Bobbi Campbell was the first person in the United States to publicly disclose that he had what was then called "gay cancer," and he spent the rest of his life putting a face on the epidemic. Born in 1952 and raised in Tacoma, Washington, he studied in Seattle before moving to San Francisco, where he worked as a registered nurse and was in graduate school at the University of California, San Francisco, training to become an adult health nurse practitioner.

In October 1981, at 29, Campbell was diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma, the 16th person in San Francisco to receive that diagnosis, months before the disease had a name. He photographed his own lesions and posted the pictures in the window of Star Pharmacy in the Castro District with a notice urging men with similar spots to see a doctor, the city's first AIDS poster. On December 10, 1981, he published the first of a series of columns in the San Francisco Sentinel, a gay…