February 12 2026, 08:15 
In the early 1980s, as AIDS ravaged the gay community in the U.S., two people emerged as the first “poster boy” and “poster mom” of the epidemic — even as celebrities shied away from cause and people who were HIV-positive were hesitant to publicly disclose their diagnosis.
In December 1981, Bobbi Campbell, a nurse and gay rights activist in San Francisco, published the first of what would become a series of column in the city’s bi-weekly newspaper The Sentinel. “I’m Bobbi Campbell, and I have gay cancer,” he wrote, according to The Body.
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As, Dr. Bill Lipsky noted in his 2022 remembrance for the San Francisco Bay Times, Campbell had been diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) the previous October, becoming just the 16th person in the city to be diagnosed with the rare form of skin cancer that was suddenly popping up among young men. During those early days of the epidemic, before doctors identified HIV and AIDS, patients like Campbell were described as having “gay cancer.”
According to Lipsky, following his diagnosis, Campbell parlayed his experience as a nurse specializing in gay health issues into raising awareness about the so-called “gay cancer.”
“I’ve become so active in publicizing KS and the other gay illnesses to friends and media that I’ve taken to referring to myself sardonically as the ‘Kaposi’s Sarcoma Poster Boy,’” Campbell wrote in that first Sentinel column, titled “I Will Survive.”
According to The Body, Campbell’s column marked the first time anyone in the U.S. publicly disclosed their diagnosis of what would come to be known as AIDS. True to his self-styled nickname, Campbell created a poster featuring images of his own KS lesions — it included contact information for a University of California, San Francisco center tracking the disease. He hung the poster in the window of a Castro pharmacy. That poster is widely believed to be the first HIV/AIDS public service announcement, according to The Body.
Between 1981 and his death in August 1984, Campbell would work tirelessly to raise awareness about AIDS. He helped organize the Castro Street Dog Show and Parade, likely the world’s first AIDS fundraiser. In 1982, he co-produced Play Fair!, one of the first safer sex brochures for gay men, by gay men to focus on AIDS prevention.
That same year, he appeared on CBS News in one of the first national TV news segments to address AIDS. In 1983, Campbell was part of a group of people with AIDS at the Fifth Annual Lesbian and Gay Health Conference in Denver, Colorado who developed The Denver Principles, essentially a bill of rights for AIDS patients and a summary of responsibilities for the healthcare providers who cared for them.
Later that same year, he appeared on the August 8 cover of Newsweek embracing his partner, Bobby Hilliard, under the headline: “Gay America: Sex, Politics and the Impact of AIDS.”
Campbell “was very passionate and could be very angry, but he was also very funny,” Jones told The Body in 2024. “He’s remembered most for fighting as hard as he could on every front right up until the last weeks of his life.”
Following his 1984 death, the 1985 San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Freedom Day Parade was dedicated to Campbell.
Around the same time, another champion took up Campbell’s torch, becoming the “poster mother” in a campaign promoting HIV/AIDS prevention.
To most people, Zelda Rubinstein is probably best remembered as Tangina Barrons, the diminutive psychic in 1982’s Poltergeist and its two sequels. But to gay men in the mid-1980s, she was “Mother,” the star of a series of ads and television commercials aimed at raising awareness about HIV/AIDS and safer sex practices.
The charming, tongue-in-cheek ads depicted the four-foot, three-inch Rubinstein, then around 51 years old, as a loving mother figure, advising her “sons” — played by well-muscled, and often shirtless, male models — to “play safely” with other boys.
Rubinstein may not have had quite the same public profile as Elizabeth Taylor — who would not throw the full force of her fame behind HIV/AIDS activism until mid-1985 — but her involvement in the campaign marked one of the first times a celebrity of any stature lent their star power to the cause.
“At a time when few celebrities were willing to speak up, Zelda’s participation was nearly as groundbreaking as the first AIDS Walk itself,” AIDS Walk Los Angeles founder Craig R. Miller told the Windy City Times following her 2010 death at the age of 76. “She helped make the issue one that was not only accepted but embraced by the entertainment industry.”
“I lost a friend to AIDS, one of the first public figures that died of AIDS,” Rubinstein once told The Advocate, according to CNN’s 2010 obituary. “I knew it was not the kind of disease that would stay in anybody’s backyard. It would climb the fences, get over the fences into all of our homes. It was not limited to one group of people.”
Rubinstein was fortunately able to continue her advocacy far longer than Campbell. According to the Windy City Times, she worked for years with the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, AIDS Project Los Angeles, and promoted AIDS Walks. In August 2009, just months before her death, she told The Advocate that she would still “do a fundraiser for this cause anywhere in the world.”
“She was one of the very first Hollywood celebrities to speak out, and she was undaunted by the stigma that surrounded both the disease and those who spoke openly about it,” AIDS Project Los Angeles CEO Craig E. Thompson told the Windy City Times in 2019. “She wanted to make a difference, and she did.”
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