Voices and laughter filled FilmBar on Sept. 25 as people watched the movie “Burlesque” at the theater’s Big Gay Sing-A-Long.
The Big Gay Sing-A-Longs are movie viewing events where people can watch and sing along to popular movies and musicals like “The Sound of Music” or “Phantom of the Opera”.
At each event, organizers Kevin Bushaw and Christopher Tong feature a charity in the downtown area and organize a way for people to support that charity.
For the “Burlesque” Sing-A-Long, the charity of the night was HIV/AIDS awareness organization RipplePHX. Bushaw said he and Tong try to feature different charities for every event they host at FilmBar.
“Typically, we will do a charity one or two times or have a goal that we want to raise before we move on,” said Bushaw. “It just has to be something close to our hearts.”
In addition to HIV/AIDS awareness, RipplePHX focuses on education about and prevention of the disease. The organization’s co-founder Jason Jones said every month they split up different focuses for the community each week.
For the first week of the month, the charity focuses on the importance of using protection methods such as condoms, and then for the second week, it focuses on pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medication, a medication HIV-negative people can take to prevent getting the disease.
“A lot of the individuals we target in our community are great candidates for [PrEP], but some people may not know about it or people think it is super expensive,” Jones said. “There is still some stigma around it, but we talk to folks about it.”
The third week of the month focuses on U=U, or Undetectable equals Untransmittable.
According to the RipplePHX website, U=U is “a global consensus statement from hundreds of experts, research, HIV organizations, and the Centers for Disease Control stating that a person living with HIV who has a sustained, undetectable viral load is not able to transmit the virus to an HIV-negative partner. Period.”
For the last week of every month, RipplePHX offers free HIV testing. Before the showing of Burlesque, Bushaw and Tong raffled off prizes to raise money for the tests and support the charity.
“We have a captive audience for five or ten minutes, and sometimes that is really all it takes where we may get follow-up questions,” Jones said. “It’s because of the events that Kevin and Chris put on that allow us to be there, but it helps our mission.”
Abby Kimball, who attended the “Burlesque” showing last Wednesday, has attended multiple Big Gay Sing-A-Longs and enjoys participating in the raffle because “it is always a great cause.”
“It gives people an opportunity to give money and feel like they are doing something good for the community,” Kimball said.
Bushaw said that FilmBar’s variety, from classic horror films to “Bee Movie,” provides an irreverent yet fun experience for the audience. And with fun, residents can also learn more about their community’s charities while loudly singing or shouting obscenities at the screen.
“We want to bring more culture and fun to downtown Phoenix. FilmBar is a great center of culture,” Bushaw said. “It is one of the only few theaters that shows fun indie films—stuff that you would never see anywhere else.”
Contact the reporter at ldiethel@asu.edu.
Lisa Diethelm is the Politics editor for the Downtown Devil while she studies at The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in downtown Phoenix. She grew up in California and started her journalism career in high school.
