: Banjee. That was the identity I was given back in the summer of 1991, when I, half out/half in approached the colored museum of the Christopher Street piers. I was new to the life, so I had no reference for what people were talking about, but I soon gathered that "banjee" meant that I wasn't a "queen." Whatever the terms of identification, all I knew was that there was one thing that brought both the banjees and the queens (and whatever lies between) to the pier: we were men who loved men. An anxious 19 year old, I wore my banjee realness designation like a badge of honor. [...] a queen schooled me on how my masculinity was something that carried great weight, not only in the gay world, but the straight world as well." The 1990 documentary film Paris is Burning featured "banjee realness" as one of the categories in which contestants competed for trophies. According to the Village Voice "banjee boy categories have been a part of vogue balls since at least the early '80s." The word "banjee" never entered mainstream pop culture, but it had currency as gay slang throughout the 1990s. In 1998, a report in the medical journal AIDS patient care and STDs regarding safer sex practices among young Black and Latino men was entitled "Banjee Boys Are Down" ("down", in this vernacular, meaning "supportive of it"). The 1999 play Banjee, presented at New York's Lesbian and Gay Arts Festival (and in another NYC venue in 2004), is "the story of Angel (Indio Melendez), a straight homeboy, and Tony (Will Sierra), an admittedly bi banjee, who've known each other since childhood." Nuyorican openly gay poet Emanuel Xavier included a poem titled Banjee Realness in his 1997 self-published poetry collection, Pier Queen and uses the term throughout his 1999 novel, Christ Like. The term banjee is also been used by several producers of gay pornography in presenting the type of young man described herein. For example, in 1995 a company called Pleasure Productions produced a DVD called Banjee Black Boys (and five similarly named sequels) and circa 1999-2003 a company called Banjee Boy, Inc. produced films with taglines such as "Wanna see some of the sexiest, thugged out gangstas that NY has to offer?" There are other examples from adult films, as well as several pornographic websites (such as "Banjee Boy Group Slam") that still use the term. While seeming to have peaked in popularity during the 1990s, the term banjee is still in use. For example, a 2003 web page for a restaurant in East Harlem describes its clientele as an "eclectic mix of patrons that range from pretty neighborhood Banjee boys to some of the wise guys that once populated the space formerly." In 2008 the band Hercules & Love Affair has performed wearing matching shirts with the word printed on them.
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