Lewis, Angie

Biographical Information

Angie Lewis was one of the major nurse educators working with AIDS education for health professionals and the greater community from the first rumors of a new gay disease through its growing presence in the heterosexual community. Lewis worked specifically in AIDS education; she did not treat AIDS patients. She did this work for approximately 13 years from 1981-1994. Unlike many others active in the early AIDS advocacy community, Lewis came into the work as a health professional, and not as a rights activist. Lewis served on the Kaposi's Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation (later the San Francisco AIDS Foundation) Board from 1983-1985. She also spoke at, and worked on organizing committees of, a number of AIDS conferences and symposia, as well as lecturing for UCSF classes and community groups. Lewis retired from nursing in 1994 to move to Sonoma County and open a restaurant with her life partner.

Carole Angela "Angie" Lewis was born July 19, 1944, in Adrian, Michigan, and she grew up in Clearwater, Florida. She received her nursing diploma from Charity Hospital School of Nursing in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1965. It was in New Orleans that she met her life partner Shirley Palmisano. After working in New Orleans and Florida, she and Palmisano moved to Seattle, Washington, where Lewis worked as Staff Nurse and Assistant Head Nurse in the Perinatal Unit at the University of Washington Hospital, while working on her B.S.N (1971). After moving to San Francisco bay area upon graduation, she continued to work in the perinatal field (at Alta Bates in Oakland and Moffitt Hospital at UCSF). During this time she also enrolled at UCSF and received her master's degree in perinatal nursing with a minor in human sexuality (1979). In 1980 she left perinatal nursing to be Nurse Educator in Nursing Education and Research at Moffitt-Long Hospital at UCSF (1980-1986).

In the context of her Nursing Education job she was approached to coordinate a workshop at UCSF on gay male sexuality (1981). The workshop led to her attending a Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights (BAPHR) Conference in June 1981, where she heard a talk by Alvin Friedman-Kien that described a new outbreak of Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) that was killing gay men. She attended Marcus Conant's first rounds on KS at UCSF and became involved in his Thursday morning KS Study Group. .

Lewis immediately became more involved with education and outreach about this new disease. She attended the conference in Houston in 1982 where a new name for what was then called GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) was discussed. She organized the first nursing conference on KS and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) in June 1982. Lewis championed patient participation including presentations from people with the disease, which put a face on the disease. Lewis met Bobbi Campbell, another nurse and early AIDS patient around 1982. They presented together at the American Nurses Association Meeting (ANA) in New Orleans in 1984. Later Lewis was instrumental in Bobbi Campbell's journal being donated to UCSF. She was the editor and author of two sections of Nursing Care of the Person with AIDS/ARC, Aspen Publications, 1988.

Most of the information in this section was adapted from: Angie Lewis, "Nurse Educator in the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic," an oral history conducted in 1995 and 1996 by Sally Smith Hughes in The AIDS Epidemic in San Francisco: The Response of the Nursing Profession, 1981-1984, Volume II, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1999.