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 Via the Online Searchable Obituary Database of the GLBT Historical Society and posting photos of his KS lesions to help other San Franciscans know what to look for,Interview with Helen Schietinger, nurse coordinator of UCSF's first AIDS clinic, on January 30, 1995, by Sally Smith Hughes — in as well as helping write the first San Francisco safer sex manual, Play Fair!.Interview with Helen Schietinger, nurse coordinator of UCSF's first AIDS clinic, on January 30, 1995, by Sally Smith Hughes — in
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, the defining manifesto of the People With AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement. Appearing on the cover of Newsweek and being interviewed on national news reports, Via the Online Searchable Obituary Database of the GLBT Historical Society Campbell raised the national profile of the AIDS crisis among heterosexuals and provided a recognizable face of the epidemic for affected communities. He also lobbied Margaret Heckler, Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Reagan administration over both practical issues and stigmatising medical practices affecting people with AIDS. 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 and raised in Tacoma, Washington, 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, while being politically active in Seattle during the city's initial wave of gay liberation in the 1970s. 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."Mentioned in an interview with Tom Richards by Charlie Fuchs and Larry Knopp of the Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project in July 2000, cited in a footnote from page 299 of Atkins's book Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging.
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 had 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. Cited in Wright (2013), Am J Pub Health.
Diagnosis and local activism Starting with a case of shingles in February 1981, Audio embedded in: 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 City and now known to be closely associated with AIDS. He was formally diagnosed as having KS by dermatologist Marcus Conant on October 8, 1981. This would become Conant's first diagnosis of a patient with what would become known as AIDS; Campbell brought Conant a rose every year to commemorate the anniversary of his diagnosis.
While the New York Native was printing several stories about the "gay cancer" beginning to make its way round the city, with detailed medical writing by Lawrence D. Mass, a gay physician and psychiatrist, the San Francisco gay press largely ignored the nascent epidemic. Campbell's interest in educational outreach and professional interest in gay sexual health combined to inspire him to raise awareness himself. As a result, in October 1981, the same month he was diagnosed, Campbell put pictures of his KS lesions in the window of the Star Pharmacy at 498 Castro Street, urging men with similar lesions to seek medical attention. In doing so, he created and displayed San Francisco's first AIDS poster.
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". In his first article, on December 10, 1981, he proclaimed himself to be the "KS Poster Boy" (later "AIDS Poster Boy"), becoming the first person in the US to publicly disclose that he was suffering from "gay cancer", writing:
This article turned into a regular column in the Sentinel—and syndicated in newspapers serving the LGBT community nationwide—describing his experiences. On January 10, 1982, Campbell was interviewed by Alfred for The Gay Life program on KSAN-FM, with doctors Marcus Conant and Paul Volberding; the interview has been archived by the GLBT Historical Society.The GLBT Historical Society's "Gayback Machine " search does not produce persistent URLs, but searching for "Bobbi Campbell" in 1981 will bring up the appropriate episode, dated 1982-01-10 and captioned "Marcus Conant, M.D. and Paul Volberding, M.D., U.C. San Francisco Medical School; Bobbi Campbell, Kaposi's Sarcoma cancer patient." It is also available offline as Reel 118, Box 16 from Randy Alfred subject files and sound recordings, collection 1991-24, GLBT Historical Society.
Campbell joined the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at the time of the health crisis in early 1982; in his "sister" persona as Sister Florence Nightmare RN, he co-authored the first San Francisco safer sex manual, Play Fair!, written in plain sex-positive language, using humor to leaven practical advice. The Sisters were early awareness and fundraisers for the oncoming AIDS pandemic and continue to raise awareness of sexual health; many Orders regularly pass out condoms and participate in events to educate people on sexual health issues.
In February 1982, on the invitation of Conant and Volberding, Campbell and Dan Turner, who had just himself been diagnosed with KS, attended what turned out to be the founding meeting of the KS/AIDS Foundation, which later became the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, of which Campbell then served on the board. Campbell also became involved with the Shanti Project (which moved from its original focus, supporting people with terminal cancer, to help provide emotional support to people diagnosed with AIDS coming to terms with death)Interview with Michael Helquist, journalist of the early AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, on March 24, 1995, by Sally Smith Hughes — in Interview with Helen Schietinger, nurse coordinator of UCSF's first AIDS clinic, on January 30, 1995, by Sally Smith Hughes — in and persuaded reluctant physicians to allow him to meet and counsel AIDS patients at Conant's KS clinic.
The People With AIDS Movement
In 1982, Campbell and Turner convened a meeting that spawned People With AIDS San Francisco, founding the "People With AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement" or PWA Movement, rapidly followed by Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz, authors of How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, in New York City. As well as arguing that people with AIDS should expect to participate actively in the response to the AIDS crisis, the PWA Movement rejected the terms "AIDS victim" and "AIDS patient," as Campbell explained in interviews, for example:
With other members of People With AIDS San Francisco, Campbell organized the first candlelight march to bring attention to the plight of people with AIDS and to remember those who had died of AIDS. On May 2, 1983, they marched behind a banner of "Fighting for our lives" for the first time, drawing around 10,000 people. On May 23, 1983, People With AIDS San Francisco voted to send Campbell and Turner to the Fifth National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference, at which the Second National AIDS Forum would be held.
Campbell and his colleagues' push to persuade service organizations to sponsor gay men with AIDS to attend the Conference was a key moment in the People With AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement. Michael Callen subsequently wrote that, despite a growing sense of being patronised, it had not occurred to the AIDS-diagnosed New Yorkers to "be anything more than the passive recipients of the genuine care and concern"; once people with AIDS realised they could advocate for themselves, lessons learned from the feminist and the civil rights movement helped with a more-widespread acceptance of the notion of self-empowerment.
The national PWA movement came fully together when Campbell took charge of a discussion where, with Callen, Turner and others,Those in attendance included:
From San Francisco: Bobbi Campbell, Dan Turner (1948–90), Bobby Reynolds (died 1987) and Michael Helquist representing his recently-deceased partner Mark Feldman From New York City: Phil Lanzaratta (died 1986), Michael Callen (1955–93), Richard Berkowitz, Artie Felson, Bill Burke, Bob Cecchi (1942–91), Matthew Sarner M.S.W., Tom Nasrallah From Los Angeles: Gar Traynor Plus "someone named Elbert from Kansas City by way of Houston; and one individual from Denver whose name we unfortunately cannot recall". (See "Remembering Bobbi Campbell" from The Daily Seyahatname and "A History of the PWA Self-Empowerment Movement" by Callen and Turner.) he drafted the Denver Principles, the defining manifesto of the PWA Movement, which, again, start with the rejection of the terms "victim" and "patient." Campbell and the San Franciscans had different thoughts on the origin (etiology) of AIDS from Callen and the New Yorkers—Campbell described as "crazy" the idea that AIDS was caused by promiscuity, a perspective espoused by Callen and Berkowitz (and their physician Joseph Sonnabend) at the time Linked from —and the Denver Principles represent a "careful synthesis" of these two positions:As Joe Wright explained in footnote 63 to his 2013 article in American Journal of Public Health: "For example, the 'recommendations for all people' would have been easy points of agreement; the last of the 'recommendations for people with AIDS,' on sexual ethics, underlines their agreements about safe sex but without delving into the language of 'promiscuity' or its rebuttals; and the second recommendation for health care providers appears to be a gentle assertion of Callen's concerns about etiology, while the third likely reflects Campbell's own approach to how to be a clinician, and would have been the sort of instruction a progressive nursing educator might have given at the time."
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.