Juba Kalamka
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Juba Kalamka (born July 12, 1970 in Chicago, Illinois) is an artist/activist most recognized for his work as a founding member of "homohop" crew Deep Dickollective (D/DC) and his development of the micro-label Sugartruck Recordings.
Kalamka has coordinated the release and promotion of four 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.
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 is currently the curator/director of PeaceOUT World Homo Hop Festival which marks its sixth year in September 2006. The success of PeaceOUT has inspired the creation of 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 sex 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 yet to be released Radio Dildo Libre (David Findlay/Blissfull 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. His second solo recording, Ooogabooga Under Fascism, and Deep Dickollective's fifth disc, On Some Other, will be released on Sugartruck in early 2007.
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. He is recording with Deep Dickollective and solo, and planning additional group and solo touring. An essay/interview with Kalamka and 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).
