On August 8, 1983, Newsweek Magazine featured nurse Bobbi Campbell and his partner, Bobby Hilliard, on its cover under the headline “Gay America.” This landmark issue provided one of the nation’s first glimpses of a person living with AIDS. Campbell was the 16th man in San Francisco diagnosed with Kaposi sarcoma, a rare skin cancer, and he became the first American to disclose his diagnosis publicly.

Born in 1952 and raised in Tacoma, Campbell relocated to Seattle in the early 1970s to attend the University of Washington. During this time,…