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AIDS Walk Arizona
AIDS Walk Arizona 2022 raised more than $230,000, surpassing the event’s fund-raising goal, as nearly 2,000 people spent a beautiful Saturday afternoon participating at Tempe Beach Park.
“Forty years after first discovering the virus, the battle against HIV/AIDS is not over,” said Aunt Rita’s Foundation Executive Director Jimmy Thomason. “We’ve made tremendous progress but our commitment to ensuring ongoing awareness, education, prevention and resources is as strong as ever. The money raised at AIDS Walk, and the incredible support we experienced, will go a long way in continuing our mission and bringing our vision to light.”
AIDS Walk Arizona
AIDS Walk Arizona 2022 was presented by CAN Community Health, a national organization dedicated to improving lives in the community and expanding the availability and accessibility of PrEP, a one-pill-a-day medication that reduces the risk of getting HIV by more than 99% when taken as prescribed.
Additional sponsors included Walgreens, which raised $27,000 through the annual wristband campaign; Gilead, featuring its product Bitkarvy; Sonora Quest Laboratories, sponsors of Kids for the Cause; and Tito’s Handmade Vodka, the Vodka for Dog People, sponsor of Paws for the Cause.
Elijah Palles and Regina Wells were AIDS Walk Arizona 2022 co-chairs.
With roots in Phoenix since 1988, Aunt Rita’s Foundation is dedicated to the elimination of, and suffering from, HIV and AIDS through collaborations with Arizona HIV service organizations and local and statewide government agencies.
About Aunt Rita’s Foundation
In our mission to end HIV in Arizona, Aunt Rita’s quietly began in 1988 with our first fundraising bake sale. Since then, Aunt Rita’s Foundation has provided millions of dollars to HIV programs and prides itself as the “Connector of the HIV Community” with gap-filling programs that include testing and collaborative initiatives. Partner agencies include Ebony House, The Bill Holt Clinic at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, CAN Community Health, Chicanos Por La Causa LUCES Program, HEAL International, HIV Care Directions, Valleywise Health, one n ten, Southwest Behavioral Health Services, Southwest Center, Shot in the Dark, Southwest Recovery Alliance and Terros Health. Aunt Rita’s distributes free Home HIV oral swap test kits through GetTestedAz.org and provides vouchers for confidential clinical testings at 100 Safeway stores and Sonora Quest locations statewide. Aunt Rita’s signature fund-raising events areAIDS Walk Arizona and RED is the Night and will commemorate World AIDS Day with a community-oriented Picnic in the Park. Aunt Rita’s Foundation also works with the Arizona Department of Health Services to increase awareness and education about HIV/AIDS statewide through HIVAZ.ORG. For more information, visit www.auntritas.org or call (602) 882-8675.
Arizona Musicfest is almost here and as the non-profit concert presenter gears up for its 31st year, we were delighted to catch up with one of the star attractions of the season: Ann Hampton Callaway.
An Arizonan transplant, Ann will be joining her sister Liz Callaway and presenting their 1995 cult-classic hit, Sibling Revelry on March 7 in Scottsdale. Those in the showbiz 'know' have for some time appreciated the harmonic wonders of The Callaway Sisters — but if you are new to the party, welcome. I caught up with Ann ahead of the show to find out how her fabulous musical career came to be, what she really thinks of sister Liz, how she's adjusting to life in Arizona, and what marriage has taught her.
AZMF 2021-22 Concert Season Preview youtu.be
Ann Hampton Callaway, I am such a huge fan of yours. You have the perfect career and dare I say, the perfect life, which includes a happy ending with a beautiful wife.
Ann: I remember when I finally was in love and it was actually mutual and it was all going to work out despite certain challenges, and I thought, Am I still going to write good songs? Am I allowed to be happy? Am I actually allowed to have this feeling?
I like to think as gay women, we get to graduate at some point. So let me go back to the beginning because my understanding is you grew up in the Midwest with talented parents, but I'm not sure they were on the showbiz map yet somehow you discovered you were musical. Tell me a little bit about that discovery and when it happened.
Ann: Well, you know, I sensed there was music deep into the DNA of at least my mother's side of the family. I think the way when in the olden days, in the 1800s, there were opera singers in Austria and my mom was a wonderful singer, pianist, and voice teacher, and she sang with the Chicago Symphony Chorus and was quite talented. But she had a challenging mother and parents who didn't really have any intention of her doing anything but getting married and teaching and having a family. And so there were moments in my life where I thought I was living my mother's unrealized dreams. I wanted my own dreams. My father was truly a brilliant journalist, but when the great Sammy Cahn heard him sing at a luncheon when he was introducing Sammy and he sang one of Sammy's hits, Sammy went up to him and said, 'You knocked it out of the park, John' and my dad said it was better than all his Emmy awards and Peabody Awards, having Sammy Cahn tell him that he sounded good as a singer. So my dad was a scat singer and he was a jazz fan, and I fell in love with jazz from my father. But my mom was more show tunes / classical music. And so my sister and I grew up in this very interesting family where there was just the right amount of neurosis, the right amount of difficulty, and the right amount of love.
Find Out Why Everyone Loves the Callaway Sisters' "Sibling Revelry" youtu.be
Let's talk a little bit about sisters. What is your relationship with Liz like?
Ann: We had a normal amount of rivalry and revelry. We had a normal amount of having fun and being kids. And then there was a while where I was like, Why are you my sister? We have nothing in common. But then when I went off to college and my parents had gotten divorced, we finally realized that we could be allies and she was starting to get into her own light and not in the shadow of her sister. In high school — we had a beautiful performing arts department — and she started to find her [musical] family. And that was the birth of Liz Callaway as a singer when she really found her people and got to star in some shows in high school. And then she went to college at University of Cincinnati for a quarter. And I like to say I served two years as an acting major at the University of Illinois because the people there had a very negative, hostile way of teaching. And that was not the kind of environment that I or most people thrive in. So we I decided to move to New York and Liz decided at the last minute to join me. Once we moved to New York we became allies in a big city where there were a lot of challenges. I got off the Amtrak train and they lost my reservation at the Martha Washington Hotel for Women where my sister and I were going to stay and I had no place to go and my little sister's coming, and so I'm crying on the corner and this guy says, 'Oh, go two blocks down and you can go to this hotel and they'll take care of you' — not knowing that that's where prostitutes and homeless people lived. And Liz got groped by the taxi driver on the way from the airport. So that was our welcome to New York! That kind of stuff makes you bond. I always say that she is the sunlit voice and I am the moonlit voice and together we make twilight.
And speaking of New York and how shitty New York City can be, what what made you move out to Arizona where you now live?
Ann: My wife, Kari, who is from Tucson, Arizona, was in deep need of returning to be with her mom and her family and her incredible friends. And I happened to be bewitched by the desert. I'm a person who thrives in New York and its excitement, and I love the glorious spiritual beauty of this part of the world. It's something indescribable, but when people come to our home, they just feel like, Oh wow, you get to live here and you get to experience this. And I tell people we moved to heaven and God is our neighbor. It's just spectacular, inspirational beauty with the skies and mountains and the stars and the sunsets and the beautiful birds. As a songwriter, and as a highly sensitive person, it's an environment to really replenish. It's a sanctuary, a place to to rebuild my energy. And it turned out to be a great place to spend the pandemic.
And many great performers pass through Tucson, Phoenix, and Scottsdale.
Ann: [Tucson] is actually a surprisingly vital and vibrant, funky artistic town. It's really a hip community. And the more time I spend here, the more talented people I meet, and I get to see our friends come through. And so it's a really lovely place to have the best of it all.
You work extensively in the genre of jazz and the American Songbook, what do you love about this genre?
Ann: I do feel very passionate about the genre because to me, it's just great artistry and it's great artistry that becomes more beautiful and more significant, with time, with challenges. There are very few love songs that can provide the level of depth and resonance to a human heart than the ones that were written during this golden age of theater and film writing. And so, yes, I feel very passionate about it, and most of the songs are songs from that era are timeless. And on the other hand, though, I listen to a lot of other music and I'm as seriously busy songwriter...
People may not know you wrote and sang the theme song to the TV sitcom The Nanny, and you wrote Barbra Streisand's wedding song. Tell me a little about your approach to songwriting.
Ann: I was born a songwriter. The way I think things and feel things. I like to distill the moment. When a phrase has a ring of truth it's like a gong that goes off in me and it wants to be realized. It asks me to to pursue it and follow through and make something of it. And so it's just a natural part of my creative life. Over the last two years, with the exception of this year, I wrote a poem every single day. It was an extremely creative exercise, and many of these poems turned into songs. And this year I want to take many more poems that are meant to be songs and actually spend the time to write them into songs. But I do have a very passionate way of looking at life, and as a person who primarily is a lover and cares about people and our world and being a conduit for loving change and compassionate exploration of new ways of living and experiencing life — being a songwriter is one of the most powerful ways to address many of the challenges that we see in front of us . And also to embrace the gorgeousness of life and to honor and celebrate it in the midst of extremely challenging times.
You know, when the pandemic came, I think we suddenly realized even more strongly how we don't know how long we have. And so I don't want to leave this Earth without giving a lot more from my heart as a songwriter. It's a beautiful way of trying to meet the creative power. And I'm very spiritual person, so when I say the creative power I mean I don't think that anybody writes a song alone, you can call it whatever you want to call it, but I feel that I have a bossy muse and she needs to be obeyed (laughs).
How do you know it's a love song when you write a love song?
Ann: I don't worry about what something is. I just try to tell the truth of something. And if it's written with love, it's a love song.... It may be me seeing the world having just kissed someone. There are so many different ways of experiencing love; seeing the world through loving eyes having found love; and learning more about love and getting to share it with someone significantly through the years is a profound gift. So every song is a love song if you are a loving human being.
A WEDDING CELEBRATION Ann Hampton Callaway & Kari Strand - Stephen Sorokoff youtu.be
You're in your seventh year of marriage? Has it transformed you?
Ann: We've been together for 15 years by the way. I proposed to Kari not much later, after meeting her — I just knew she was the one — and she said yes. So, the world's longest engagement, and we always said we didn't need a piece of paper. But then I started to realize that we were part of history, and there were a lot of people who fought to give us the right to marry. And we thought about the legal protections of marriage, and we also thought about it as an inspiration to up the ante of a true relationship. And so we wanted to celebrate our marriage. First, we got legally married at our house, on November 7th, seven years ago. And then we had a huge party at Birdland the following year in June on Pride Week with the greatest singers and pianists and musicians do two and a half hours of great love songs, and it was a love benediction and people all over the world came to celebrate our marriage and we had one of the greatest singers of our time officiate our wedding, Marilyn Maye. That kind of positive, loving energy blessed our relationship and made me feel like, I want to work even harder to be a better partner. This is so precious. I don't want anything to get in the way of us growing every day as a couple. So I think marriage helped me feel the higher stakes of thinking that this is like an art, and I want to get better at it.
Get tickets to The Callaway Sisters: Sibling Revelry here. Visit Ann's website here.
GOP bill would force teachers to out LGBTQ students to hostile parents
Arizona Republicans are backing a measure that would discipline teachers and open them up to lawsuits if they don’t tell parents everything a student tells them—including if the student confides that he or she is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.
According to the Arizona Mirror, the legislation, House Bill 2161, would make it illegal for a government employee to withhold information that is “relevant to the physical, emotional or mental health of the parent’s child,” and specifically prevents teachers from withholding information about a student’s “purported gender identity” or a request to transition to a gender other than the “student’s biological sex.”
The bill, which is sponsored by Rep. Steve Kaiser, R-Phoenix, would allow parents to sue school districts if teachers don’t comply. The bill also aims to allow parents additional access to certain medical records.
Kaiser argued in the House Education Committee on Jan. 25 that the aim of the legislation is to reign in surveys sent out by schools that have made headlines in a number of states and locally.
But out gay Rep. Daniel Hernandez, D-Tucson has pushed back against the bill.
Daniel Hernandez wants changes made to HB 2161
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“I still feel this bill is not ready for prime time,” Rep. Hernandez said, adding that he felt there was some merit to schools surveying students. “This bill could’ve been done without this inclusion or without the trivialization of transgender children.”
Kaiser initially said the bill was created via a “stakeholder group” and his “own inherent passion” for the issue. But when Hernandez pressed him on which stakeholders were involved in drafting the bill, Kaiser admitted he didn’t work with education groups or teachers, but with anti-LGBTQ advocacy groups—chief among them the Center for Arizona Policy, a conservative Christian lobbying organization that has pushed numerous controversial and bigoted bills since forming in 1995. CAP holds sway with most Republican lawmakers and Gov. Doug Ducey, and is widely considered one of the most powerful lobbying groups at the state Capitol.
“I’m not sure what education group I’d go to, because they’d be against this," Kaiser told Hernandez.
Kaiser also consulted Family Watch International, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group. That group is backing another piece of legislation that would ban books that have “sexually explicit” content and that critics say would effectively make it illegal to teach about homosexuality.
Punishing Teachers
Supporters of HB2161 said it was necessary to punish teachers in order to bring transparency to schools, who they said have been asking “inappropriate questions.” Some said the $500 fine for school districts in the bill’s language was not large enough — Rep. John Fillmore, R-Apache Junction said that was a “drop in the bucket” for a school district and asked Kaiser if he’d agree to increase the amount.
Jeanne Casteen, the executive director of the Arizona Secular Coalition and a former teacher, worried about how the reporting function of the bill would impact child abuse. Teachers are mandatory reporters, and Casteen said that every time she had to report child abuse, it was being inflicted by a parent. Under Kaiser’s bill, she said, a teacher would also have to notify the parents—the likely abusers—that the child informed them of the abuse.
“I keep hearing about parental rights, but what about the rights of these students?” Casteen said.
Although the bill cleared the committee with Republican support, Rep. Joel John, R-Arlington, acknowledged there may be situations where a student may be more comfortable confiding with their teacher than with a parent. He suggested that the changes to the bill will be in the area of outing students to people who are essentially hostile towards them.
On February 12, hundreds of people in Kansas City will brave the cold in just their undies during Cupid’s Undie Run, the nation’s largest pantless party and mileish run for charity.
The event raises awareness of neurofibromatosis (NF), a genetic disorder that causes tumors to grow on nerves throughout the body, and fundraises for NF research through the Children’s Tumor Foundation (CTF).
In addition to Kansas City, Cupid’s Undie Run will take place in 37 other cities across the United States including Chicago, Nashville, and Phoenix. More information regarding the event can be found here: https://my.cupids.org/cur/city/kansascity
Registration for the 2022 Cupid’s Undie Run is open! While there is still a lot of uncertainty about what the future holds, organizers remain optimistic that we will be able to party pantless in-person come in February. The focus remains on fundraising to find a cure for neurofibromatosis (NF). Organizers are continuing to monitor all national, state, and local public health guidelines in order to give you the Cupid’s event you know and love, while ensuring the safety of our runners, event directors, staff, and volunteers! If you have questions, please contact info@cupids.org.
2022 CITIES
Don’t see your city? Not to worry! This year, you can join from anywhere! Just select “Virtual Runner” when you’re registering.
ATLANTA, GA • 2/12/2022
AUSTIN, TX • 2/26/2022
BALTIMORE, MD • 2/12/2022
BOISE, ID • 2/12/2022
BOSTON, MA • 2/19/2022
BUFFALO, NY • 2/12/2022
CHARLESTON, SC • 2/19/2022
CHARLOTTE, NC • 2/12/2022
CHICAGO, IL • 2/19/2022
CINCINNATI, OH • 2/12/2022
CLEVELAND, OH • 2/12/2022
DALLAS, TX • 2/12/2022
DAYTON, OH • 2/19/2022
DENVER, CO • 2/12/2022
DETROIT, MI • 2/12/2022
JACKSONVILLE, FL • 2/12/2022
KANSAS CITY, MO • 2/12/2022
KNOXVILLE, TN • 2/12/2022
LOS ANGELES, CA • 2/19/2022
MADISON, WI • 2/19/2022
MINNEAPOLIS, MN • 2/12/2022
NASHVILLE, TN • 2/12/2022
NEW YORK, NY • 2/12/2022
ORLANDO, FL • 2/19/2022
PHILADELPHIA, PA • 2/19/2022
PHOENIX, AZ • 2/19/2022
PITTSBURGH, PA • 2/19/2022
PORTLAND, OR • 2/12/2022
RALEIGH – DURHAM, NC • 2/19/2022
RENO, NV • 2/12/2022
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA • 2/12/2022
SEATTLE, WA • 2/19/2022
ST. LOUIS, MO • 2/12/2022
ST. PETERSBURG, FL • 2/5/2022
VIRGINIA BEACH, VA • 2/12/2022
WASHINGTON, D.C. • 2/12/2022
WILMINGTON, DE • 2/26/2022