LGBT and AIDS Quilt

Robert “Bobbi” Campbell is a U.S. AIDS activist who became the 16th person in San Francisco and the first LGBT person in the country to publicly come out and be diagnosed with AIDS. He also co-founded a social movement with Dan Turner, who is diagnosed with HIV, known as, People With AIDS (PWA) Self-Empowerment. The goal of it was to spread the word that people with AIDS or HIV should recognize the people who died due to the disease and to keep living their lives as normal and independent as anyone else until the end. The quilt consisted of the regular red and white stripes like the American flag and had the front cover of an articled named “Newsweek” and had a picture of Bobbi Campbell and his partner, Bobbi Hilliard. To the right of it is a blue and white shirt where it lists one of Bobbi’s most memorable quotes, “Everyone should have the right to live and die with dignity.”

Bobbi was a huge impact when it came to encouraging those with AIDS or HIV to find a reason to live life normally even with aids. His beliefs brought many people to believe that the moment that they are diagnosed with AIDS/HIV, their lives are not over and that they will not die anytime soon. Although the movement did not specifically mention LGBT people, there were multiple people influenced by the idea mainly because it was co-founded by two gay men. I honestly hoped that discrimination would not have anything to do with AIDS and HIV and that it was just a general concept, but clearly, I was wrong. I will be splitting the ideas and relations of LGBTQ rights and the conflicts of HIV/AIDs as well as my conclusion into separate posts. In each post, I will explain the ideals of the topic and make my interpretation from there and then add my conclusion.