The Life and Death of Ryan White: A Conversation with Dr. Paul Renfro

Welcome back to Season 5 of The Past, the Promise, The Presidency, which features brief interviews with historians about their newest books.

Our second episode features former CPH postdoctoral fellow and current associate professor of history at Florida State University Paul Renfro, who will be giving a book talk on Thursday, February 19th, at 6 pm in SMU's McCord Auditorium (Dallas Hall 306). Dr. Renfro is the author of The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America. 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, Renfro’s powerful biography grapples with the contested meanings of Ryan’s life, death, and afterlives. Dr. Renfro is interviewed by CPH student research assistant Kennedy Moore. 

Paul Renfro is an associate professor of history and an affiliate faculty and advisory board member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at FSU. He is the author of two books: Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2024), which received an honorable mention in the general nonfiction category at the Florida Book Awards. Alongside Susan Eckelmann Berghel and Sara Fieldston, Renfro also coedited the anthology Growing Up America: Youth and Politics since 1945 (University of Georgia Press, 2019). Renfro is currently writing two books. The first, titled Those Fearful Days, is a work of historical true-crime focused on the 1979–81 Atlanta youth murders, which claimed the lives of nearly thirty young, mostly poor and working-class African Americans in the self-proclaimed “city too busy to hate.” The second, The Passion of Matthew Shepard, situates Shepard’s life and 1998 murder within the broader history of the LGBTQ+ movement in the United States. Both books will be published by Liveright, a division of W. W. Norton & Company.

Kennedy Moore is a junior at SMU, and is double majoring in public policy and music with a minor in public policy and international affairs. Kennedy is a President's Scholar, Pre-law Scholar, and Meadows Scholar. At SMU, Kennedy is involved in Hegi Board Fellows, Meadows Chorale, the Tower Center's premier undergraduate research journal The Dialogue, and works at SMU's Center for Presidential History. Kennedy is interested in educational equity and national defense. She aspires to work for a federal agency to research and create policies to protect our education system and recenter citizens' voices in policy.