16 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | PRIDE MONTH
Qsaltlake.com |
Utah Pride Center announces Awards Three members of Utah’s LGBTQ and ally community will receive awards at the annual Pride Spectacular, which will take place as a virtual experience on June 7, the day the Utah Pride Festival was scheduled to begin.
KRISTEN RIES COMMUNITY SVC AWARD
Karrie Galloway
Past Kristen Ries Community Service Award winners chose Karrie Galloway as this year’s recipient. Galloway is the CEO and president of Planned Parenthood of Utah, which provides over 32,000 STD tests and serves over 11,500 teens and families with medically accurate responsible sex education to ensure our community stays safe. “In 1981, I joined Planned Parenthood as a full-time staff member and never left,” Galloway said. “I worked first as a community educator and then as president and CEO — a role I have filled for more than 30 years. But even before I made Planned Parenthood my life’s work, I was a patient.” “That was in the 1970s, when I was a University of Wisconsin student. I received services thanks to a new federal program [Title X] created under the direction of President Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, that provided low-cost reproductive health care to people without insurance or who couldn’t otherwise afford health care services on their own,” Galloway continued. “It meant I could get the affordable birth control I needed so I could finish my education.” The basic preventive health-care services provided by Title X include wellness exams, life-saving cervical and breast cancer screenings, birth control, contraception education, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and HIV testing. PPAU was the sole grant recipient of Title X funds for 35 years before the Trump administration gutted the program and created a gag rule that prevents doctors receiving such funds from talking about abortion. PPAU also has a variety of educational programs including educator training called Safe at School, which last year trained over 1,100 current and future
educators about how to make classrooms safe for LGBTQ+ students. PPAU spends around double the amount of other Planned Parenthood affiliates on education since the state does not provide such services in the schools. Of the nearly 47,000 patients PPAU sees annually, 20 percent are males seeking services because of the lack of state-provided STD testing and treatment services and the lack of other safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community to receive care. “I am heartbroken that this administration is ruining the most successful public health program of the last century,” Galloway said. “In the meantime, Planned Parenthood will still be here. We will do all we can to keep providing affordable health care for the people who need us. We have saved our pennies from the many generous donors who have stepped up since Trump was elected — we will do all we can to not make patients suffer.”
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
John Bennett
John Bennett, who passed away in January of this year, held leadership roles in the ’80s and ’90s at the University of Utah Lesbian and Gay Student Union, AIDS Project Utah, Utah Pride Festival, and the Gay and Lesbian Community Council of Utah. He was an accomplished classical pianist and was accompanist at the Salt Lake Men’s Choir for three years and, in 1993, helped found the Lesbian and Gay Chorus of Salt Lake City. He was also former Sen. Bob Bennett’s nephew. Bennett served as executive director of the Utah Stonewall Center, now the Utah Pride Center, from 1994 to 1995. He was part of many other groups, including the Utah AIDS Memorial Quilt Project, and marched with the Utah contingent at the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987. Bennett managed a senior center of Salt Lake County Aging and Adult Services from 2004 to 2013 before taking on the full-time role of caregiver for his aging par-
ISSUE 312 | JUNE, 2020
ents until his mother’s death in 2018. He started Bennett’s Art Glass in 2015. The name paid homage to the Art Glass Department of a former family business, Bennett’s Paint and Glass. He did custom pieces for many homes and businesses. He became president of LifeRing Secular Recovery, a secular alternative to 12-Step recovery for drug and alcohol dependency, in 2017.
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Kim Pederson
Kim Pederson began her service to others joining the U.S. Army at the age of 18. She was jailed two years later for being a lesbian. After refusing to betray others by telling military police of other lesbians, she was tracked, harassed, put in solitary confinement on numerous occasions, and then discharged and declared an “Undesirable.” She went on to promote LGBTQ veterans’ rights. In college, she fought for the Equal Rights Amendment and against the Vietnam war. She also worked as an advocate for those on a limited income, battered women and children, and unemployed miners. Pederson was the first director of the Utah chapter of the National Alliance of Mental Illness. She also worked with the University of Utah Women’s Resource Center and the Battered Women’s Project at the Utah YWCA. She worked as a licensed social worker for four decades, focusing in part on alcoholism and addiction in the LGBT community. She is also personally celebrating 48 years of sobriety. As a longtime member of the LGBTQ Affirmative Psychotherapy Guild of Utah, she worked alongside others to address the treatment disparities based on racial and sexual biases. She also worked to ban reparative therapy in the state. She is currently a member of the Utah Pride Center’s Sage leadership team, where runs the Supper Club committee. She is also an active resident of the Friendship Manor, encouraging proper treatment of LGBTQ residents and helping management deal with residents in crisis. Q Awards will be presented at the Fifth Annual Pride Spectacular, June 5, from 5.30 to 7 p.m. More information at utahpridecenter.org
