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.

“I don’t say hope will guarantee you’ll beat AIDS,” he said, “but you’ve got to have it to be in the running.” Fighting Discrimination.

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.

Also in 1983, Mr. Callen was a member of the founding board of the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in Greenwich Village.

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. Means of Survival

Mr. Callen was the editor of “Surviving and Thriving With AIDS: Hints for the Newly Diagnosed,” which was published by the People With AIDS Coalition in 1987 and then revised and expanded in 1988.

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