Queer Questions is a series of short Q&A’s with writers featured in The Black Futurist Projects: New Queer Black reading and performance on July 6th. Check out the Facebook event page for more info and to RSVP.
Juba Kalamka is a bisexual artist/activist most recognized for his work as cofounder of the queer hip hop group Deep Dickollective (D/DC) and his development of the micro-label Sugartruck Recordings. Kalamka’s personal work centers on intersectional dialogues on race, identity, gender, disability, sexuality and class in popular media.
I became aware of Deep Dickollective (D/DC) in the mid 2000’s, way before Mykki Blanco, Big Freedia and other queer hip hop artists started becoming more visible. And since then a lot of what you’ve done, including starting the music label Sugartruck Recordings, has been ahead of it’s time and independently produced. Can you talk about how you navigated being one of the 1st at so many things and having to forge a path on so many levels: creative, cultural and business?
I’d have to say that the successes that I’ve had have been directly related to understanding that I’m a small part of a continuum as opposed to innovating anything as such. I looked at queer musicians and labels that came before me (mostly women) to find out what worked for them and what didn’t and used the technology currently available to stretch the resources that I had.
Mixed-gender crew Age Of Consent (1981-1985) was the first queer rap group I knew of, so I peeped what they were on culturally and politically which was incredibly intersectional. I looked at vocal group Sweet Honey in The Rock’s structure for cues on how to run a collective music project, and people like Ani DiFranco and Steve Albini for their understandings and approaches to putting out music as independent artists. To be honest, timing was important as well. We caught a moment of some interesting things happening culturally as well as internet technology being in an explosive phase,and we were in the right place geographically too. I’m fairly certain D/DC wouldn’t have had the success we did if we weren’t based in the SF Bay Area.
What are your thoughts on how sexuality, race and gender intersect, specifically as it relates to queerness in the African Diaspora?
Despite our protestations to the contrary, African Diasporics, particularly in the United States have had to contend with (and have often internalized) the fierce overcultural pressures to be as assimilable and normative as possible, what ever that means in one’s particular time and place. One could argue that the immediate experience of non-whiteness forces a series of disruptions of normative notions of sex, sexual practice, gender, and the like, and there’s a lot of interesting ways that gets expressed.
At the same time, there is the formation(s) of sub and sub-sub normativities that have been in some ways survival mechanisms and habit that people are reticent to interrogate individually and institutionally because of our investments in cultural monolith as said survival mechanism. That happens in Black Queer communities as well. Africa was a diaspora before The Diaspora, and if that was something more of us could be honest about I think we’d encourage not only an even more vast fount of creative expressions but a more healthy and holistic way of relating to and expressing our varied selves, whatever that might be for each of us.
What’s your vision of the black future? From an artistic, social and cultural standpoint?
Ongoing public conversations that challenge identity/cultural monoliths in general and the politics of respectability are in my view, crucial to continuing and expanding the intersectional analyses that encourage solution-oriented thought and action(s).
There is for me, an ongoing opportunity to deconstruct dialogues on what for better or worse might be known as post- blackness, as such would require a context/backdrop of post-whiteness/ post – global white supremacy. The intersectional affect of what that would look like is ripe for riffing musically, visually, linguistically, What would we see, hear do? What might that look like from moment to moment? What is the end “product” so to speak? Who are we as artists or cultural producers without that particular layered and multi-definitional backdrop?
What are you working on now and how does your work tie into your views on culture, community, sexuality and identity?
I’ve worked in some kind of HIV care or prevention services at least part-time the last 15 years, and full time in testing, prevention and patient linkage since 2006. The conversation on relative “baselines of wellness” deeply inform our notions around what ideas and objects have cultural worth/currency what our “community” is and can be and our relationships to our own sexualities. The concept of a sexuality continuum has opened and encouraged countless conversations on the way our ability to own and define our sexuality can ideally give us space to contemplate and consider the limitlessness of it all.
That said, freedom ain’t free, and in my mind, it’s kind of electric to think of what that might mean (as affinity groupings or individuals) to be “free” from “Blackness” as well, what that would mean, and who might want it? I’m smart enough to not try to hit that in a paragraph ( smile).
As for my own work: lots of performance stuff with Mangos With Chili and Sins Invalid, producing digital music for short film, releasing a new album in 2014 appearing in more porn with Slanted Tendency and Heavenly Spire, and serving on a few boards for arts and community advocacy organizations. I’m having the opportunity to pay some of my success and good fortune forward. I’m in a real good place.
New Queer Black takes place July 6th at Betti Ono Gallery in Downtown Oakland. This edition of Black Futurists Speaks is in conjunction with BeastCrawl, Oakland’s annual literary barcrawl.
Black Futurists Speak, is a quarterly literary, technology and live arts event featuring some of the most exciting Black artists working in the Bay Area and beyond.
