Flyer, “Bring Your Grief and Rage About AIDS to a Political Funeral in Washington, D.C.” October 11, 1992.
Several years ago, I was asked to give a presentation for World AIDS Day while working as a sexual health educator at a youth center. Popular histories of AIDS activism were in vogue, such as David France’s documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012), which focused on the heroic activism of educated, economically-stable white gay men. I wanted to tell a different history: one that emphasized the diverse coalitions that AIDS brought together, which included not only gay men but injection drug users, women of color, unhoused people, and youth. This story, I thought, was not only more accurate, but would resonate with the queer, working-class, and often undocumented youth of color who came to the center.
At the last minute, however, I was called away to a meeting, leaving the presentation to a colleague. I remember feeling my stomach drop the next day, when my co-worker explained that she had changed the presentation to focus on Ryan White, a young white boy with hemophilia from Kokomo, Indiana, who became the “poster boy” for AIDS after contracting the disease through a blood transfusion. White would gain national attention when his public school barred him from attending, concerned that he might somehow infect other students. My co-worker thought the youth would be inspired by the bravery of White, who used his experiences of discrimination to humanize people living with AIDS (in the terminology of the period, PWAs). I thought, conversely, that White would be alienating, as he was a symbol of a pernicious discourse that divided PWAs into “innocent” and “guilty” victims based on social categories such as race and sexuality.
My anecdote is illustrative of recent popular and scholarly debates about how to properly narrate the history of AIDS. Books, such as Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani’s AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (2020) and Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show (2021), have tried to decenter white gay men as the dramatis personae of the AIDS crisis and to place greater emphasis on the role of women, people of color, and drug users in the AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s.
Historian Paul M. Renfro’s new book, The Life and Times of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (2024), contributes to these discussions by analyzing Ryan White both as a flesh-and-blood historical actor and as a discursive figurehead for the epidemic. While focusing on Ryan White risks once again reifying a whitewashed narrative about the epidemic, Renfro is concerned with how White’s racial, gender, and sexual normality helped “undermine reigning ideas of HIV/AIDS as solely a ‘gay plague’ or an illness for ‘junkies’,” and hardened a boundary between patients who were deserving and undeserving of infection (2). Renfro’s goal is to re-narrate the Ryan White story so that “sympathy and love extend not only to the ‘innocent’” (136).
Renfro, an associate professor of history at Florida State University, brings a unique lens to HIV/AIDS history as a scholar of childhood. His previous book, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the Carceral State, examined moral panics about missing and murdered children in the United States in the 1980s, connecting these events to the rise of mass incarceration and neoliberalism during the same period. Renfro continues this line of media analysis in The Life and Times of Ryan White, showing how “racialized notions of childhood innocence and exceptional victimhood” disseminated by the media shaped public understanding and policy about HIV/AIDS (7).
Renfro’s monograph is organized into seven chapters. The first four concentrate on White’s life, including his diagnosis, court battles with the school system, and his growing celebrity status. Chapters 5 through 7 shift their focus to the mobilization of Ryan White as a political symbol. The fifth chapter, for instance, compares White’s funeral, which was attended by public figures and celebrities like First Lady Barbara Bush, Michael Jackson, and Elton John, to the “political funerals” organized by the ACT UP/New York affinity group the Marys. While White’s funeral was a dignified event of national mourning, the Marys turned PWA funerals into a protest, linking the death of friends and activists to organized political abandonment. In 1992, activists turned these political funerals into a national event, organizing the “Ashes Action” referenced in the above cover image, in which they threw the cremains of PWAs onto the lawn of the White House.
In chapters 6 and 7, Renfro examines the congressional debates over the landmark funding bill that bears White’s name: the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, which was passed in 1990. As a “normal” white boy from the Midwest, White was a politically safe symbol to rally support for AIDS funding. Opponents to the bill, such as Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, nonetheless accused “the homosexual AIDS lobby” of taking advantage of an innocent child to promote sodomy and sexual irresponsibility (97). While the CARE Act is usually celebrated as a major bipartisan accomplishment, Renfro argues that the emphasis on White “limited the scope and scale of the legislation” (110). In order to receive the funding, for instance, states were required to create mechanisms that criminalized HIV transmission and reinforced stereotypes of PWAs as murderous and monstrous threats to society.
The Life and Times of Ryan White is a slim and accessible volume suitable for undergraduate courses in queer studies, media studies, and the history of medicine. The book is meticulously researched, drawing on archival sources including the personal papers of politicians, previously conducted oral histories, and historical newspapers. While some of the early chapters are repetitive in terms of their arguments about White’s racial innocence and exceptionalism, this makes them ideal for use as independent reading assignments.
Debates about how to accurately narrate the history of the HIV/AIDS crisis, such as the one with which I opened this review, show no sign of abating. However, Renfro’s valuable study offers a warning to today’s activists regarding the ongoing resurrection of harmful narratives about queer people as vectors of disease. In the epilogue, for instance, Renfro points to the resurgence of the innocent/guilty binary during the 2022 outbreak of mpox among gay men. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to hear a case that pits religious liberty against access to preventative HIV medications through the Affordable Care Act seems likewise poised to restage another culture war between conservative religious groups and “wanton” homosexuals. Renfro’s book shows that while the appeal to safe symbols like Ryan White in the struggle for health justice may be politically expedient, it also risks doing harm to the communities most in need of support.
Works Cited: Renfro, Paul M. The Life and Times of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2024).
Image Credit: Flyer, “Bring Your Grief and Rage About AIDS to a Political Funeral in Washington, D.C.” October 11, 1992 Source: Wiki Media Commons.
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