Banjee

Banjee (as in: "banjee boy" or "banjee girl") is a term originating in the house system and ball culture of New York City which seem to be "from the hood" or embodying an urban, tough swagger. The term is mostly associated with New York City and may be Nuyorican in origin. Attitude, clothing, ethnicity, masculinity, physique, and youth are all elements of what has been called "banjee realness". According to The Village Voice, "banjee boy categories have been a part of vogue balls since at least the early 1980s". The 1990 documentary film Paris Is Burning featured "banjee realness" as one of the categories in which contestants competed for trophies. Of his experience with the term, a gay black 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 word banjee never entered mainstream pop culture, but it had currency as gay slang throughout the 1990s. In 1997, author Emanuel Xavier coined and referenced the term in his debut poetry collection, "Pier Queen". 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"), named for a project of Brooklyn's Unity Fellowship Church to get safer sex information to young men of color. The 1999 play Banjee, written by playwright A.B.