Author Talk: Paul M. Renfro's "The Life and Death of Ryan White"

Join Tomorrow Bookstore for an author conversation with Paul M. Renfro on his new novel The Life and Death of Ryan White: Aids and Inequality in America.

About The Life and Death of Ryan White: Aids and Inequality in America:

The teenager who brought the AIDS epidemic into living rooms across America.

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.

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.

"An illuminating addition to AIDS history...Thoughtful and helpful in understanding how standing tropes of stigma were created and maintained."—Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993

"For those of us who lived through or study the early AIDS epidemic, Ryan White looms large. This compelling and engaging book contends with and adds depth to his familiar story. A book of great consequence."—Katie Batza, author of Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s

About Paul M. Renfro :

Paul M. Renfro is an associate professor of history at Florida State University and author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State.

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