This Week in Queer History

The Straight White Boy Who Accidentally Saved Gay Lives

This Week in Queer History

Show Notes

Ryan White never asked to be the face of AIDS in America. He was a teenager from Kokomo, Indiana, who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion used to treat his hemophilia. He was thirteen years old. And when his school tried to bar him from attending class, his family fought back, and in doing so, forced a terrified nation to confront the myths it had built around the epidemic. Ryan was straight, white, young, and from the heartland. For a country that had been telling itself AIDS was some...

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