After contracting AIDS through a tainted clotting factor, hemophiliac Ryan White, at age 13, confronted the ignorance and bigotry all around him with strength and determination. The one woman who stood beside him throughout his ordeal, his mother, Jeanne White, now tells the uplifting story of their struggle to the bitter end, when Ryan died in 1990. of photos.

Thirteen-year-old Ryan White contracted AIDS through tainted Factor VIII, administered for his hemophilia, and became nationally known through his family's fight against the bigotry and ignorance his illness revealed in their community. Now, Ryan's mother, Jeanne White, who helped her son discover the strength to overcome prejudice and the courage to face death, tells her inspiring story. of photos.

Set in the 1980s against a backdrop of the AIDS crisis, deindustrialization and the Reagan era, this book tells the story of one individual's defiant struggle against his community--the city of Kokomo, Indiana. At the same time as teenage AIDS patient Ryan White bravely fought against the intolerance of his hometown to attend public school, one of Kokomo's largest employers, Continental Steel, filed for bankruptcy, significantly raising the stakes of the fight for the city's livelihood and national image. This book tells the story of a fearful time in our recent history, as people in the heartland endured massive layoffs, coped with a lethal new disease and discovered a legacy of toxic waste. Now, some 30 years after Ryan White's death, this book offers a fuller accounting of the challenges that one city reckoned with during this tumultuous period.

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.

Pat Broadbent describes her life with her adopted daughter Hydeia, who had contracted AIDS at birth. Despite a dire prognosis, Hydeia has grown into a prominent AIDS activist and a typical teenager.

After one wild night out, Veronica McKenly and her friends- Connor, Stacey, Michael, Frank, and Erin- return home to discover some abnormal activity on the bank of the town's creek. After some investigation, they inadvertently find themselves at the center of the town's secular controversy. The Church that once embraced its members is rapidly being split apart by Father Krath's extremists, who are desperately seeking to right everyone's wrongs. Veronica and her friends are among the first to bear witness to the devastations, as the town "sinners" soon learn the true meaning of redemption.