Bobbi Campbell

Robert Boyle "Bobbi" Campbell Jr. (January 28, 1952 – August 15, 1984) was a public health nurse and an early United States AIDS activist. In September 1981, at the age of 29, Campbell became the 16th person in San Francisco to be diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma, when that was a proxy for an AIDS diagnosis. He was the first to come out publicly as a person with what came to be known as AIDS, writing a regular column in the San Francisco Sentinel, syndicated nationwide, describing his experiences and posting photos of his KS lesions to help other San Franciscans know what to look for, as well as helping write the first San Francisco safer sex manual, Play Fair!.

He rapidly became one of the leading activists co-founding People With AIDS San Francisco in 1982 and then, the following year, with HIV+ men from across the U.S., he co-wrote the Denver Principles, Campbell raised the national profile of the AIDS crisis among heterosexuals and provided a recognizable face of the epidemic for affected communities. He also continued to campaign for LGBT+ rights, speaking outside the 1984 Democratic National Convention a month before his death from cryptosporidiosis.

Before the AIDS crisis Born in Georgia in 1952 Bobbi Campbell earned a degree in nursing from the University of Washington and volunteered at The Seattle Counseling Services for Sexual Minorities, the first gay-run counseling service for gay people in the country, He lived communally in Capitol Hill with other gay male activists at what was known informally as the "East John Street Gay Men's Collective", described by his former lover Tom Richards as "a notorious and famous house with colorful and smart people."

Campbell moved from Seattle to San Francisco in 1975, getting a job in a hospital near The Castro and immersing himself in the political and social life of the community,

Diagnosis and local activism Starting with a case of shingles in February 1981, Bobbi Campbell suffered a succession of unusual illnesses, including leukopenia later that summer. and now known to be closely associated with AIDS. He was formally diagnosed as having KS by dermatologist Marcus Conant on October 8, 1981.

After speaking with Randy Alfred, a friend and editor of the San Francisco Sentinel, Campbell agreed to write a column "to demystify the AIDS story".

Campbell joined the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

In February 1982, on the invitation of Conant and Volberding, and persuaded reluctant physicians to allow him to meet and counsel AIDS patients at Conant's KS clinic. he drafted the Denver Principles, the defining manifesto of the PWA Movement, —and the Denver Principles represent a "careful synthesis" of these two positions:

The activists—in an echo of the Lavender Menace radical feminists storming the NOW convention stage in 1970 —decided to storm the stage of the closing session of the Second National AIDS Forum in order to present the Denver Principles. As each of the 11 men read out one of the 11 statements, they did so with the "Fighting for our lives" banner behind them, from the San Francisco march earlier that month; these words became the slogan of the PWA Movement. there were only 6 stories about AIDS on major network news and print media up to May 1983 included little coverage beyond the gay press and the San Francisco Chronicle

After being criticized for omitting any coverage of a Madison Square Garden benefit in April 1983, The New York Times increased its coverage of AIDS, setting the tone for an increase across print media. —only the second time an openly gay man had appeared on the cover of a mass-market news magazine, The following week, with Callen, Berkowitz, Felson and Turner, attendant media had little to cover beyond Campbell with a sign reading "Dan White's homophobia is more deadly than AIDS,"

Campbell gave one of his last speeches at the National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights when the 1984 Democratic National Convention was held in San Francisco in July. His body was taken back to Washington state and interred at New Tacoma Cemetery in Tacoma, Washington. Campbell had kept a journal throughout his life; Angie Lewis arranged for the journal to be donated to the UCSF Archives and Special Collections.

The 1985 Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day Parade was dedicated to Campbell, "for the work he did as a Person With AIDS, and as a symbol for all of us who continue to fight against the threat that AIDS poses to our survival."

In the 1993 docudrama TV movie And the Band Played On, adapted from Randy Shilts's book of the same name about the early days of the AIDS crisis, Campbell was played by Donal Logue. Campbell was portrayed by Kevin McHale in the 2017 docudrama miniseries When We Rise written by Dustin Lance Black to chronicle the gay rights movement. The name "Bobbi Campbell" and the names of several other key figures of the time were featured in the American Mock Trial Association's 2007–08 National Case Problem, albeit in a fictional case, unrelated to Campbell's life.