I’ll never understand why I never found a helping hand.
All the people, they just watched as I was leaving.
They said I was small town change.
—David Lasley & Don Yowell Clifford “Cliff” Leroy Callen (1925–2007) was born in Moores Hill, Indiana, one of five children of Manie Edward (1885–1945) and Stella Florence (née Frazier, 1887–1959). In 1943, he gradu-ated high school at the height of World War II, but at seventeen, Cliff was too young for combat duty. So, he joined the Mer-chant Marines. Soon, the “small-town farm boy [found himself]
thrown to the wolves in New York City.”1 The city was exciting, and Cliff would have stayed in New York but for his father’s un-timely death and his mother’s ailing health. Reluctantly, he re-turned to Indiana and took charge of his family’s affairs. He sold their family farm then used the money to move his mother and
1 Barbra Callen, letter to Michael Callen, 23 October 1977, typewritten origi-nal, the Michael Callen Papers at The LGBT Community Center National History Archive (henceforth, MCP).
sister out of the countryside and into town, so they would be closer to a community of people, friends, doctors, and impor-tantly, his own work. In 1949, Cliff took a job as a welder at Gen-eral Motors’s Fisher Body, enduring ten-hour shifts, seven days a week, and a grueling ninety-mile round-trip commute to the plant in Fairfield, Ohio. At home, he cared for his mother and sister, “raised a garden, cooked the meals, did the wash, cleaned the house, and whatever else needed to be done.”2
In 1949, Cliff met Barbara Ann Walker (1933–2015), the daughter of itinerate Pentecostal gospel musicians Chester E.
“Chet” (1908–1968) and Wilma (née VanTyle, 1904–1981) Walk-er. Eventually, Mr. Walker “sort of [ran] away from singing” and became an ordained minister through a correspondence course.3 To earn a living, he toiled in a chair factory for thirteen years and then at a machine shop, from which he eventually retired.
Mrs. Walker worked in a nearby creamery, but even with two incomes the Walker family’s financial situation was precarious and their home life unstable. Because her family moved twenty-two times in the first eighteen years of her life, Barbara joked that her mother’s preferred method of house cleaning was to
“find a new house and just move into it!”4 Although the Walkers were devoutly religious, they were also heterodox, and Barbara was free to walk her own path to salvation. On Sunday morn-ings, “the family would leave the house to go to church, and eve-ryone would go to a different church! Daddy would go to the Holiness; Mother would go to the Baptist. [Barbara] would go to the Methodist, and [her] brother would go to Church of Christ.
And nobody thought anything about it.”5 Although her parents allowed Barbara to attend the church she preferred, they still re-quired her to observe strict Pentecostal traditions. She could not cut her hair or wear it down or drink soft drinks (for fear they would lead to alcohol), and she had to wear modest dresses that
2 Ibid.
3 Barbara Callen, interview with Michael Callen, 24 February 1992, audio re-cording, MCP (henceforth, BC and MC [1992]).
4 BC and MC (1992).
5 Ibid.
small town change covered her legs practically to the ankle. Throughout her life, Barbara maintained her Christian belief in the inherent equal-ity of all people, reminding others that, “the man in the gutter [is] just as much loved by God as anyone else.”6 Later in life, her second son would test the elasticity of her beliefs and the mettle of her motherly love.
Dating proved to be difficult for the young couple, not be-cause of the Walker’s religious beliefs but due to Cliff’s work schedule. After working all day at GM, then attending to his mother and sister, he would drive thirty more miles to Rising Sun to see Barbara, often arriving after 9:30 pm and sometimes even later. While these late-night rendezvous rubbed against the grain of courtship norms and the Walker’s sense of propriety, from Barbara’s family’s perspective, Cliff’s age was a bigger ob-stacle. At twenty-five, he was considerably older than sixteen-year-old Barbara, and the Walkers worried that a worldly man who had been in the Merchant Marines and who had once lived in New York City might be too experienced for their naïve daughter. Their worries were unnecessary, for Barbara’s convic-tions, especially those about sex, were set firm in the bedrock of her faith. She “would only go so far but no farther,” allowing kissing and some heavy petting but no sexual contact or any-thing remotely risqué.7 In a mid-twentieth-century small town, a young woman’s reputation was a serious matter. Few wanted to risk being labeled “easy,” or worse yet, pregnancy out of wed-lock, which could ruin their chances for marriage. In time, Bar-bara’s family grew to love Cliff, and the young couple married in 1952, settling first in Rising Sun. With its population of 2,500 nestled on the banks of the Ohio River in southeastern Indiana, Rising Sun was, as their eldest son, Barry, later described it, “the kind of town where famers go to die.”8
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Barry Wayne Callen, interview with the author, 21 September 2013 (hence-forth, BWC and MJ [2013]).
Like many women of her generation, Barbara dreamed of be-ing a housewife and mother. She also shared with other women her age a near perfect ignorance of her reproductive system and sex. When she had her first period at age eleven, Barbara thought she was dying. Her mother assured her that menstruation was
“very natural and normal,” but she did not explain much else.9 Cliff had to teach Barbara about sex, and she later recalled that
“he was very gentle about it. Very kind. Very caring.”10 When she had difficulty getting pregnant, Barbara worried that there was something wrong with her body. But on 24 February 1954, Clifford and Barbara welcomed their first child, Barry Wayne Callen. Barbara believed that she could not get pregnant while breastfeeding, so she was surprised to find that she was with child again only a few months later. A second son was born on 11 April 1955 at Margaret Mary Catholic Hospital in Batesville, Indiana. They named him Michael Lane Callen.
The psychological and physiological stress of having two in-fant children negatively impacted Barbara’s health. Dizziness, bouts of sweating, and anxiety overwhelmed her at times, and she felt powerless to do anything about it. Barbara’s emotional instability and unpredictability made the already difficult work of mothering nearly impossible, and family members, includ-ing her husband, wondered if she even wanted to be a mother and questioned her love for her two baby boys. At times, Bar-bara feared that she was having a nervous breakdown and grew paranoid that Cliff would leave her. Although it was not widely discussed or understood in rural Indiana in the 1950s, in ret-rospect, Barbara’s symptoms align with a clinical diagnosis of postpartum depression, and the intense social pressures to be-have according to the norms of new motherhood must be-have exacerbated her distress. Eventually, she saw a psychiatrist who prescribed tranquilizers and other medications to stabilize her mood. Within a few years, her depression faded, and Barbara
9 BC and MC (1992).
10 Ibid.
small town change
could fully enjoy motherhood. On 10 December 1958, she gave birth to a daughter named Linda Jo.11
In 1960, the Callen family relocated to Hamilton, Ohio, a blue-collar suburb of Cincinnati. Founded as a military outpost on the US Western frontier in 1789 and named for then Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, the small city was conven-iently located near Ohio’s important automobile factories and Miami University in nearby Oxford. Both would play important roles in the Callen family’s destiny. Lucrative manufacturing jobs lured workers from Appalachia and nearby rural areas in search of greater economic prospects. Th e infl ux of mountain folk earned for Hamilton the pejorative nickname “Hamiltucky”
because “one out of three residents had migrated north from Kentucky to work in the auto plants. Th e joke was that they set-tled in Hamilton because their cars broke down on the way to Detroit!”12
11 Linda politely declined to participate in my research and asked that details about her life be omitted. I have respected this request except in cases where an archival source, such as a letter, or event requires signifi cant discussion of her.
12 BWC and MJ (2013).
Fig. 2. Th e Callen Family Home, 66 Warr Court, Hamilton, oh. Photo by Author.
Clifford and Barbara purchased a small house at 66 Warr Court in the new Twin Brook subdivision. While waiting three months for construction on their new home to finish, the Cal-lens rented an apartment that turned out to be a roach-infest-ed death trap. A slow carbon monoxide leak from the furnace eventually made everyone sick, an experience that haunted Mi-chael; he was repeatedly plagued by fears of strangulation and the memory that he had nearly died as an infant.13 They moved to 66 Warr Court over the Labor Day holiday, and Barry and Michael started school the next day. Gradually, the Callen fam-ily settled into a new suburban normal.
As the Callens acclimated to their new life, broader cultural changes were afoot in the US. Buoyed by the postwar economic boom, the middle class rapidly expanded. Returning WWII and Korean War veterans (the white ones, that is) went to college on the GI Bill and purchased homes at greatly subsidized rates in new housing developments far from city centers.14 For newly af-fluent (and mostly white) Americans, these changes engendered new notions of family — a “nuclear” unit built around a bread-winning father, a dutiful and well-heeled mother-homemaker, and two or three children, all housed within a modest yet mod-ern single-family home. Across the 1950s, the ideology of nor-mative nuclear families displaced other modes of kinship based on extended family networks and communal childrearing in the US cultural imaginary.15
Ideas of masculinity, too, mutated in the nuclear age, and what it meant to be a man in the mid-twentieth century was a question with few definitive answers. Marriage, procreation,
13 BC and MC (1992).
14 The politics of the GI Bill and affordable housing were highly racialized and are the subject of a number of recent works that look at “redlining” in cities and the racial biases that precipitated white flight to the suburbs. In “the Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes an elegant and rigorously informed argument that such practices were rooted in deep American racism. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.
15 For more, see Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 20th anniv. edn. (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
small town change occupational mobility, and home ownership functioned as im-portant signs of success for white American men. Breadwin-ning — providing for the needs of the entire nuclear family on a single income — became both an aspiration for these men and a measure of their manhood. Popular sociologists like William H. Whyte (author of the 1956 best seller The Organization Man) worried that corporate culture threatened men’s vitality. Sepa-rated from communal, artisanal, and trade-based economies and customs, The New Man of the 1950s purchased his pass into masculinity with his college degree and high salary rather than earning it through traditionally manly displays of prowess and skill. A kind of “male panic” ensued — though it might more ac-curately be described as a divergence — as new and sometimes competing forms of masculinity coexisted in uneasy tension.
Men’s roles within the home and family were also changing.
Modern family psychology, epitomized by Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), encour-aged men to take an active interest in domestic life by engaging with their children, balancing work and home life, and making themselves physically and emotionally available to their wives, all for the health of the nuclear family. Popular television pro-grams like Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963), Father Knows Best (1954–1960), and Ozzie and Harriet (1952–1966) reinforced a stratified, middle-class gender ideology and facilitated a cultural shift from the stern and patriarchal father figure to the modern benevolent “dad.”
Cliff Callen embodied the contradictions and frustrations of his era. On the swing shift at Fisher Body, he welded doors for automobiles, seven days a week in exhausting ten-hour stints.
Outside of work, however, he was “a real lover of reading [who]
was very much into intellectual discourse,” especially politics and philosophy.16 Cliff passed his love of books, reading, and politics down to his children. The dinner table was often a hot-bed for discussion and debate, especially between Michael and his father. While he labored to build a better future for his
fam-16 BWC and MJ (2013).
ily, Cliff dreamed of being a self-made man with his own busi-ness, a small store or perhaps even a restaurant in Arizona, far away from the Midwestern cold and industrial labor. He always
“had some goal or other that he’d like to have reached, and every time he tried to reach it something happened to take that suc-cess away.”17 So, Cliff hitched his hopes to the wagons of his three stars: Barry, Michael, and Linda.
With the support of his family, however, Cliff did fulfill his dream of getting a college degree when he received a Bachelor of Science degree from Miami University by taking night classes.
At some point in the 1970s, the entire Callen family was enrolled in university degree programs, making them all simultaneous first-generation college students. Barbara earned multiple de-grees from Miami University: a Bachelor of Science in Art Edu-cation, a Bachelor of Science in Learning Disabilities/Behavior Disorders, and a Master of Education in Guidance and Coun-seling. Barry graduated from Miami University in 1976. Michael graduated from Boston University in 1977, and a few years later, Linda also studied at Miami University.
After he received his degree, Cliff wrestled with conflicting ideas about manhood and class status. A promotion to a man-agement position at GM (facilitated by his college degree) would have eased the family’s financial burdens considerably and enabled Cliff “to do something other than grovel for General Motors.”18 However, traditional manly pride won out over prag-matism. Clifford flatly “refused every chance to climb the corpo-rate ladder [at GM because] he felt that would entail the ‘sacrifice of his beliefs and his morals’ [and] would force him […] to treat employees below him in a ‘degrading and demeaning’ manner that would make them ‘feel like just so many cattle.’”19 The
patri-17 Barbara Callen, letter to Michael Callen, 5 October 1974, typewritten origi-nal, MCP.
18 Ibid.
19 Michael Callen, quoted in Martin Duberman, Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS (New York: The New Press, 2014), 3. Barbara Callen also recounts this experience in her letter 23 October 1977 letter to Michael.
small town change arch’s unwillingness to change impacted his wife and children.
Because he was “obsessed with the idea that [like his own father]
he would predecease [his wife],” Cliff “forced [Barbara] to go to college and get a teaching certificate.”20 With clockwork regular-ity, terrific fights erupted between husband and wife each semes-ter. The stress caused Barbara to put on considerable amounts of weight and according to Michael, it exacerbated her existing depression and anxiety, leading to another nervous breakdown.
While mid-century men wrestled with new masculine mo-res, women faced their own gender trouble. Even in a blue-collar town like Hamilton, women who left the domestic realm often faced brutal criticism. Other women “put [Barbara] down for working with or trying to help other people’s kids when maybe [her] own [children] have their unmet needs, too.”21 Still Bar-bara enjoyed teaching elementary students with special needs.
She adored her students like her own children and was their staunch advocate and ally for thirty years.
Whereas her own mother’s work outside the home had not kept the Walker family from the brink of ruin, Barbara’s second income afforded her family an extra layer of financial security, though it came at the cost of her emotional well-being and her dream of being a stay-at-home mom. Nevertheless, the Callens, like most working-class families, still struggled to make ends meet. Even so, music and the arts were important priorities in their home. “We come from a sort of ‘Daddy Sang Bass, Mama Sang Tenor’ background,” Barry told me before describing a life filled with music, literature, and art even when money was tight.22 Their multi-instrumentalist mother played organ, xylo-phone, accordion, autoharp, and the family piano, which was painted her favorite color — pink. After putting the children to bed, Mrs. Callen would play piano or organ and sing for an hour each night, and as the children grew older, family music-making became a favorite pastime. Barbara also performed for
20 Ibid.
21 Barbara Callen, letter to Michael Callen, 5 October 1974, MCP.
22 BWC and MJ (2013).
church and community events and was a member of the Ham-mond Organ Club of Hamilton. Although she never learned musical notation, Barbara composed religious songs and chil-dren’s music, which her sons — especially Michael — mocked mercilessly but lovingly. Barry and Linda each sang and played the guitar, while Michael received intermittent vocal train-ing off starttrain-ing at the age of 7, includtrain-ing a year and a half at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and he sang in church choir where he was labeled “leather lungs” by the choir direc-tor. Through the Title I Education Program, Michael “received violin lessons from age 13 through 15 and was awarded a schol-arship to study (from 15 to 16) at Miami University,” though his
“inability to read music […] finally caught up with [him] and [he] forewent further training.”23 Michael also taught himself to play piano, and he inherited both his mother’s ability to yodel and her knack for songwriting.24
Early in life, Michael learned that his music could have an impact on other people. As a toddler, he entertained his mother by pulling pots and pans from the cupboards and drumming on them with kitchen utensils as mallets and drumsticks. As a mis-chievous youngster, he frequently snuck into the living room early in the morning, flipped the switch on the family’s Ham-mond organ, and blasted low bass notes which rattled the whole house. “I thought I was having a heart attack!” Barry laughed as he recalled his younger brother’s antics, but “Mike would wake us up with that note!”25
Among the family’s most cherished possessions was a big cabinet stereo with wire mesh speakers and a record player.
Music poured out of the stereo at all hours, and their family’s eclectic record collection included “lots of folky, lefty stuff”
like Peter, Paul, & Mary — music which Michael later credited with cultivating his social consciousness — Broadway original
23 Michael Callen, résumé, 1977, typewritten original, MCP.
24 Barry Callen released his first album, The Gospel of Fun, in 2011.
25 BWC and MJ (2013). Barry also wrote about this incident in a letter to his
25 BWC and MJ (2013). Barry also wrote about this incident in a letter to his