Bobbi Campbell

Bobbi Campbell
Bobbi Campbell (left), with his lover Bobby Hilliard, on the cover of Newsweek, August 8, 1983
Born	Robert Boyle Campbell, Jr. (1952-01-28)January 28, 1952 Columbus, Georgia
Died	August 15, 1984(1984-08-15) (aged 32) San Francisco, California
Cause of death	Cryptosporidiosis, resulting from AIDS
Resting place	New Tacoma Cemetery, Tacoma, Washington
Nationality	American
Other names	"KS poster boy" "AIDS poster boy"
Occupation	Public health nurse
Known for	AIDS activism, co-writing the Denver Principles

Bobbi Campbell (born Robert Boyle Campbell Jr., January 28, 1952 – August 15, 1984) was a public health nurse and an early United States AIDS activist. In September 1981, 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 living with what was to become known as AIDS. In 1983, he co-wrote the Denver Principles, the defining manifesto of the People With AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement, which he had co-founded the previous year. Appearing on the cover of Newsweek and being interviewed on national news reports, Campbell raised the national profile of the AIDS crisis among heterosexuals and provided a recognizable, optimistic, human face of the epidemic for affected communities.

Born in Georgia in 1952 and raised in Tacoma, Washington, he gained a degree in nursing from the University of Washington. Having been in the initial wave of gay liberation in Seattle, 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, which had become a center for the LGBT community over the previous few years. By 1981, he enrolled in a training program at University of California, San Francisco, to become an adult health nurse practitioner, with a view to focusing on healthcare in the gay and lesbian community.

Starting with a case of shingles in February 1981, Bobbi Campbell suffered a succession of unusual illnesses, including leukopenia later that summer. After hiking the Pinnacles National Monument with his boyfriend in September that year, he noticed on his feet lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma (KS), then thought of as a rare cancer of elderly Jewish men but with alarming numbers of cases appearing in California and New York and now known to be closely associated with AIDS. He was formally diagnosed as having KS by dermatologist Marcus Conant on October 8, 1981, in what would become Conant's first diagnosis of a patient with AIDS; Campbell brought Conant a rose every year to commemorate the anniversary of his diagnosis.