gang member

gang membernoun

• 1

  Someone regularly participating in the activities of a gang (group of hoodlums or criminals).

  • There is as well some narrative compression in the film, as befits the differences between the two media. […] The film conflates the characters of Royal Baron and Priest, who is referred to as a “businessman” early on by Duke. Similarly, the character of Chester, a black gay who has managed to escape the neighborhood by becoming an isolated, virtually imprisoned lover of a rich white man downtown (Duke describes Chester as having “a white man's face with a black skin over it”) is eliminated entirely from the film. In the book Duke attempts something similar, going with fellow gangmember Rod to Central Park at night to turn tricks, but this too is absent from the film although it is alluded to briefly in the dialogue when BeBop makes a sarcastic remark to Rod about prostituting in the park.
  • Tie signs (e.g., having an alleged boyfriend show up at school to threaten gangmembers) are more substantively indicative of “anchored relationships” than simple cover stories and provide an “open and direct means for staking a claim, the claim being a relationship to the [tied] individual” (Goffman 1971, p. 203).