Renfro writes incisively about the speed with which Ryan became a symbol, both “exceptional” and “normal.” Unlike the archetypal person with AIDS (a gay man, an intravenous drug user, a sex worker, etc.), Ryan was white, charismatic, presumed to be straight, and lacking in social or sexual baggage. He was the kind of kid with whom a great many could sympathize. Members of the public, moved by Ryan’s “innocence,” flooded Indiana with letters: “You don’t deserve to have that disease,” a teenager in the Philippines wrote to him. The broader public excoriated the school officials for his exclusion: One suburban resident wrote to superintendent Smith “heartsick over what you’ve done to this boy,” who’d contracted HIV “through no fault of his own.”
Such sentiments served a particular political function: They reduced the crisis to “an issue of personal responsibility, morality, and kindness,” Renfro writes. The exclusion of Ryan White came to be understood as a struggle over whether individuals were willing to treat the sick with compassion, rather than a conflict over public health funding or policy. Noting the popularity of “color-blind” movies of this era (such as Glory and The Long Walk Home), Renfro adds that the narrative surrounding White “reflected a broader late twentieth-century tendency to reckon with injustice on narrow, individualized terms.”
It was easy for many across the country, and those in the press, to blame the “hicks” and “rednecks” in Kokomo; it would have been far more difficult to grapple with how typical the people of Kokomo were for the time. Ryan was far from the only child excluded from school for having AIDS; calls for quarantine and vicious declarations of blame emanated from across the country. Yet retellings of Ryan’s travails reduced the story to a familiar morality tale; the made-for-television movie version even (inaccurately) portrayed some of his antagonistic Indiana neighbors speaking with a Southern twang.
Following months of legal fights, the White family had triumphed in the legal arena, and Ryan was allowed back in school, albeit subject to extreme measures meant to assuage fears. He had to use separate bathroom facilities (“cleaned daily”), eat only with disposable utensils, and his trash would be “double-bagged and incinerated.” Nonetheless, 42 percent of the student body stayed home the day of his return, and some students picketed. Eventually, the parents of more than 20 of his classmates launched a breakaway school in a former American Legion hall. The White family eventually relocated from Kokomo to Cicero, Indiana—a move that many in the media depicted as a neat journey from a community mired in ignorance to one bathed in the light of kindness, despite the two towns’ similarities (both, for instance, had historical links to the Ku Klux Klan).