The life and death of Ryan White AIDS and inequality in America

Paul M. Renfro, 1987-

Book - 2024

"In the 1980s, as HIV/AIDS ravaged queer communities and communities of color in the United States and beyond, a straight white teenager named Ryan White emerged as the face of the epidemic. Diagnosed with hemophilia at birth, Ryan contracted HIV through contaminated blood products. In 1985, he became a household name after he was barred from attending his Indiana middle school. As Ryan appeared on nightly news broadcasts and graced the covers of popular magazines, he was embraced by music icons and well-known athletes, achieving a curious kind of stardom. Analyzing his struggle and celebrity, Paul M. Renfro's powerful biography grapples with the contested meanings of Ryan's life, death, and afterlives. As Renfro argues, Ryan...'s fight to attend school forced the American public to reckon with prevailing misconceptions about the AIDS epidemic. Yet his story also reinforced the hierarchies at the heart of the AIDS crisis. Because the 'innocent' Ryan had contracted HIV 'through no fault of his own,' as many put it, his story was sometimes used to blame presumably 'guilty' populations for spreading the virus. Reexamining Ryan's story through this lens, Renfro reveals how the consequences of this stigma continue to pervade policy and cultural understandings of HIV/AIDS today"--

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  • Blood and blame
  • Normal activities
  • AIDS victim now a celebrity
  • The "country hicks" of Kokomo
  • The funeral
  • In Ryan's name
  • Whose CARE?
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Reexamining the life and times of an "innocent" teenager. Ryan White (1971-1990) was born with hemophilia and diagnosed with AIDS in 1984, during a time when those with the disease were vilified and shunned. He was in one of the so-called 4Hs, or "risk groups": homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. Only those groups could contract HIV/AIDS--that was the uneducated perception of the time. We now know differently, of course, and it is partly because of people like White that the stigma associated with AIDS has dissipated. In his thoughtful overview, historian Renfro rightly notes that White's case received attention due to White's status as "young, white, midwestern, heterosexual, middle-class, photogenic, 'normal,' and 'innocent,' media narratives [that] helped undermine reigning ideas of HIV/AIDS as solely a 'gay plague' or an illness for 'junkies.'" Ryan's death led to a star-studded funeral, an all-too-common political/cultural rift between both sides of the aisle, and the implementation of the Ryan White CARE Act, which was vehemently opposed by Republican Senator Jesse Helms, who "downplayed the severity and scale of the HIV/AIDS crisis." Decades later, Renfro argues, some things have not changed. In particular, he cites former Vice President Mike Pence, previously the governor of Indiana, where White was born: "Pence's sordid public health record reveals the continuities between HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 and illustrates both the continued relevance and the limits of the Ryan White story." A compact and knowledgeable study of the "poster boy" of the AIDS epidemic. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.