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

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

Renfro applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America, and reported the following:

The ninety-ninth page of my book includes the tail end of the introduction for chapter 6, which focuses on the passage of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act in 1990. As Ryan White lay dying in an Indianapolis hospital in April 1990, the US Congress decided to dedicate the bill in his honor. But Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) had actually introduced the CARE Act the previous month, before Ryan had fallen gravely ill for the last time. The rest of the page reveals how certain politicians characterized the CARE Act before the US Congress had attached Ryan’s name to the bill.

While the first few lines of page 99 offer a taste of my main argument concerning the myriad political and cultural uses of Ryan White’s name, image, and story, the rest of the page doesn’t directly address my main claims. (It does provide some important background information, however.)

Although this page deals very little with Ryan White, obviously the main subject of my book, it does spotlight some of the other ways in which politicians and activists discussed HIV/AIDS in the early 1990s. Specifically, page 99 explores the rhetorical “de-gaying” of AIDS, which served “to weaken the association between AIDS and presumably deviant populations, particularly gay men and intravenous drug users,” I write. “In one sense, this maneuver accurately reflected the fact that HIV could be transmitted in a variety of ways,” I note on the bottom of page 99 and the beginning of page 100. Yet, “efforts to ‘de-gay’ AIDS arguably reinforced dominant hierarchies of victimhood by spotlighting more ‘sympathetic’ or ‘respectable’ subjects,” I write on page 101. “Moreover, this tactic obscured the reality that MSM [men who have sex with men] (particularly in communities of color) were, in fact, disproportionately burdened by HIV/AIDS.” This discussion, which begins on page 99 and spills onto the next few pages, remains at the heart of contemporary HIV/AIDS prevention and education efforts, which often fail to reach communities understood to be less vulnerable to HIV infection.

Learn more about The Life and Death of Ryan White at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue