Ryan White and fight against gay stigma

Although not gay himself, Ryan White gave a face to the represent the stigma surrounding the gay community in the 1980's when he was diagnosed with AIDS.

In the HIV/AIDS epidemic 1987's book And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts, who contends that Ronald Reagan's administration dragged its feet in dealing with the crisis due to homophobia, while the gay community viewed early reports and public health measures with corresponding distrust, thus allowing the disease to spread and hundreds of thousands of people to needlessly die. One of the most well-known victims of this was Ryan White, a 13 year old boy with haemophilia, who was diagnosed after receiving a blood transfusion infected with the disease sometime in 1984. The stigma surrounding AIDS, formerly known as GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), and the lack of knowledge surrounding the spread of the disease, caused White to be excluded from school. 

According to White's mother, people on the street would often yell, "we know you're queer" at Ryan."It was really bad. People were really cruel, people said that he had to be gay, that he had to have done something bad or wrong, or he wouldn't have had it. It was God's punishment, we heard the God's punishment a lot. That somehow, some way he had done something he shouldn't have done or he wouldn't have gotten AIDS." 1 Even though numerous scientists at the time went on record to say that AIDS could not be spread through touch or sharing a glass, for instance.

Eventually Whtie's story catapulted him into the national spotlight, amidst a growing wave of AIDS coverage in the news media. Between 1985 and 1987, the number of news stories about AIDS in the American media doubled, with him becoming a poster boy for the need for further research into the disease. 2 He helped changed the perception of the disease. 

"The biggest contribution I think that Ryan made is, and I didn't know it at that time, that his legacy would be that people are getting their drugs and their treatment and that people are living with AIDS." His mother ultimately set up the Ryan White Foundation which worked to increase awareness.

1,3 https://hab.hrsa.gov/about-ryan-white-hivaids-program/who-was-ryan-white
2 Brodie, Mollyann; et al. (2004). AIDS at 21: Media Coverage of the HIV Epidemic 1981–2002 (PDF). Kaiser Family Foundation. Retrieved on 13 February, 2016