This same text will be posted on the "Rants And Missives" section of the Sugartruck Recordings website. It runs a little long here given the shape of the blog, so you may want to read it there.
http://www.sugartruckrecordings.com/id13.html
(Pictured: Yours truly and the fierce and legendary bi activist Loraine Hutchins,co author of "Bi Any Other Name", who addressed the conference and recieved a Creating Change Award right before me.)
---------------
fightingwords
By Juba Kalamka
Delivered at the Welcome Plenary session of
The National Gay Lesbian Task Force’s 18th Annual Creating Change Conference
November 10, 2005
Oakland Marriott Hotel, Oakland,California
About six years ago, I sat outside with my ex about 1000 feet from here. We had run out of money and gotten kicked out of the residential hotel where we were living. I remember sleeping with one eye open that February night and thinking to myself, “what in the fuck am I doing here?” Over the next year and a half, I lived in a Christian homeless shelter, couch surfed, lived in a San Francisco youth hostel, finally taking up residence in a storefront down the street from here.
Six years later, I’ve released five albums with Deep Dickollective and as a solo artist, curated an internationally known, Oakland-based LGBT hiphop festival five years running, seen that festival spawn sister events in New York, Atlanta, and London, England. I’ve written and illustrated articles for numerous sexuality and culture magazines. I’ve toured the United States twice with crazy punk dyke spoken word artists, appeared in three porno films you may or may not have seen J, curated or served as a panelist at a gaggle of workshops at numerous colleges and universities.
After having some gained some stability in my living situation and a few artistic accomplishments, I was still unsure of exactly where what I was doing would be going. That isn’t to say that I always know now. The difference, I think, is that I don’t have to know what’s happening, exactly. It’s enough to know that I must go where I am led by what feels good and right even when what feels good and right also feels scary as hell.
Back aways on the road when I was 19 years old, I had the good fortune of catching the late black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs' film “Tongues Untied” on public television. Shortly after moving to the Bay Area ten years later, I found myself on a street in San Francisco acting the total fanboy while speaking to one of the cast members who was in the middle of a safer sex outreach project. Not a week later, I visited the Castro for the first time and found myself outside near the Castro Theater where Riggs walks in several scenes. In that moment, I thought, “This is why I am here - I am home.” In the next year, I continued to have opportunities to meet a number of people that would collaborate and incubate the numerous arts and activism projects I'm involved in today.
I traveled to that moment outside on Castro street, when preparing for this day’s speaking to you. I realized that if I am to continue in this direction, moving toward change, then I must continue to visit that moment because they are a part of this road - good and right and scary as hell. I was finding this new “home”, yes, but I was, like many transplants to the fabled queer mecca, taken aback by the nature of the intracommunal conflicts - the overt misogyny, the transphobia, the infighting, backbiting,
and general haterism that existed here.
My idyllic notions of a queer community that was progressive around race had been shattered years before by Riggs’ film, by the way he described his experience of the pervasive racism of the Castro and the Bay Area’s extended gay community. Nevertheless, the infighting that existed among queer factions and how it began to overlap my presexisting issues made for some challenges around creating community out of these communities.
As part of those challenges, I learned that I and my fellow bisexuals weren’t gay enough for a biphobic gayristocracy; that I dated too many women and too many white men for a Black gay community; that I was too nigga, too hiphop, and too feminist for a white gay male community comfortable in its overt and implicit misogyny and racism; too black and too funky and too black sissy for parts of my bisexual community too steeped in oblivious privilege and heteronormative pretense to recognize the overlaps of its classism, sexism, racism and transphobia. As a black bisexual man, I have been at once frustrated and exhilarated standing at the intersection of communities and {seeming} conflicts of identity. The experience presents an opportunity to engage multiple conversations around coming to and continuing the activism carried forward by the likes of yourselves and begun by those who have come before you.
See me engaging: I am an emcee, a poet, a father, a slut, a faggot-ass faggot cocksucker, a freestyler, a knucklehead, a smartass, a slow talker, and a faster learner who is unapologetically black and queer all at the same time. Fifteen minutes is an eternity in the performance world but an instant on a stage such as this one. I could take the cheap, chickenshit route that I've watched black people take in contexts like this on many occasions.
To a certain extent, it would be completely valid to stand here and play off the guilt and hit white people upside the head with similies and metaphors on racism in queer activist communities and how much it pisses me off. I mean, I am really, really, really angry, and I could get some points with the people of color and be done with it.
But, I’m not gonna go that route. There's so much work to do . . . all of which will not get done here, but some of which can start here, now.
So, I got ta use this time well . . . and that includes owning my privilege, owning my shit . . . I have the privilege of a post-grad education, of a middle class upbringing, of being a man in patriarchy, of having a family of activists who are supporting me being here, of access to technology and culture recognized as such, of my good health, of my unincarcerated state, of my much appreciated indoor toilet. I own my responsibility to be honest with and about myself, so, I can be honest with you.
Ready? Here goes.
To the white folks - I ain't interested in parceling ya'll into neat lil' good whitefolk/ bad whitefolk packets. That's an old, tired game and a waste of everyone’s time, energy, talent, and resources. What I'd like to do is encourage you, implore you to ask those hard, uncomfortable questions - in the parking lot, in the bathroom, on the elevator, when you're ordering lunch, or by remembering to tip the housekeeping folk - pull your brothers’ and sisters’ coats – stop and say something when you get that twist in your gut that makes you question when you see wrong (because that's what got you here today); say something even though you know white folks won't let you in the club no more, and because it means that you might love yourself and this work and the rest of us more than all of those privileges.
To my gay brothers and lesbian sisters - my brothers especially because the policy decisions of gay-identified men have controlled the timbre of much of the conversation within queer institutions. When they come - and you know who I mean by they - they will come for all of us, like they always have . . . because all of us sit here tonight, at these tables and in organizations and at homes and in streets across the world being who we are, and that is enough; that is all it takes. We cannot warn or protect each other if we are too busy thinking that making ourselves acceptable and normal to straight people will make us safe. We cannot take care of each other if we are politicking for space at tables that will not accept us as we are . . . in khakis, in leather, in kente cloth, in Abercrombie, in Birkenstocks, in doo rags, in drag. When they come, they will not ask if you are queer in a same or different sex relationship, if you are monogamous or not, or how long you've been with a current partner. They will not care if you’ve sucked 2 dicks or 2,247 clits, if it was an hour ago or at Creating Change ’98. They will not care if you are top, bottom, or switch, or how long you've been clean. They will not care if you’re a Kinsey 6 and it was just that once that you snuck and had sex with a girl or a boy. What will matter is that they know - because you were here, today - that you are not one of them, and that is all that matters.
To my sister folk - and I mean all my sister folk, the ones who can’t get into Michigan, too - I would like to address and thank you specifically for the template you’ve provided me, the path laid out that has allowed me the opportunities to communicate as an artist-activist. The message and reminder that although all men are sexist, many of my brothers - the ones who aren’t too lazy to do the work - are sexists in recovery. Just so, the white men who are doing the work are racists in recovery. Recovery is a moment by moment task, and those of us in it have a responsibility to remind each other of it. We also must make those who have refused to do this work accountable. We should pull each others coats when necessary. We must be unafraid to question the self because it opens a space to challenge the thoughts notions and motivations of the collective.
To my queer people of color, I implore you even more to interrogate these same myths of purity, this fake ass construction of race that we cling to, refusing to break it down and understand. We fight a very real system of global white supremacy, yes, and in that fight, we have too long used too many of the master’s tools - the one drop, the blood quantum, the rabbit proof fences, marginalization and erasure of mixed race folks, the lack of recognition that even though the racist science of race says Arabs and Jews are white, the lived realities of Arabs and Jews says otherwise. These sign posts and barometers that we allow to verify our existence in the name of making community have been used in much the same way to keep us separated from each other because we don’t know who we are unless white folks tell us. We will never know until we face that truth.
With all that said, you may be asking, where am I suggesting that we as individuals and a community of activists go in these few days? It would probably be more accurate to say that I am asking what will we, what can we begin during this conference - as that is the opportunity that lies before us.
The easy thing to do would be to stick with the welcome, the plenary, the luncheon, the panels that fit the specific interests and leanings we came here with.
The more difficult, and ultimately, more productive approach is to go toward what frightens us. Though we are here from a variety of different spaces and places, we are again here, with each other, and I believe we are called to this space in the name of a common good.
James Baldwin said in 1963 that “to be a black person of any state of consciousness is to be in rage most of the time.” I would have to amend that for myself and say that being an out bisexual black man, I am in a constant state of immolation.
I stand here on fire. I am enraged. I am perched on the thin line between that rage and fear. It is sexual. It is urgent, and it is frightening. I have been afraid to be angry because I didn’t want to deal with what that big plume of fear would make me say to you . . . And as scared as it makes me in some moments {like now}, I will run toward that flame, that fire. I will smoke a cigarette in this darkroom of volatile photographic chemicals. I will run into this hell wearing my best gasoline drawers because I have to if I am serious about doing what I can to make justice happen. I am scared as hell of how angry I am, and I’m going to shout, to scream to you through it because I gotta make you hear me.
So, listen, please, even if you have to strain to hear me:
Gay boys!!!!
Go grab that program book and pick a panel to attend where you can listen to those scary, angry lesbians . . . they have brothers and need and want them in this work in the same way you need sisters.
White folks!!!!!
Do the same thing - attend people of color panels and listen to what they have to say. Just as the men will, you’ll hear a lot of shit you might not want to about yourselves. You are here, and you have come again because you are best equipped and are needed to take that message back to your organization, your dinner club, your racist lovers and friends, your bar, your school, your bathhouse, your clinic, your hometown, your world.
I challenge you, my bisexual folks, to raise up again right now, this minute – the sometime-though-nobody-knows-I-have-sex-with-a-guy-slash-girl, the normal
kinda regular ones, the dj, the b-boy and b-girl, the vanilla fifteen-year monogamous relationship ones, the sexworkers, the curious and questioning ones, the mission hipsters, the bi trannies, the wicca priestesses, the agnostics, the atheists, the born-again Christians, the new age crystal wearin’ dudes, the yerba mate drinkin’ sistas,the leather bdsm switch freak flag flying ones, the fats, the femmes and their fellow genderqueers, the bi bears, the negatives and positives, the softball dykes, the wheelchair basketballers, the marrieds, the d&d geeks, the trekkies, the Goths, the furries, the IT guys, the bi soccer moms in suburbia, the middle management weekend dads, the PFLAG-ers and family members – all of us - to stand up and be visible now and in moments and years to come because it is important for queers as well as straight people to know that we are standing next to them and expecting to have the value of that space recognized and honored because we have to if we’re going to be truly effective. We need people to see us in our kazillions of ways of being bi and have them understand the ramifications of that for all of the communities we traverse.
I challenge each of us, the ones who could afford to be here this weekend, to stand in more than token support for the marginalized within our marginalization - the transpeople, the intersex, the disabled, the po’ folks - the ones who very literally could not afford to be here - my ex, the bi video artist who has been out of work for a year, my transman homeboy just back from visiting his folks in New Orleans and going through bankruptcy and a nasty custody fight, young folks and old folks, the Ibrahim Farajajes and the Lani Ka’ahumanus and the Venetia Porters,The Bill Beasleys, the Victor Lewises, the Alan Taziri’s, the Loudas Perez’s and the Ciana Stewarts, and the Angel Fabee-ahns and the Kuwaza Imaras’ and the Penelope Williamses and the who’ve been a part of Creating Changes past and those whose names you might not recognize, the bold fierce angry bi colored folk shoulders I stand on - and to remember, in those spaces that you can……because some of ya’ll are old enough...
. . . the days and the spaces before we even had a storefront with folding chairs and punch and cookies and parades in every city and bars in which we would not be arrested or asked for three pieces of ID by gay boys who forgot and clinics with free rapid HIV tests and lavender senior organizations and websites and listservs and high school gay straight alliances . . .….those who remember phone trees and mimeographs and rub-on letters, pasting up magazines, who remember the days when they could not imagine that a black queer hip hop artist would ever and could ever be standing here, in the midst of all thesepossibilities and imperfections and work that needs to be done within this organization and without . . . standing here suggesting what you MIGHT be able to do because I can’t believe that a kid from the west side of Chicago is getting a chance to say this to you.
I say this because even when I think about how far I have come, I know there are those who have come through more and from farther than me to be here, and still more who made a way for me to be here whose stories we may never know in specific that are just as relevant to the creating of change - bi men with AIDS in Veterans Administration hospitals and sleeping outside on Telegraph Avenue right now . . . bi women staying in the shitty marriage for them babies that they have no other way to provide for . . . for the church sissies and choir directors that confide in our ministry folk, for the students who emailed me from Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan to say thank you for being Pointfivefag . . . for all of those making a way and making a way and making a way . . . for the making of a million ways because if for just a few moments and oft times for longer, somebody reached up out over and through that fear - that fear of being wrong, fear of not being the king of the hill, fear of not getting that grant because they talked too much shit about a racist development director or a sexist asshole of a foundation head or board members who are made nervous by loud angry homeless transwomen or those that continue to bow and scrape to keep their jobs because they got theirs and they fear of missing that extra lil’ scrap of chicken and mouthful of biscuit and pat on the head from the status quo because they are afraid that men or white folks or rich folks straight folks won’t let them move in if they don’t.
We stand on the shoulders of those writing and working dancing pushing screaming fighting rhyming and stealing away and fucking and fucking and fucking and flying though that fear.
-to Audre Lorde journaling through radiation and cold and puke and pain
-to Essex Hemphill shaking but standing strong at Black Nations/Queer Nations on three T cells
-to Marlon Riggs dancing in bed with an IV and making notes back in 1994, so his assistants can finish his last movie because he knows he don’t have much longer and has to make sure it gets finished
-to them young boys who sucked cock for coin and for love in the corner of a bar on Polk or in Folsom Gulch, on Christopher Street, in Oklahoma City and on Halsted in Chicago when you could still be arrested on sight for just looking like a faggot
to Gwen Araujo, to Rashawn Brazell, to J.P. Warren, to Emmet Till, to Simon Nkoli, to Ruwa Chire,
to Barry Winchell, to Matt and Brandon and Sakia
to the butches and bulldaggers in pants, tie, and pocket chain back in the day when that meant the lockup, a beatdown, or worse
to cornfed country boys, to babydykes in North Cacakalack and Johannesburg
to them girls strolling for coin right now around the corner
on 20th and San Pablo, scared as hell but holding tight to the hammers in their purses
and to them black babies – the children out across from here RIGHT NOW on 14th and Broadway twisting and voguing and partying and holding each other and daring you to say something to them because they daddy already put them out and they don’t have nothing else but each other
to the ones with a momma that wasn’t afraid to love them in Jesus name when the church folk told them not to
All of these small victories lead us to and prepare us for big ones And bigger ones
And ones that seem tiny that we cannot take for granted
All of them the millions upon millions upon millions
They have told me/ their bodies are calling me
They are the reasons why I keep going
Because I am mad as hell and in love with you and them and we
I will open my arms, run headlong into these flames
I will own this heat in my chest
I’m on fire and for you and you and you and
you and you and you
I am ready to fucking fight
