Robert Boyle "Bobbi" Campbell Jr. (January 28, 1952 – August 15, 1984)[1] was a public health nurse and an early United States AIDS activist.

By 1981, he had enrolled in a training program at University of California, San Francisco, to become an adult health nurse practitioner,[22] with a view to focusing on healthcare in the gay and lesbian community.

[24] After hiking the Pinnacles National Monument with his boyfriend in September that year, he noticed on his feet lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma (KS),[17][24] then thought of as a rare cancer of elderly Jewish men but with alarming numbers of cases appearing in California and New York City[3][25] and now known to be closely associated with AIDS.

[26] 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".

[4][26] Michael Callen subsequently wrote that, despite a growing sense of being patronised,[11] it had not occurred to the AIDS-diagnosed New Yorkers to "be anything more than the passive recipients of the genuine care and concern";[4][26] 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.

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.

"[2][13][40]—only the second time an openly gay man had appeared on the cover of a mass-market news magazine,[2][40] albeit with Hilliard identified as Campbell's "friend.

[14] At the first Clinical Nursing Conference on AIDS, in Washington, D.C., on October 7, 1983, Campbell presented a poster session, "dressed for the part" in white pants and a lab coat.

[14] With Artie Felson, he shouted his disgust at the "creepy" policy from the back of the room[14] and arranged an impromptu meeting of the National Association of People With AIDS, where they decided to pay visit to Heckler at her office in Bethesda, Maryland.

[14] In January 1984, when Dan White, the assassin of gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, was due to be paroled, Campbell and Hilliard stood outside Soledad State Prison.

[15] Campbell told the crowd that he had hugged his boyfriend on the cover of Newsweek, and then kissed Hilliard on stage "to show Middle America that gay love is beautiful," criticizing the Christian right for using scripture to justify their homophobia.

[15] After criticising the lack of progress being made by the Reagan administration, he held 15 seconds of silence for the 2,000 who had died of AIDS at that point "and [for] those who will die before this is over," before laying out a series of concerns for politicians to address—including increased funding for both research and support services and a warning of the potential for discrimination with the advent of a test for HTLV-3 (now known as HIV)—and appealing to all candidates in the upcoming elections to meet with people with AIDS.

[2] While the rumors and fear of AIDS had reached a mainstream audience, the facts had not yet, so Campbell was placed in a glass booth, with technicians refusing to come near him to wire up microphones for the interview.

[16] At noon on August 15, 1984,[16] exactly a month after his DNC speech and after two days on life support in intensive care,[6] Campbell died at San Francisco General Hospital[16] when his blood pressure dropped rapidly.

"[13] 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.

"[48] 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.

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.