of California, San Francisco, to become an adult health nurse practitioner, with a view to focusing on healthcare in the gay and lesbian community. Diagnosis and local activism 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 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by Alfred for The Gay Life program on KSAN-FM, with doctors Marcus Conant and Paul Volberding; the interview has been archived by the GLBT Historical Society. Campbell joined the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at the time of the health