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9781469680842 Academic Inspection Copy

The Life and Death of Ryan White

AIDS and Inequality in America
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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.
Paul M. Renfro is associate professor of history at Florida State University and author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State.
"Paul M. Renfro's excellent new book is part of an equally worthy and important revisionist tradition. . . . Such works seek to deconstruct the dominant myths that were made to stand in for a more complete understanding of the epidemic--and reveal what such narratives have long occluded."--The New Republic "Thoughtful . . . . A compact and knowledgeable study of the "poster boy" of the AIDS epidemic."--Kirkus Reviews "When it comes to media coverage of HIV, few Americans have garnered as many headlines as Ryan White. But there is a difference between the person and the cultural figure . . . . [Renfro] plumbs the depths of those contrasts [and] puts the late AIDS activist's life into context."--POZ Magazine
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