Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America

The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America

Renfro, Paul M.

Paperback

Series: Gender and American Culture

Biographies GeneralMedical ReferenceGeneral Gender Studies

ISBN10: 1469680858
ISBN13: 9781469680859
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: Oct 22 2024
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.69
Height: 0.54 Width: 6.24 Depth: 9.20
Language: English
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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