page_title: Bobbi Campbell
section_title: Death and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Bobbi Campbell / Death and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of the AIDS quilt in front of the Washington Monument
context_page_description: Robert Boyle "Bobbi" Campbell Jr. 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 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.
  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, Campbell raised the national profile of the AIDS crisis among heterosexuals and provided a recognizable face of the epidemic for affected communities.
context_section_description: A few days after the DNC speech, another case of shingles left scars across his head; within weeks he was hospitalized with cryptosporidiosis and subsequently cryptococcal meningitis. At noon on August 15, 1984, exactly a month after his DNC speech and after 2 days on life support in intensive care, Campbell died at San Francisco General Hospital when his blood pressure dropped rapidly. His parents and his partner Bobby Hilliard were by his side. Campbell was 32 years old and had lived for over 3½ years with AIDS.
  Two days later, the city closed Castro Street for Campbell's funeral cortège, where 1,000 people gathered to remember Campbell. A "reverential chant" by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence was followed by several speeches, including Conant and Hilliard as well as Campbell's parents and local performers (including Lea DeLaria and Holly Near) and an audio recording of Paul Boneberg introducing Campbell at the National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights a month earlier. In his August 23 obituary in the Bay Area Reporter, Allen White described the event as "exactly what should be expected to remember a hero in a crisis." The Gay Life radio show on KSAN-FM, presented by Randy Alfred, Campbell's editor at the Sentinel, covered his memorial across two weeks, on September 16 and 23, 1984. 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 2015, the group "Let's Kick ASS—AIDS Survivor Syndrome" were looking to have a commemorative plaque erected at the site of the Star Pharmacy (now a Walgreens), where Campbell first put up images of his KS lesions. As of 2016, Bobbi Campbell is memorialized on 4 separate panels of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.
  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.
caption: NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt in front of the Washington Monument
exif: {}