Juba Kalamka

Juba Kalamka (born July 12, 1970) is an African American bisexual artist and activist recognized for his work and founding member of homohop group Deep Dickollective (D/DC) and his development of the micro-label sugartruck recordings.[1]

Kalamka has coordinated the release and promotion of five critically successful D/DC albums, the Outmusic Award winning solo debut of former Sister Spit member Rocco "Katastrophe" Kayiatos, and the distribution of the work of numerous other artists in the homohop community.

Kalamka's personal work centers on dialogues on the convergences and conflicts of race, identity, gender, sexuality and class in pop culture. He has written and illustrated several articles for pop culture magazines and journals, Kitchen Sink, ColorLines, and the now-defunct bisexual issues magazine Anything That Moves.[2] [3]

He has been a speaker, panelist, and curator for numerous organizations and conferences, among them the San Francisco Black Gay/Lesbian Film Festival, GLAAD, Hip Hop as a Movement at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Burning Closets/Working Our Way Home at Oberlin College. In November 2005, Kalamka was chosen to be one of six plenary speakers at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's 2005 Creating Change Conference and received a Creating Change Award for his activist work in queer music community.

Kalamka served as Festival Director for the now defunct East Bay (Oakland, California) Pride in 2003 and the curator/director of PeaceOUT World Homo Hop Festival which ran annually from 2001 through 2007.[1] The success of PeaceOUT inspired the creation of three now-defunct sister festivals; Peace Out East in New York City, Peace Out South in Atlanta, Georgia, and Peace Out UK in London, England.

Kalamka appears extensively in Alex Hinton's 2005 documentary Pick Up the Mic, an active survey of the scene through documentation of homohop artists on tour and in performance at the various PeaceOUT festivals.

In 2003, Kalamka continued his personal and artistic dialogues on sexuality and race with appearances in three sex films; Good Vibrations/Sexpositive Productions G Marks the Spot, Joani Blank's Orgasm: Faces of Ecstasy, and the unreleased Radio Dildo Libre (David Findlay/Blissful Itch Productions). In 2005, Kalamka was contacted by artist and sex worker advocate Annie Oakley (whom he'd met at the Olympia, Washington queer arts fest HomoAGoGo) and accepted an invitation to tour with The Sex Workers'Art Show, a month-long cross-country cabaret-style theater event featuring current and former sex worker artist/activists. Deep Dickollective's fifth and final disc, On Some Other was released on Sugartruck in June 2007. [4]

In December 2006, Kalamka completed the MFA program in Poetics (minoring in Queer and Activist Performance through the schools Experimental Performance Institute) at New College of California in San Francisco. An essay/interview with Kalamka and former bandmate Tim'm West appears in hip hop writer Jeff Chang's collection Total Chaos: the Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop (Basic Civitas Books). He was elected to the Board of Directors of the Queer Cultural Center (producers of the National Queer Arts Festival) and the Strategic Committee of sex worker advocacy organization Desiree Alliance in 2011. He joined the board of national bisexual advocacy organization BiNet USA in 2018 and was elected Vice President in 2019. Kalamka resigned as Vice President in August 2020 and left the organization in October 2020.

On January 18, 2022 Kill Rock Stars announced the release of the first single and accompanying music video(directed by media artist John Sanborn) by queer rap rock/nü metal collective COMMANDO, featuring performances by Kalamka, The Living Earth Show, former Tribe 8 lead singer Lynnee Breedlove and RuPaul’s Drag Race performer Honey Mahogany, with a full-length album to be released on March 4, 2022.

Kalamka's first poetry collection Son of Byford was released by Nomadic Press in July, 2022. [5] [6] [7]

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