Michael Callen: Father of Safe Sex
Day 15 of the Pride 30 Project for Pride Month, 2018.
If you were born after 1981, HIV and AIDS have always been a part of your world. That year, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) identified the first cases of what would come to be known as AIDS, or, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Gay men were diagnosed with conditions such as Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi Sarcoma (KS) — a rare form of skin cancer typically affecting persons of Mediterranean descent — that typically affected those with suppressed immune function. Due to these early cases, the CDC initially referred to the perplexing new illness as Gay Related Immune Deficiency, or, GRID. After the CDC realized other populations, such as injecting-drug users and Haitians, were also impacted, the AIDS acronym was adopted in 1982. Today we know HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, originated in West African Chimpanzees and was transmitted to humans via infected blood in so-called “bush meat” — meat that comes from animals not specifically raised for human consumption.
Once HIV was identified in 1983, scientists understood the virus was not transmitted by casual contact, but through exchange of bodily fluids such as blood, semen, vaginal and anal fluids, and breast milk. HIV disproportionately affected gay men due to what historians describe as a “perfect storm” of conditions, namely the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s coupled with the rise of urban gay male culture, in part, due to the emergent Gay Liberation Movement. Within gay male subcultures, the rise of sex practices such as anal sex, oral-anal sex (rimming), “fisting,” and the use of “poppers” (nitrite inhalants which relax smooth involuntary muscle) contributed to the spread of the virus. Growing awareness of gay rights coupled with capitalism led to the expansion of gay bars, sex clubs, and porno theaters — all places that provided opportunities for HIV to proliferate.
During the 1970s and early 1980s there existed no widespread concept of safe sex. Gay men, therefore, could not have protected themselves against what they did not know was risky or “unsafe.” Some epidemiologists also speculated that frequent contraction of treatable sexually transmitted infections among gay men led to suppressed immune function that created prime conditions for the HIV virus to take hold. Thus, an epidemic was born. A patient of Dr. Marshall Forstein, a psychiatrist who worked with AIDS patients, described the world before AIDS like this:
“It was as if we had all found a beautiful field where we could go and play, celebrating our bodies, having sex, and our affection for each other. A cloud appeared from nowhere, and as the thunder roared the lightning struck without warning, and around me lay friends dying and dead, while I stood unscathed.”
Michael Callen knew that world well. Born in 1955 in Rising Sun, Indiana, and raised in Hamilton, Ohio, Callen attended Boston University, earning a degree in music in 1977. After graduation, he moved to New York City to pursue a career as a vocalist. Though Callen realized he was gay as a teenager, he did not fully explore his sexuality until his years in Boston and New York; and when he did, he did so with gusto. Influenced by sex-positive feminist writing of the second wave Women’s Movement, he was a self-described and unapologetic “slut.”
Initially diagnosed with GRID in 1982, Callen became an early AIDS activist and threw himself into understanding the disease. His overarching focus was one of survival, believing hope was a crucial factor in living with AIDS. Callen worked closely with his physician, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, a virologist from South Africa, who posited a multifactorial model of AIDS. AIDS, thought Sonnabend, developed not from a singular cause, but was the result of multiple factors including an individual’s sexual history and lifestyle. Put simply, Sonnabend believed AIDS could be the result of a repeated assault on the immune system by common sexually-transmitted infections.
Though the HIV virus was identified by French and American researchers as the cause of AIDS in 1983, Sonnabend was not entirely incorrect. A person’s sexual history certainly impacted their susceptibility to the virus. Callen, influenced by Sonnabend’s ideas, continued to believe throughout his life AIDS was the culmination of multiple factors. He was one of the few people during the early years of the epidemic to argue against a diagnosis of AIDS as an automatic death sentence. In his 1988 article, “Not Everyone Dies of AIDS,” published in the Village Voice, Callen wrote:
“Believing that I could survive was probably the precondition necessary for my actual survival. Unlike many other people with AIDS who considered themselves, in playwright Larry Kramer’s phrase, merely ‘ticking time bombs,’ my AIDS world view admitted from the first at least the possibility of recovery… Having hope won’t guarantee that you’ll survive AIDS, but not having hope seems to guarantee that you’ll succumb quickly.”
Emboldened with knowledge from Sonnabend, Callen and his friend Richard Berkowitz, a former sex worker, authored a controversial piece for the New York Native, a biweekly gay newspaper that ran from 1980 to 1997, entitled “We Know Who We Are: Two Gay Men Declare War on Promiscuity,” published in November of 1982. As the title implies, Callen and Berkowitz cited urban gay men’s promiscuity as the leading cause of AIDS, though they did not wholly discount the possibility of a new virus. “We believe that [AIDS] is the accumulation of risk through leading a promiscuous gay urban lifestyle which has led to the breakdown of immune responses that we are seeing now,” they said.
Though Callen and Berkowitz did not call for a complete end to promiscuous behavior, and recognized the political implications of doing so, they believed the gay community should be informed of the potential consequences of engaging in risky sex practices. “This isn’t a game. People are dying — very real, horrible, and unnecessary deaths,” they wrote. “Sure, the baths are fun; but the risks have simply become too great. A year ago, new cases of AIDS were being reported at a rate of one a day; today, the rate is three times that.” Sonnabend, Callen, and Berkowitz also published a piece sharing treatment advice, entitled “A Warning to Gay Men With AIDS,” as a paid advertisement after the Native deemed it too controversial to run as a regular column. San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter and Health & Pleasure Times, deeming their ideas significant, reprinted the article for free.
Callen and Berkowitz, under the scientific supervision of Sonnabend, expanded upon their ideas in How to Have Sex In an Epidemic: One Approach, a forty-page, self-published pamphlet, published in May of 1983, in which the pair layed out the philosophy and practice of what would come to be know as “safe sex” — or, safe(r) sex, at least. Recognizing the physical, psychological, and political harm of arguing for gay me to cease all sexual activity, Callen and Berkowitz took a moderate approach: gay men could have sex, but in ways that mediated risk. Gay people were becoming more widely accepted and attaching shame and negativity to sex — what some referred to as an “anti-sex” approach — could have damaging consequences. The political right would also have a field day if gay men themselves argued gay sex practices were the direct cause of AIDS.
The epidemic was also raging on the west coast in San Francisco. Bobbi Campbell, a nurse who was diagnosed with AIDS in September of 1981, was one of the first to publicly identify as a person with AIDS. He boldly hung posters of Polaroid photos of his Kaposi Sarcoma lesions accompanied by the heading “Gay Cancer” — an early name for AIDS — in the Castro district as a way to inform others about the epidemic. Campbell also wrote a column for the San Francisco Sentinel called “Gay Cancer Journal,” where he discussed his experiences and offered advice to others. Dr. Marcus Conant, a dermatologist who was treating Campbell’s KS, suggested he meet with Dan Turner, who was diagnosed in February of 1982. Together, Campbell and Turner founded People with AIDS San Francisco, the first organization of, by, and for people with AIDS and what was then referred to as AIDS Related Complex (ARC). Turner and Campbell, who was then calling himself the “AIDS Poster Boy,” took on increasingly public roles as faces of the epidemic. Their work formed the foundation of what became the People With AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement.
In June of 1983, Callen’s and Berkowitz’s paths crossed with Campbell and Turner at a national gay health conference held in Denver, Colorado. Gay men attending the conference formed the Advisory Committee of People With AIDS and, at Campbell’s urging, wrote a manifesto articulating both affirmative standards of care and the rights of people with AIDS, or, PWAs. They titled their manifesto “The Denver Principles.” Above all, the manifesto demanded that people with AIDS — not scientific or medical professionals — were the experts on their own condition and should be involved at every level of decision making regarding the epidemic. It was Callen who coined the term “people with AIDS” (PWAs) to replace the passive terms “patient” and “victim.” Feeling newly empowered, the committee stormed the closing session of the conference. In the democratic spirit of their work, they took turns reading the principles, while members of the committee from San Francisco unfurled a banner that proclaimed: “Fighting For Our Lives.” The People With AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement was born and spread into a national coalition of PWA organizations.
Callen’s activism overlapped with his work as a singer and composer. He performed his most popular song, “Love Don’t Need a Reason,” from his 1988 solo album Purple Heart, at gay pride celebrations and AIDS-related events across the country, including several showings of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation only eight months before his death.
Though Callen lived until 1993, he was not actively involved in ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a militant activist organization who used direct action tactics with the goal of ending the AIDS crisis. Between 1981, when the first cases appeared, and 1986, approximately 40 thousand people died from AIDS complications. On March 10th of 1987, the writer Larry Kramer, enraged by the lack of response to the epidemic, gave an impassioned speech at the New York Gay and Lesbian Center. “Most of you will be dead within 6 months,” he shouted to the crowd, “so what are you going to do about it?”
Twenty days after Kramer’s speech, ACT UP was founded, and the AIDS civil rights movement altered in tempo and tone. Operating under the mantra “Drugs Into Bodies,” ACT UP lobbied government institutions such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institute of Health (NIH) to accelerate the drug trial process to put potentially life-extending medications into PWAs’ hands. Callen, however, was suspicious of ACT UP’s “Drugs Into Bodies” approach, particularly the antiretroviral medication AZT. He believed treatment should be backed by sound scientific evidence and that he lived as long as he had because he had not partaken in experimental drug therapies.
Callen did not live to see the life-saving “cocktail” of antiretroviral drugs that appeared in the mid 1990s. “I’m convinced it’s as rational to have hope as it is to give up,” he wrote in “Not Everyone Dies of AIDS. “If 85% of people diagnosed with AIDS are dead after five years, then 15% are still alive. I intend to remain among that prophetic minority.” Though Callen died on December 27th of 1993, he survived many years beyond his diagnosis and longer than most.
If a survivor is someone adept at living through hardship, someone who remains when others have long since departed, then Callen did, in this way, survive AIDS. One of the rights of people with AIDS listed in “The Denver Principles” manifesto is: “To die — and to LIVE — in dignity.” And Michael Callen did.
