Juba Kalamka (born July 12, 1970 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American 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. ,p> Kalamka has coordinated the release and promotion of five critically successful D/DC albums, the Outmusic Award winning solo debut of 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 was the curator/director of PeaceOUT World Homo Hop Festival which had it's seventh and final incarnation in year in September 2007. 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.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,2007).
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!: The Faces of Ecstasy", and the unreleased "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 and final disc, On Some Other was released on Sugartruck in June 2007. His second solo recording, Ooogabooga Under Fascism, will be released on Sugartruck at some point, likely late 2010. 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. lyrics from songs by both Deep Dickollective and Kalamka solo are included in the forthcoming Yale Anthology of Rap (Yale University Press, 2010).
He is Still working at his really cool day job like a real musician would and planning solo touring and lecturing and really enjoying his life.