New Ryan White Book Highlights Indiana’s Mixed Legacy of Acceptance

[JI7]

In some ways, the recent furor over Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act echoed a heated discrimination debate from three decades ago, when the state was previously a battleground in the national culture wars: HIV/AIDS activist Ryan White’s struggle to attend public school.

As cases of HIV/AIDS started popping up across the country in the 1980s, the rhetoric used in some of the medical and political language of the time attacked victims and described the disease as exclusive to homosexuals and intravenous drug users. The Reagan Administration was slow to act, regarding AIDS as a disease that infected morally corrupt individuals: Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s communications director, called it “nature’s revenge on gay men.”

As absurd as Buchanan’s claim sounds today, negative perception and stereotyping were the reality for many HIV/AIDS patients of the time. That is, however, until the national media focused on discrimination against White—a 13-year-old who contracted HIV through treatment for hemophilia—in his hometown of Kokomo, Indiana. Suddenly, the epidemic couldn’t be dismissed as a curse; it had a human face, an average kid living in America’s heartland.

http://www.indianapolismonthly.com/arts-culture/ryan-white-book/

[MaggieD]

1. Mixed legacy of acceptance of what?

I lived there for 5 years in the mid-90s (as a gay person), and still have family there. I never saw the slightest resemblance to acceptance of GLBT people. And recent events haven't persuaded me that it has changed.

Not sure where that headline comes from because there is nothing about accepting GLBT people in the article either. Maybe acceptance of the actual fact that heteros could get HIV/AIDS too, but that's about it. Bravo, I guess.

I'd file this one under wishful thinking.