>From: rjwill6@snfc430.PacBell.COM (Roderic J. Williams) >Subject: Michael Callen's Obit. in NYTimes >Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1993 13:54:15 -0800 (PST) Here's Michael Callen's obituary in today's (12/29/93) New York Times, reproduced without permission... ------------------------------------------------ MICHAEL CALLEN, SINGER AND EXPERT ON COPING WITH AIDS, DIES AT 38 By David W. Dunlap Michael Callen, a writer and singer who embodied for a dozen years the possibility of long-term survival with AIDS, died of the disease Monday night at Midway Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 38 years old and lived in West Hollywood, Calif. Mr. Callen was the author of "Surviving AIDS" (HarperCollins, 1990), a founder of the People With AIDS Coalition and the Community Research Initiative in New York, and a member of the Flirtations, an a cappella group to which he contributed what the Los Angeles Times called "an upper register that Joan Sutherland would surely envy." After his AIDS was diagnosed in 1982, Mr. Callen devoted himself to spreading the message of survival through books, magazines, newspapers, films, concerts and television appearances. "If we could change our paradigm of AIDS," he said, "if there weren't that notion that it's all ultimately hopeless and pointless, it might actually increase survival rates." Mr. Callen was born in Rising Sun, Ind., and raised in Hamilton, Ohio. He graduated from Boston University, which he attended on a music scholarship, in 1977. After college, he moved to New York, where he sang in cabarets and with the New York City Gay Men's Chorus. He grew into political advocacy after contracting AIDS. An early proponent of what came to be called safe-sex practices, he wrote "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach," in 1983 with Richard Berkowitz, Dr. Joseph A. Sonnabend and Richard Dworkin. That year, he was also a plaintiff in the nation's first AIDS discrimination lawsuit, when Dr. Sonnabend, his physician, successfully fought eviction from a Greenwich Village co-op for treating people with AIDS. In 1985, Mr. Callen was one of the founders of the People With AIDS Coalition, based in Manhattan. Among other programs, the coalition maintains a toll-free phone line staffed entirely by people with AIDS, publishes the monthly "P.W.A. Coalition Newsline" and maintains what it describes as the largest AIDS treatment information library in the metropolitan area. Out of frustration with the slow pace of drug development, Mr. Callen and others then formed the Community Research Initiative, a group of AIDS patients and doctors who conducted their own drug trials, including the early use of aerosolized pentamidine to prevent pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. His 1990 book, "Surviving AIDS," told the story of 14 long-term survivors. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Dr. Jeffrey Laurence, an AIDS researcher, said Mr. Callen had managed to "capture the spirit and eccentricities of men and women who, shouldering an extraordinary burden, simply will not break." Even on the political front lines, Mr. Callen remained devoted to music. His solo album, "Purple Heart," was released in 1988. That year, the Flirtations were formed. The quintet has performed nationwide, recorded two albums ("The Flirtations" and "Out on the Road") and can be seen in Jonathan Demme's new movie, "Philadelphia." Mr. Callen is survived by his companion, Mr. Dworkin; his parents, Clifford and Barbara, of Hamilton, Ohio; a sister, Linda Stanger, of Hamilton and a brother, Barry, of Chicago.