Constantly Coming Out: An Interview with Juba KalamkaPart 1

Juba: Moving to the Bay area was my first real intimate familiarity with biphobia in the queer community. I was really kind of naiive.

Nia: So you were out in Chicago?

Juba: I was out in Chicago, yes.

Nia: But you didn't encounter biphobia there?

Juba: I didn't encounter biphobia there. But at that time, I was in a monogamous relationship.

Nia: Okay.

Juba: I think that maybe there was a way it was okay for me to be bisexual with the queer people who I knew. I didn't really have a large queer community that I engaged really regularly, even though I was out. I certainly didn't have a community of Black men at all. The Bay Area was the first place that I really had that. I was really kind of surprised about that. Even the artist community that I was in, but part of that was about the class issues within the artist community. It was stridently middle-class, upper middle-class, even in its approach and its understanding of art. It was a lot of box wine and crudité kind of events. That's not saying that I didn't get anything out of that or it wasn't important for me to be a part of that.

But I would say that I was kind of naiive in thinking that “LGBT” necessarily meant having a queer sensibility or a queered sensibility, being a freak or a weirdo, so to speak. Before I knew I was queer, I knew I was a weirdo. I can't remember not being weird, you know, the weird kid. What happened for me was, I knew very many men who were bisexual-identified, but not many who identified as a faggot. And that was something that was crucial to my identity formation, what that meant to me to refer to myself as a “fag”. That it was about resistance, about not denying sexualized aspects of the conversation.

The first porn film I did in the Bay area was with Good Vibrations. I remember being asked to the cast party. They knew that I was mostly in the monosexually gay male community. They said, "What was that like for you? You know, having sex with women in this film?" I was like, well, my primary partner is a cis woman. I'm out as a guy who dates and has sex with men. Even with biphobia among Black men, it’s like, “If you're hanging with us, you're a faggot.” I think that they were more problematized when I told them I did readings, I did poetry about leather community, about that kind of stuff, because that's not “polite society”...

Nia: That's not striving for normativity...

Juba: It's not striving for normativity. Exactly. And I get it. Intellectually, I get it. People want to fit, people want to have a space, but something that my partner says often is that there isn't a “safe space”. There isn't a completely safe space. It just doesn't exist.

Nia: For you in your identities, or just in general?

Juba: I would say just in general. I think that there's a way that we create safeties with each other as a community and beyond. But if safety means holding onto the idea that they won't come for you at some point, then that's ridiculous.

Nia: (laughs)

Juba: Of course we're always working towards that and trying to create safe space for each other, but I don't think that's necessarily about each other's... But it is about each other in the sense that you talk about, even the conversation around gay marriage, you have a largely about throwing the non-normative aspects of the queer community under the bus

Nia: Yeah. That's exactly the expression I was going to use.

Juba: And there's a way I can relate to that, because being a middle class post-graduate educated cis guy, even as a Black man, and queer, there's gobs of privilege that I have. Being able to have these conversations. But it's still... And even how that's a threat when you are the person that... I had a person, who's kind of a person like me, and just bothering to say, “What about them?” “What about this?” “What about there…?” I think that a lot of what happened after I wrote that story [in Anything That Moves] was "Okay, you're in the club. You're cool" That's why I go now, "What about all this other stuff?" And then that became the problem for everyone. It's not about the work. It's about the paradigms. It's about the structures. If you're not challenging the structure then you're part of the problem.

Nia: When you say, "If you think they're not coming for you then you're deluding yourself…" I feel like what you're saying is that there's never a space where welcoming doesn't feel conditional. Is that accurate ?

Juba: A lot of the time, yes. Most of the time that's been my experience. I'm not saying it's all the time. But most of the time.

Nia: It's like, there's always the threat of having your membership privileges revoked? Is that what you're talking about?

Juba: I've heard lots of people talking about, like when I performed at Sins Invalid, and to hear people say over and over again, what was so amazing about that project, and what continues to be [is that], people will say, "For the first time, I didn't feel like I had to leave a piece of myself at the door in order to participate." And that's so much of what happens for people so much of the time. You're told, "you can hang out if you don't...

bring your partner. If you don't acknowledge that you have this partner. That’s been largely my experience with monosexually gay communities, that they’re very fiercely invested in this idea that misogyny and gynophobia is what makes gay men gay. That made them properly “queer”.

Nia: So they're in relationships with women but they -

Juba: No, they had been. They weren't in relationships with women.

Nia: And so in order to “pass” better as monosexual gay men, they would just be really misogynistic?

Juba: Yeah. Like that is what made you gay. I'll give you an example. This is for queer parents to participate in. And it was really interesting talking about... Like, I have two children. I have a son who's 19. I’m sorry, I have two offspring. One who's now an adult who's now 19 years old. And one who's nine. My son didn't actually live in the Bay area till he was 17 years old. He lived in Chicago. People knew I had a kid. But there was a way that even though I was out as bisexual, because I didn't have a child who was immediately visible, I was sort of conscripted into “good gay man-ness”. Because I didn't have a visible child, or any visible evidence of previous sexual experiences with women.

Nia: So it was almost like being in the closet about having a kid because your kid was in Chicago?

Juba: Right, and I wasn't. I was always talking about him, when I would see him, whatever, had his pictures all over my place, you know, all that kind of stuff. But like, he wasn't there. And all that really shifted - well I wouldn't say shifted - but the question that I get asked once my daughter was born in 2004, was stuff around, "Are you with the woman you have the child with?" And I'd be like, "Yes, we're partners." And even people who said to her, “I though Juba was gay.” And she was like, “Why did you think that Juba was gay? I told you that he's bisexual.” "Well I just thought that he was just kind of tolerating you."

Nia: (laughs)

Juba: I'm serious. I'm dead serious. I'm not exaggerating at all.

Nia: They said that to her face?

Juba: Said that to her face. People she knew for years. It's just about the level of denial. Just to give you an example of the nature of denial… This fellow says, "Hear me out, it's not that you don't know any gay men with children who are your age, but it's that part of the social contract is - " And I would say, he wasn't Black. And he said, "even in Black communities I'm sure it's the same way too, is that for very many men in order to be ‘properly’ gay, whatever they think that is, is that they have to cut off anything that they

did before they said “I'm gayyyyyy!” Anything that they did then. So there's a social pressure for them to erase everything that happened before their coming out experience."

And it's just stridently misogynist, and about how they were somehow polluted before. Like I had a friend who was like this. This was almost 12 years ago, we were sitting in a taqueria having this conversation. I don't know how we were talking about bisexuality and he was like, "Let's ask Juba about that, he knows because he's bisexual." And we're like, "Dude. Two years ago, you were bougie, engaged to a woman in Los Angeles. And now you're gay party boy." So it's like, quit frontin'.

And this is before we even get to transphobia in queer community. Just about who's a man and who's not. Who's queer, who's not. The intersection of all of that. And as a word, I say “purity mythology”. People are just fiercely invested in this idea that what makes it good is it's all one thing.

Nia: Yeah. It's sort of like the idea of being a “gold star lesbian”. (laughs)

Juba: Yeah! It’s like, “Really?”

When I moved to the Bay Area, for the first time I met a monosexually gay man who had never had sex with a woman in his life. Not only didn’t have sex with a woman, but like didn't even go to prom with a girl. Like, that kind of gayyy. And it's very seldom that you meet African-American men... I'd say you probably do more now, I mean younger kids, because people are coming out way younger and able to be like, "This is what my desire is," at a much younger age. So if that's not something that they're interested in then they don't feel compelled in the way. Because you have institutions, you have communities that people can create more readily than you could, say, 40 years ago. So you might have people just going with the flow, so to speak. And also too, there's ageist gerontocratic kind of resentment about that.

Nia: I'm not familiar with -

Juba: Gerontocratic, meaning, "I know the way because I'm older," as opposed to actually having the wisdom or maybe the understanding.

Nia: Gotcha.

Juba: Yeah, resistance to that, and like every generation going, "Oh, these kids..." You know, that kind of thing. When I see young queer kids, I'm just like, “Wow. I'm glad that you get to experience this expanse.” My son, I remember him talking about his best buddy in Chicago, and my son ostensibly, as far as I know, is straight. And I think at one point he finally showed me a picture of his buddy. He's like, “This is him and this is his boyfriend.” And I said, "He's gay?!" He says, "Yeah." I say, "Well you didn't say anything about that before," and he says, "Well it didn't seem like a big deal." And I was like, wow. That's just a completely different experience. There's certain stuff that he... I'm not saying he doesn't have at all complications navigating communities. But he does

at least have a conversation about that that's very different from... And that's not saying that he would never ever have any homophobic inclinations, but he certainly wouldn't have any biphobic inclinations.

Nia: One of the other things I wanted to go back to that you'd said earlier was, you were talking about the differentiation between bisexual men versus “fags”...?

Juba: I wouldn't say it's a differentiation. For me, it was about a particular social modality. I think it was about was a way that people would relate to their sexuality that was more comfortable for them. Like when gay communities started becoming very publicly hyper-masculine back in the 70s, and resistance to that from cultural spaces like the radical faeries, like "We're gay, but you know what, it's our gender expression and our cultural expression. We're not really investing in this particular normativity. If that works for you, you go ahead and do that, but we want to create a space where everybody can be who they are." That did and does have its issues in that particular space, but it was an attempt to try to address some of those things.

So for me, what me saying "faggot" was about a particular kind of resistance. In the sense that even for me, when I'm telling someone I'm bisexual, there's having to deal with continual coming in and out of the closet. You're constantly coming in and out of the closet. Or feeling like you're coming out of the closet all the time.

Nia: So you'd say that you were a “fag” and you didn't have to -

Juba: I didn't have to consistently do that. Or saying “bi-faggot.” like how people say “bi-dyke”. Even dating profiles. Saying “I'm bisexual. That means that I date and have sex with men, so if you're a woman who's uncomfortable with that... I'm not a ‘progressive’ straight guy,” you know?

Nia: (laughs)

Juba: If that's your thing that's cool, I'm just saying, run with that. But I’m a fag. I am what you understand as a faggot. I date women. But I’m what you understand as a fag. So if that is something that you are uncomfortable with, then, I ain't mad at you, but there's probably some space where we don’t need to be hanging out together.

Nia: The way you differentiate between “bisexual” and “fag” sort of reminds me of how we now use “gay” versus “queer.”

Juba: Right, yeah.

Nia: Where “gay” sort of has these assimilationist connotations, at least for some folks, and “queer” is supposed to be explicitly anti-assimilationist.

Juba: Yeah. I was reading Jose Munoz’s Disidentifications. And he talked about that in the book. I remember it was the first place that I saw, in print, the use of the term

"homonormativity." And basically he was saying, that there came a space around the activism of... Like, even we talk about something like Stonewall. Stonewall was colored folks, poor folks, transsexuals, and femmes, and butches, and a little bit of everybody. But the narrative that gets sold to people is that it was all these "A-Gay" white, normative people. That's not who riots. Sorry.

Nia: (laughs)

Juba: It's not! And especially, you know, who was hanging out in the fag bar in New York in 1969.

For me, when I'm driving down the street in East Oakland, down to International Blvd. in my van, and I see police lights flashing behind me, I'm not going like, "Oh my god! I'm a bisexual polyamorous post-graduate blah blah blah, what are the police going to think?” No, I'm thinking about, “I'm a Black dude with dreadlocks, I'm about to be shot in the face.” That's what I'm thinking. And people don't want to talk about that. People in the queer community generally don't want to talk about that. You go a lot of "for what it's worth" type conversation. Like a derailing conversation about something else. And my response to “for what it’s worth” is, “It ain't worth shit,” you know? Fuck you.

And that's dear to my identity. I remember recently reading, I can't remember the author's name, it's a book called Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. And it was just amazing and incredible to read because there was this whole conversation about him, about the beginnings of Black nationalism, about Marcus Garvey as immigrant, about Marcus Garvey as chronically ill person, about the cultural forces that made him. Even about later when he was exiled. Or Marcus Garvey writing to one of his mentors going on and on about his white girlfriend. It's this whole different picture of him. I was just like looking through this book cracking up. I'm amazed, but at the same time... He was made a person, he was made whole by all of these aspects of his life and of his personhood and things that he did that were really amazing, and that were really not cool. All of it was there. It was a beautiful rendering of a person.

That's something that I was reaching for, in trying to have conversations with my father. He's now a 70-something, straight Black guy from the South. He is who he is. But there's conversations that we can have now, that we do have, where he asks questions, and if he gets it he to hold it. Not saying he's always necessarily comfortable, but also understanding he doesn't always have to be comfortable, he just has to be who he is and let me be who I am. We’re not antagonized by each other anymore, in that way.

Nia: The other thing that you said that I wanted to go back to. You were talking about the strive towards assimilation in the gay and bisexual male community when you came out here. I was wondering if part of that might be a generational thing. I interviewed Julia Serano. And she talks a lot about how particularly the Bay area, and particularly queer women's communities - I'll say queer women and trans men because a lot of times they overlap in some ways - there's this really fierce anti-assimilationism that means that anything that's perceived as being assimilationist in any way is considered not “queer”.

It's sort of the opposite of what you're talking about but it's similar in that it's drawing these borders around who's considered part of the community and who's not. And bisexuals in theory are excluded from that community but there are so many people that are bisexual that just call themselves "queer" that... It's such a weird thing.

For me personally, I used to identify as bisexual and I was told that that was transphobic, and so I stopped. And Julia and I talked about that. She identifies as bi and as trans and is like, “that's bullshit.” So I didn't want people to assume that about me, so that's part of why I stopped calling myself bisexual. But at the same time, I feel like by not associating myself with that term, that is helping to perpetuate biphobia by saying "Oh, I'm not part of that group."

Juba: It's like how the conversations about the notion of binarism about bisexuality go. So like, "gay" and "lesbian" aren't binaries? If that's the conversation you're having... If that's your rhetoric, they should probably think about how there’s this Holland Tunnel-sized hole in that conversation. And I really appreciate what Julia is saying.

In my experience, I think I've seen it more in trans male community. I know trans guys who are open and vociferous about themselves as trans men. And I know some who are stealth. And that's their thing. And they're very fiercely invested in passing. Again, I say, whatever context somebody is passing in, that that's their right to pass, as they do. If you're talking about passing, that there's ways that people pass unintentionally. I'm sure I pass most of the time as straight, because people will project that on me. Or I could pass as monoracial. And I'm not. Or I could pass as middle class, upper middle class on the basis of my. And then when I say my dad grew up in a mining camp in West Virginia, my mom grew up in dirt floors, with polio, in a shack on the Mississippi River. When I tell those kinds of stories...

Nia: I'm sorry, she had polio?

Juba: Yeah, she does. Even that conversation is a complicated conversation about ability, about race. But they all are complicated conversations. But I think that having had both of those experiences... In terms of passing, I understand it absolutely in a visceral sense, in the sense of people wanting to be safe, or think they are safe, or their experience of assault or potential assault. And there's ways that people can do so for safety, in lots of ways. But also, there's the conversation about who can pass and how and when because it's all conditional and it's all contextual.

At one point I was in the Bay, I was in Oakland, and I walked out on the street and I flounce while walking down the street. The first time I went back to the West Side of Chicago, I was walking from the train to my mother's house and noticed the difference. I felt myself “butch up” while I was walking down the street. And it disturbed me.

I understand that it was a reflexive safety response that didn't necessarily have anything to do with my queerness, I should say, didn't have anything to do with my sexualized

race, but it was about my “not man”-ness. Even as a kid. Just the way I relate to that, even as a kid, I wasn't a skinny little kid, and so there's a difference even in the same body. I'm big, there's a way that people might approach me in a way that they wouldn't if I was a skinny little kid, but I still have that there. That's still in my head. I'm still the same person, and I’m still vulnerable in the same kinds of ways. So I get it and understand it.

Also too, I think when we're talking about those passing or assimilation, understanding that even as a non-white person and a queer, there’s a particular set of privileges I have around being the big public “freak” that I am, and not feel that particular pressure to assimilate, because of the way that... That's why we have that conversation in the Bay area, because it's such a bubble. You hear that term over and over again, and it's so true. And when I say Bay Area is a bubble, I mean if you go to Livermore or Fairfield. You know, where you don't have to leave a 25 mile circle from San Francisco or Oakland to understand what that is. There's a queer kid who might want to wear a dress or makeup or whatever that particular expression is of their genderness, outside of the norm. But they're foregoing that because it's about being about their safety, not even just in their community but in their home. And having to deal with that. I problematize the way a lot of times that it gets bandied about because it's done in this way that people who don't consider reality...

Nia: I'm sorry, the way that what gets bandied about?

Juba: The idea of assimilation. This whole notion of assimilation. That if you're not doing it this way, you're -

Nia: You're somehow “less queer”...

Juba: - you're somehow less queer. You're some kind of tool of the system or the over-cultural conspiracy. But people have to stay alive till tomorrow, or the next hour, or whatever, and people figure that out in different ways. It might not be the ways that I figure it out, but they have a different experience of that. So I feel like my responsibility, what I do, is in terms of, I have a lot of [privilege]. One, I have the privilege of being asked to have this conversation. And the opportunity to have my work out in public. So as part of these conversations, I want people to really feel like I’m a resource in a particular kind of way. Like I said, I have a different understanding than I had when I wrote that story, a different language than I had when I wrote that story. That didn't stop right there. It wasn’t like, "I got mine, okay. I got to get away." I felt like it was about keeping it moving, keeping it going. And helping other people figure out what their own “keep it going” is.

Part 2

Nia:  You said you did a show with Big Freedia 10 years ago in New Orleans?

Juba: Yeah. At Louis Armstrong Park. Deep Dickollective opened the show at the park. It was probably 150 degrees outside. Our records were warping on the turntable.

Nia: (laughs)

Juba: We're trying to stay under this tree and I had never seen or heard Big Freedia before that. She came on the stage with what looked like fifty-eleven dancers, and doing “Gin in My System.” I was like, damn. I hadn't seen bounce music or anything at that time. And I was like, "Wow! What is this?"

As the homo-hop scene started to get more attention, the people who started to get booking opportunities and club days and get play and get mainstream press attention were mostly genderqueer kids, trans guys, and trans women performers. Not because of some spectacle, but because they were doing fun dance-able club music. Most which was intensely political but was dismissed as such because it was club party dance music.

And then there was this really, at first soft-pedal, but then in some places, really ignorant and obnoxious and transphobic, genderqueer-phobic response from cis men in the homohop community who were resentful of this idea that this is who was getting the attention once it had relative mainstream surge, so to speak. Because they were “real hip hop”, because they were cis males and masculine.

Freedia, of course, has been around forever. And artists like Freedia have been around forever. But most of that community that I was part of was fiercely invested in actively ignoring Freedia and people like Freedia. For no more than just bare-bones bald-faced transphobia, "You're fucking it up for the rest of us." The rest of us being be-penised male folk. Or cis women who were part of their own acceptable sort of hip hop.

Deep Dickollective started as kind of a joke. But if we had been named “The Black Men” or something like that, no one would've paid attention to us, no matter what we did.

Nia: That's true.

Juba: But it's like, now, even after we're not performing anymore, people are still name-dropping us everywhere. That's just not going to stop. Where the name Deep Dickollective came from was about all of us dealing with our various frustrations about the scene. Tim’m West had been having some success when he moved here to the Bay for graduate school, but then when it got out that he was gay all of the shows dried up. So out of frustration, I said "We can be Deep Dickollective!" It was designed to have people doing their own thing, but it was also about playing with these conversations about phallo-centrism, deep diction and thinking, and also about queer collectivism, and that kind of thing.

I remember when Marcus joined the group, that all of a sudden, I started having these gay cis guys saying, "I hear there's a trans man in D/DC... What's that about?" The fuck do you mean what is that about? He's queer, he's Black, and he's a man. What is the extent of the conversation? What is the investment in transphobia… which in that particular period was from people who really weren't interested in us in the first place. But we were their “freak flag,” in this cheap kind of way, that it was easy for them to attach to. And also because we were post-grad academics. People wanted to read about where we came from, but wouldn't actually read anything that we wrote or weren't actually paying close attention to anything that we were saying.

Nia: They just wanted the cultural capital.

Juba: Yeah. Exactly. Cultural capital. I think that was it at the end. There's a way that Big Freedia resonates because Big Freedia is not trying to -

Nia: Be Eminem?

Juba: - not trying to be Eminem. Not trying to assimilate in a particular way. Or someone like FoxxJazell. Because they “passed well enough” but still talk about themselves as trans women. And vociferously so. But then again, going back to what we were talking about safety. Big Freedia is safe just because you saw Freedia on TV or because Freedia got a documentary going? Big Freedia or Freedias, the multiplicity of Freedias, are in danger? Of course, yes, you get to do shows, you get to travel, that is a privilege, there's privilege attached to that. But that doesn't mean -

Nia: It doesn't protect you.

Juba: It doesn't protect you, at all. I was in Berlin three years ago, and my partner was just absolutely terrified. A lot of people didn't know that I was legally married. That we're legally married. Part of the reason that we're legally married, and that was a difficult decision for us to make politically and personally, but doing it because that was the easiest and the best way that we had in the moment. I didn't want something to happen to me outside of the United States - best case scenario: hurt, worst case scenario: deceased - and to have my partner not be able to take care of herself and everything that would be needed. I didn't want to have someone straighten me out, so to speak, after death. And make it a really political decision to have to do that. And also to recognize that I'm a very masculine cis guy. But that's something at the end of the day I don't worry about. I'm still from the West Side of Chicago. So I don't pretend like I can't get got. (laughs)

Someone asked a friend of mine, "What’s Juba's deal?" Basically trying to figure out if I was... They were being purity mythological-

Nia: Right, so like, “Is he secretly straight or is he secretly gay?”

Juba: Right. So my fried said, "Juba's Juba." I was really like, "Wow." Because whatever I am, if we ain’t getting down like that it don't matter, you know? No one's ever asked me that, regardless of gender, “in the throes,” so to speak. (laughs)

Nia: (laughs)

Juba: No one cares! Doesn't matter what I call myself. All that matters is that I was getting it done the way it needed to get done. Don't nobody ask that. You ever know anybody that asks that? No one asks that question -

Nia: In bed? (laughs)

Juba: In bed. But really, like, be honest about it. Like why do you care? What is that about? You know, that's not really about me. That's about you. What's your investment in that? It always comes back to, like I'm always talking about, purity myths.

You can go buy the right shoes, then once you got the right shoes, next thing you know your shirt's not gonna be right. Then it's gonna be your pants... You ain't never gonna be right. You ain't never gonna be okay. Because it's always about selling you something. They gonna figure out something to sell you to tell you that you're not, because that's all it's about. And that's why it keeps going the way that it does. If people could grab that, I think, they'd generally be happier, but a lot of things would be different.

Nia: You said that you don't curate anymore, but you still run a label, correct?

Juba: Yeah.

Nia: So are you just producing your own music?

Juba: I'm just producing my own music. Last year, I released an album that I'd been trying to produce for a long time. A Deep Dickollective greatest hits album.

Also, talking to different people about things they'd been trying to release for years, but there’s only certain people I deal with. I try to be really clear. The only other record other than Deep Dickollective and myself that I released was Katastrophe’s first album. He had actually approached me and I was very clear about the details, about what I was able to do, what I was interested in doing… and they should really understand if there was a better or more viable opportunity, then please go and do that, because I did not want record business bullshit to pollute my relationship with him. I went to great pains to make clear that I “project-coordinated” the record. He got the cover art, I did some of the graphic design on it and got the barcode. I project-coordinated it, but it was a complete project that was done before I had anything to do with it.

Nia: So you didn't mix it and master it?

Juba: He did all of that himself. People were actually hyper-invested in trying to make that something that I did. That was a problem for the moment. That was a serious problem.

Nia: That people were trying to give you too much credit?

Juba: They were trying to give me too much credit. And I took great pains to be like, whenever I was promoting it or talking with people about it, I'd be like, "This is what I did."

Nia: You worked mostly on distribution?

Juba: Yeah, I was mostly on helping distribute it. But really, what's interesting about how that worked was the political part of it came in. That was a way that people relate to him, he had relative success at that particular moment. Because they had this picture of him as this well-adjusted white trans dude who had it together.

What was even more problematized was, when people were attacking him and pissed off at him about this whole “cultural appropriation” conversation about hip hop, was that all these people that were talking about racism and cultural appropriation, all these white people talking about racism and cultural appropriation and attacking him… not one of them actually came to me: the Black man who put his record out. No one ever said anything to me. I saw all this shit going on, but no one came to me and asked me anything about it. Because apparently I was just this stupid n***** who -

Nia: I think probably because they were afraid of you. (laughs)

Juba: Well, exactly! It's like, what is that about? Why are you afraid? If you're afraid, why are you afraid? If I'm just some ignorant pygmy waif, that’s been taken advantage of by the diabolical white rapper.

Nia: (laughs)

Juba: I mean, really. What is that about?

Nia: I would guess that they don't want to try and... 'Cause they realize they have no argument. If you're a white person trying to argue with a Black person about cultural appropriation, you can't win that argument.

Juba: You can't win that argument, and you're scared of n*****s!

Nia: Also true. (laughs)

Juba: That's what it is. So you indicting him for something you did, that you've actively committed, that you're actively engaged in.

Nia: Yeah.

Juba: And that's not foreclosing notes kind of conversation, that's not what I'm saying at all. But it was just such bullshit about how people act. That's another part of it. The rampant dishonesty around that, and self-seriousness, and really, the standard-grade racism attempted by white people. Really, it’s like "I'm white" already "and I'm queer, so I'm whiter. And n*****, I know what’s better for you than you know for yourself." That was just tiresome. And it still goes on in its own kind of way. But it's even the way I'm having this conversation now. I agree with you that there have certainly been people who have been afraid to talk to me. Who have read something that I've said in print. But actually, I was much more polished and nicer just now than I was years ago. But now I'm trying to be mellow. Part of it's being older and understanding more. But part of it's just less patience with the same -

Nia: Bullshit.

Juba: - the same sort of bullshit. It's like, really?

Nia: Last question, is there anything you want to plug before we wrap? Performances coming up or records coming out?

Juba: I got a record coming out next year that's tentatively titled "Jig School Confidential".

Nia: Okay.

Juba: It's coming out. I'm working on a couple different projects with a couple different people that I'm excited about. Not sure what kind of shape they're going to take. Probably doing more stuff with Mangos with Chili.

Nia: Cool.

Juba: I love performing with them.