Buzz Magazine
Jan./Feb. 1992.
The Heretic
In late 1981, New York musician Michael Callen was already suffering from the first stages of a disease that was being called Gay Related Immune Deficiency, the "gay plague." GRID was soon rechristened AIDS, and Callen's diagnosis was confirmed when he was hospitalized in June 1982 with cryptosporidiosis. It is a disease found in livestock, not humans -that is, until large numbers of gay men began to experience a terrifying collapse of their immune systems.
In the ten years since that first onset, Callen has endured five bouts of pneumonia, a series of relapses of Kaposi's sarcoma, and six hospitalizations. But he is still alive -
—making him one of the longest surviving AIDS patients on record.
In .a world that regards a positive HIV test as a mandatory death sentence, Callen often feels as if he is howling in the wind, trying to explain he is living with AIDS, not dying of it. ""The breathless notion that HIV is automatically, one hundred percent, inevitably fatal is a concept about which there's agreement from widely disparate groups with different agendas," says Callen. "I had to get off. I couldn't take it anymore."
But Callen is not simply a survivor. He is a thorn in the side of the AIDS establishment, a self-proclaimed "unrepentant HIV heretic," unconvinced by the medical community's fundamental doctrine that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS. "This is not merely a perverse academic debate," he says. "America's entire vaccine and treatment strategy is built upon the presumption that we know what causes AIDS. If I'm correct, and I'm certainly not alone—there is a small, persistent group of doubters—then the entire AIDS research bureaucracy is chasing down a blind alley."
Perhaps Callen's most controversial position, the one that has earned him the most enmity, is that AIDS is a multi-factorial disease; one that resulted from the extreme promiscuity that followed the gay sexual revolution of the 1970s. It is a conviction that led Callen early on to pioneer the concept of safe sex.
In the fall of 1983, Callen spent his federal income-tax refund on the printing of a booklet he co-authored with his doctor, Joseph Sonnabend, and fellow AIDS sufferer and writer Richard Berkowitz. Entitled How to Have Sex When in an Epidemic, the booklet characterized AIDS as the "direct result of the unprecedented promiscuous gay urban life-style"—and it helped spur what Callen now calls the second sexual revolution, the era of safe sex.
For these views, which he outlined in his 1990 book Surviving AIDS, Callen has been reviled by some of his brethren, who see him as a roadblock in their frustratingly uphill struggle to prod the government into providing funds for medical treatment and research. Some people pray that he would go away. Others wish he would just shut up. Many think the focus should be on finding cures, not causes.
"Once someone has the HIV virus, it's totally irrelevant how he got it," says Barry Krost, a prominent Hollywood personal manager and a noted AIDS activist. "And, of course, it's totally possible to get it from one contact without being promiscuous."
Early last year, tired of New York and restless after the end of an eight-year relationship, Callen picked up and left the East for Los Angeles—looking, like to many others who come out here, for rest, health, and love. At the same time, he resigned all his AIDS activist positions, which he felt condemned him to a life "owned by others." However, his plans for a more restful life were postponed until after a tour with his band, The Flirtations, a gay a cappella doo-wop group. "I wanted to call us the Juicy Fruits," he says with a sigh, "but the others wouldn't hear of it."
Callen is an attractive man of 36 with a shaggy bowl of short, dark hair. When I first met him two years ago in New York, I was struck by the grace and economy of his movements. His speech is understated and spartan, even when discussing the complex and the paradoxical. He is known for his candor and utter lack of sentimentality.
Quite simply, he has been willing to challenge some of gay culture's most sacred cows, ing from his theory on the origins of AIDS to his dismissal of the fearsome Michelangelo Signorile, the former editor of the now-defunct Outweek, whom Callen calls "the Ayatollah of the West, dishing out death sentences to his enemies." That's not to say Callen is without misgivings. "I've been attacked by all sides," he says, adding that he worries about his views being misused "as fodder for the enemy."
The second time I met him, Callen had moved into a small apartment in a handsome deco building on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood that might easily have been air-lifted from New York. He had lost weight and sported a deep, bronze tan. In fact, his dark complexion turned out to be the side effect of a new medication. "I've got pneumonia," he said as he greeted me. "I shouldn't have it, but I didn't follow my own advice, so I got sick."
Though his own advice includes taking it easy, Callen has not. As a result, a bacterial pneumonia has taken him nearly a month to shake—and then only with the help of a powerful new antibiotic not yet available in the United States. Despite such setbacks, however, Callen has somehow managed to accomplish more than most people..
Michael Callen was born in 1955 in an Indiana hamlet with a population of 550. When he was five, his family moved to Hamilton, Ohio, a town that he says took pride in its provincial sensibilities. He was 14 when one of a group of girls with whom he was playing cards suddenly pointed a finger at him and announced he was going to turn into a homosexual if he didn't stop "acting like a girl."
A copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask that he purchased at a local Woolworth's convinced him he was a pervert doomed to a life of haunting public restrooms. To make matters worse, his family were staunch Methodists of the fire-and-brimstone variety, which left him believing that he was not only a pervert, but one doomed to hell.
In his third year at Boston University, Callen came across a gay liberation group and discovered he was not alone. With that, he leapt out of the closet and angrily broke with his parents. They have since reconciled, but for a year, he didn't speak to his father.
In 1978, Callen moved to New York, where he became part of the celebratory gay sexual revolution that followed the now legendary 1969 riot at the Stonewall, [a Greenwich Village gay bar where gays for the first time fought back during a police raid]. "When I carne out during the party of the Seventies, the goal was to be liberated, to act on every sexual impulse without censorship," Callen recalls. "The organizing political principle of a certain segment of the gay movement was 'you're more liberated when you've had a thousand partners than when you've had five hundred.' The theory was that society had an anti-sex attitude that was really fucked up, and there was all this misplaced morality. It was the hydraulic theory of liberation. I call it the myth of the brotherhood of lust. We would go to the bathhouse, and we were one happy, naked brotherhood swimming in a sea of lust. And it was supposed to change the world."
The tragic irony, Callen believes, is that he and his fellow gays were actually swimming in "a microbiological sea where viruses such as cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, hepatitis B, herpes, and retroviruses such as syphilis, gonorrhea, parasites, perhaps HIV and heaven knows what, were being transmitted at unprecedented rates."
Gay men, Callen points out, have always accounted for a disproportionate share of sexually transmitted diseases reported to government agencies. But with the advent of the wonder drugs of the twentieth century, there seemed to be a cure for everything. As a result, it began to look as if the specter of disease need no longer inhibit sexual desires. The fact is, Callen says, the gay sexual revolution would never have happened on the scale it did without antibiotics.
"We thought it was like a lube job," he observes. "You would go to your doctor once a month, and he'd diagnose what particular sexually transmitted disease you had, and it would be interesting and that would be that."
By late 1979, however, it became apparent that gay men were dying of what had previously been thought to be fairly innocuous diseases such as cytomegalovirus (an intestinal disease causing enlargement of cells) and toxoplasmosis (a disease of the nervous system caused by blood borne parasites). Cases of pneumocystis began appearing. Young men were coming down with Kaposi's Sarcoma, a cancer that usually attacked aging Eastern European or Italian men.
All these conditions had one thing in common: They were associated with damaged immune systems. "There are those who argue that if we had listened to our grandmothers and had a little common sense," Callen says, "we'd have known it's not good to show up at your doctor's office every month with a new drip, rash, or sore."
By late 1981, the National Cancer Institute noted that the median number of sexual partners reported by the first 100 gay men diagnosed with AIDS was 1,120 each.
For his own part, Callen figures he had had sex with a hundred men by the time he came down with his first case of the clap in 1973. By the time he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1982, he'd had about 3,000 partners, and every time he had sex he came down with something. He'd had hepatitis A and B, non-A/non-B, herpes simplex I and II, venereal warts, amoebiasis, syphilis, gonorrhea, nonspecific urethritis, chlamydia, cytomegalovirus (CMV), Epstein-Barr virus, mononucleosis, and the cryptosporidiosis that confirmed what he already suspected: He had AIDS.
Callen's doctor, Joe Sonnabend, is a prominent microbiologist who has always held that AIDS is a multifactorial disease. Sonnabend warned him that if he didn't immediately change his promiscuous sexual lifestyle, he'd soon be dead. Callen decided to change.
He attended several meetings of Sexual Compulsives Anonymous (SCA) but was turned off by the spiritual basis of the program. "I hate the concept of a Higher Power," he says, conceding that his strong feelings have something to do with his Methodist upbringing. Fortunately, he was sufficiently motivated to be able to put the brakes on his sexual compulsiveness on his own. When he did so, he was stunned to discover that he experienced a devastating, sometimes crippling withdrawal process. "It's hard to say whether it was chemical or mental. I felt motivated by forces beyond my control. I had to do things like go out of the house with no money, because if I had money, I'd go into a [sex] bookstore."
Although Callen admits to having had the same sexual behaviors and withdrawal process as many SCA members, he's reluctant to label himself a recovered sex addict. "I think that's too facile," he says. "I like to take responsibility for my actions, and I don't like the idea of a disease. I think that's a wimp out. It's a variation on 'the devil made me do it.' "
As Callen fought to save his life, he was staggered by the obstinate refusal of many of his friends to change their sexual lifestyles. Many had slipped into a coma-like denial regarding the new disease - as frightening to Callen as the c indifference of the Reagan Administration. Whereas the polio scare of the 1950s prompted the closing of public swimming pools throughout the country (there were even plans to close the beaches), the suggestion by health officials that the most infamous gay bathhouses be shut down was met with indignation and a frenzied civil-liberties debate. The idea of limited sexual prerogative for the sake of health outraged many gays. "Promiscuity was a political statement," says novelist/playwright Larry Kramer, who was one of the first to question equating liberation with promiscuity. Understandably, many were worried about an erosion of their hard won civil rights. Others feared that admitting the link between AIDS and promiscuity would only stimulate more homophobia.
In response to the denial and paralysis within the gay community, Callen and Richard Berkowitz, a fellow AIDS victim and patient of Sonnabend, wrote a passionate manifesto for The Native, Manhattan's gay newspaper. Entitled "We Know Who We Are" and published in November 1982, the article triggered a firestorm from which Callen says he still bears "political scars."
It began: Those of us who have lived a life of excessive promiscuity on the urban gay circuit of bathhouses, backrooms, balconies, sex clubs, meat racks and tea rooms know who we are. We could continue to deny overwhelming evidence that the present health crisis is a direct result of the unprecedented promiscuity that has occurred since Stonewall, but such denial is killing us....Deep down we know who we are and we know why we're sick....Can researchers really comprehend the dynamics of urban gay promiscuity? Can they understand the health implications for a 27 year-old who has had 2,000 sexual partners.... We believe that it is the accumulation of risk through leading a promiscuous gay urban lifestyle which has led to the break-down of immune responses that we are seeing now...The motto of promiscuous gay men has been "So many men, so little time." In the seventies, we worried about so many men; in the eighties, so little time. For us, the parry that was the Seventies is over. For some, perhaps, homosexuality will always mean promiscuity. They may very well die for that belief.
"I am one of the people who had to make the agonizing choice," Callen says. "I went to the bathhouses. I knew what went on there. I knew that some were practicing safe sex and some weren't. The painful question was, do you risk letting the state step that far into your life to protect the few people who were not practicing safe sex?"
It was around the time Callen and Berkowitz published their manifesto that the gay community first rallied to the call for safe sex practices. "I am so tremendously proud of what we did and how quickly we did it," Callen says. "Everyone was freaked out and grieving, grieving for the loss of sexual innocence and spontaneity that had been for many people the very definition of what it meant to be gay. The unimaginable had happened. I challenge any heterosexual with an ounce of empathy to try to imagine what it would feel like to know that any physical expression of love carried with it the risk of death. Safe sex was a comprehensive proposal to permit us to continue to have sex by avoiding the exchange of potentially infectious bodily fluids. It was a radical, radical proposal. We had a second sexual revolution in the midst of a plague."
What causes AIDS, I ask Callen, if not HIV? "There are three views," he responds. "One camp holds that a new agent is solely responsible for AIDS, and that agent is HIV. Another camp—the middle camp—says it's a new agent, but it needs to be helped along by other factors. That's where Luc Montagnier [the French discoverer of HIV] stands now. He says HIV is pretty pathetic by itself, unless it's turned on by a cofactor such as herpes or mycoplasma or syphilis. Then there are those of us who say that there is no single cause for this disease, that AIDS is a multifactorial disease that results from repeated immunological assaults over a long period of time. The most important thing that distinguishes us from the other two camps is that we do not believe AIDS can result from a single unlucky con-tact." Nor do the multifactorialists—who a include Joe Sonnabend and renowned virologist Peter Duesenberg of the University of California at Berkeley—believe that AIDS has an incubation period.
"AIDS has different causes in the different risk groups," Callen says. AIDS researchers call these risk groups the 4-H Club: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, Haitians, and heroin addicts. "Obviously, I don't believe that AIDS in hemophiliacs and intravenous drug users has anything to do with the sexual revolution. It's not a function of morality, it's a function of mathematics. When more people have more sex, the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases rises exponentially."
Callen pauses before finishing his thought. "AIDS came about when a certain critical mass of sexually transmitted diseases occurred in the population. I believe that critical mass was achieved in 1978 in the major urban centers of the United States. That is my belief. It gets me reviled by my own community, and it is a minority belief."
Callen adds that challenging the central doctrine of the governmental and medical AIDS establishment—namely, that HIV causes AIDS—practically guarantees that one will not get a fair hearing. He compares it to the frustrating impasse in the abortion debate: Both sides are so sure they are right it is as if they are speaking different languages. "I am considered by people I love and respect to be mad as a hatter," he says. "I'm referred to as a member of the Flat Earth Society. To them, that HIV has been established to be the cause of AIDS is as well established as that the earth is round."
Callen believes that many of the symptoms attributed to HIV/AIDS are actually symptoms of CMV, a herpes virus that scientists at one time considered as a possible cause of AIDS. "Dr. Lawrence Drew [of San Francisco's Mt. Zion Hospital] published an extraordinary study of CMV...in 1979," Callen says. "[The incidence among men in general] was like forty percent. That meant every other guy you were having sex with was exposed to CMV." Even more alarming was the incidence among gay men; according to Drew's study, out of a sample of one hundred gay men, ninety-eight had CMV. Since CMV compromises the immune system, men with damaged immune systems were constantly being reinfected, turning the virus into a monster—and, in the view of the multifactorialists, a leading suspect in the cause of AIDS.
Callen points out that despite the media coverage, the epidemic in the United States remains largely confined to the so-called 4-H risk groups and their partners; the prophesied spread of the disease into the heterosexual suburbs has not occurred. In Callen's view, such scare tactics have undermined what little credibility AIDS activists had to begin with.
"It's really important to understand why that campaign was undertaken," Callen says. "It was totally about funding. [But] people saw through it instantly. In fact, I think there's been a backlash to this whole idea that 'heterosexuals are next.' "
A recent book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS by conservative writer Michael Fumento, attacks the idea that heterosexuals are equally at risk. "It's a hateful book," Callen says. "Unfortunately, it's one of the most masterful marshaling of facts around. That's what's so frustrating to me. The only people around who take facts seriously are the conservatives, and they use them for their evil, mean-spirited ends."
There is general agreement in the gay community that AIDS is spread primarily through anal intercourse and that the receptive partner is the one at risk. "AIDS is a bottom's disease," Callen says flatly. "If you're a top," he adds, "it's possible to be a slut and be completely healthy."
Unfortunately, what might have been a firewall in the spread of the disease has been compromised by the fact that some gay men take on both sexual roles. Callen doesn't mince words explaining his theory. "If you're getting semen deposited in your ass, and then you fuck somebody, that's how you transmit disease. If tops were tops and bottoms were bottoms, it would break the chain." (Callen adds that even if a gay man sticks to one behavior consistently, he should still behave responsibly and wear condoms to protect his partners. And, he says, there is no final word yet on the safety of oral sex.)
Straight women, the "bottoms" of the heterosexual world, are more easily infected than straight men; 1,657 women are believed to have contracted AIDS as a result of vaginal intercourse with men who were either infected IV drug users or bisexuals. But for a woman to contract AIDS in this fashion is not easy. Designed as they are to withstand penetration and childbirth, vaginal walls are stronger than the walls of the anus and provide a barrier to AIDS. The cells of the rectal lining do not provide this type of barrier; in fact, they are particularly receptive to retrovirus, says Callen.
Can women transmit AIDS to men through vaginal intercourse? That is even less likely. According to several studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, hardly any heterosexual men are known to have contracted AIDS solely as a result of vaginal intercourse with an infected woman. Indeed, many researchers believe AIDS simply cannot be transmitted from women to men in this way. "In New York City, now entering the second decade [since AIDS was first identified], the CDC lists six heterosexual men who claim to have gotten AIDS from sex with a woman," Callen says. "Six liars."
Because sex is a subject so rife with taboo, some AIDS victims have gone to their graves denying they had ever engaged in any high-risk activity. But men who swore on everything they held sacred that they contracted AIDS from female prostitutes have been known to break down and admit to having had homosexual partners when carefully interrogated by health department officials. In fact, both sexes often lie about anal intercourse and/or shared needles, leading to unreliable statistics.
If promiscuity is a cause of AIDS, what causes promiscuity? "There are two theories about why gay men seem to be more sexually active than straight men," says psychologist Martin Levine. "One theory holds that it is an internalized homophobia." In this view, as playwright William Hoffman puts it, one can draw an analogy between promiscuous gays and Jews who, internalizing society's hostility, become anti-Semitic themselves, or blacks who for similar reasons bestow higher status on their lighter skinned brethren. "The messages to gays are so exclusively negative," says Hoffman, author of the play As Is, "that many simply act out the labels stamped on us—like being more promiscuous."
The second theory, which Levine says he's more inclined to believe, holds that promiscuity is "a product of masculine gender role training." As Levine sees it, "Gay men are socialized in our society to follow the male role model, which teaches men to get as much sex as they can, to detach sex from relationships, and [encourages] a sense of depersonalized sexuality. Since gay men are attracted to other men, you have two [partners] who've been taught to behave the same way. That's going to up the rate of sexual activity. Heterosexual men want to do the same thing that gay men are doing but they're with women who have been taught to keep sexuality in the context of a relationship as an expression of intimacy."
Callen sees it much the same way. "The overwhelming majority of gay men live lives indistinguishable from your average heterosexual," he stresses. "They were horrified by the bathhouse culture and fast lane living. But I think you have to ask your male readers to be honest. If they could go to heterosexual bathhouses any night of the week, twenty-four hours a day nice places, with food and saunas and jacuzzis—and they could have sex with as many beautiful women as they wanted, no strings attached...how many of them would love that fantasy? Well, we created it."
Don't forget, Callen points out, gays do not have the option of society sanctioned relationships. "We don't get the benefits of the social support. We don't turn on the TV and see a variety of role models. We make ourselves up as we go along, and we make our-selves up in the face of tremendous hostility and staggering misinformation."
Callen believes there are three big brakes on heterosexual promiscuity: religious and moral beliefs, the risk of pregnancy, and the risk of disease. "In gay culture in the Seventies, if you were gay, you were already so far out from what society said you should be, why pay attention at all? We weren't worried about anyone getting pregnant and we thought disease was taken care of. There was some method to our madness. We were pushing the envelope."
He thinks that heterosexuals can't fathom gay sex, much less gay promiscuity. "For some people," he says, "sex is like sports. It's a hobby. It's like going out to a nice restaurant. It's something that's pleasurable and it's no big deal. I think we're living in a time of sexual frenzy akin to the religious madness of the Middle Ages, and that wiser future generations will say, `Why didn't they realize that sex should be enjoyed as one of life's many pleasures tailored to one's individual needs?"'
Callen believes that since the advent of safe sex, there has been a "rebirth of the radical spirit, an aggressive, up-in-your-face gay sexuality. We're coming out of our shellshock as a community," he says. "For the new generation of gay men who were born in the age of AIDS, safe sex is the only way it's ever been. They are reinventing the sexual revolution. There are safe sex sluts and they're proud, and it's a concept that's perfectly respectable."
One sign of this is the fact that gay bath-houses are enjoying something of a renaissance a development that Callen regards with mixed emotions. In the four clubs currently operating in L.A., he says, 95% of what goes on is oral sex. "I'm not one for denying the truth. It gets me into trouble, but I know that 5% of the activities I've seen in these clubs is fucking. Of that five percent, half is with condoms, half is without. I'm sure that most heterosexuals would be horrified to know that in 1991 there are places you can go where you can see men fuck each other without condoms."
Callen and The Flirtations blew back into L.A. recently after playing the Vancouver Folk Festival, Seattle, and Portland. Callen had two weeks to pull hi-self together before the group was to take off again for a three-week engagement in Provincetown in Cape Cod. He was exhausted and wasn't sure he wanted to live so much of his life in airports and airplane.
"Having AIDS feels like having the flu twenty-four hours a day," he explains. "You wake up more tired than you were when you went to bed. Your joints ache. You have low grade fevers, appetite loss, weight loss." Feeling this way, he hated having the band members depend on him and asked that they find someone to substitute for him.
""To me, it's a constant rallying task," Callen says. "I get a lot from performing. I get a lot from traveling. I love being around my people. I sing primarily for lesbians and gays. I am one of those lucky people who have managed somehow, to merge his art and his politics. But I'm physically exhausted and I don't seem to have any sense of proportion."
Callen takes a prescription of clarythromycin to ward off pneumonia. His doctor treats his other infections individually, and sometimes burns off KS lesions for cosmetic reasons. Though Callen is careful about nutrition, he relies on no specific diet. He has tried a few holistic treatments, but as an atheist he finds New Age spirituality "nauseating.' He lists "sheer grit" as the quality common to all the long term survivors, along with an ability to live with excruciating uncertainty.
When he's in Los Angeles, he's very happy. "I totally love it here," he says. "I love the weather. I love the verdure. I love the produce. I love that people are body conscious. I love that people are friendly and polite. All of the things that people make fun of California for, I love."
And while he may have resigned from his public AIDS activism, he is committed to AIDS prevention. Among other beats,, Callen prowls the bathhouses of Los Angeles, pockets full of condoms. "If I see two men about to fuck, I simply tap one of them on the shoulder and give him a condom. This has been a big, painful issue for me. In the Seventies, being judgmental was a capital crime among gays. You were not supposed to judge anything anybody did. I was accused in the Seventies of being judgmental, and again in the Eighties, and I'm sure I'll be accused in the Nineties. If judgmental means forcing my judgments on other people, I don't do that, and I don't like people who do that. But I want my fellow gay men to know that I care whether they live or die. It matters to me. I have concluded that I am my brother's keeper."