The Life and Death of Ryan White

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.<br/><br/>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.