The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America -P. Renfro

East End Books Ptown presents: The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America w/Paul Renfro - July 18th at 6pm. Provincetown.

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 Renfro is an associate professor of history and an affiliate faculty member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Florida State University. He is the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). Renfro is currently writing two books. The first focuses on the 1979–81 Atlanta youth murders, and the second will explore the 1998 slaying of Matthew Shepard. Both books will be published by Liveright, a division of W. W. Norton & Company.

An illuminating addition to AIDS history. Renfro reveals how the personal charisma and resiliency Ryan White showed in his fight for life was used to create a false division between so-called innocent and guilty people with AIDS, and how this, in turn, furthered cliches about white working-class people and homophobia. 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

A vibrant look at the dangerous narratives of innocence, power, and celebrity that emanated from one teenager's life. Whether or not you grew up with the media accounts of Ryan White's battle, this book will force you to question the frameworks and silences in the struggle for health care, compassion, and justice for people living with HIV and AIDS. A must-read for anyone who wishes to live in a world where all are cared for and cared about, regardless of who they are."--Marcia Chatelain, author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America

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