A law that needed an innocent name
In 1990 Bush signs the biggest US AIDS law. The person it was named after had to be heterosexual.
On 18 August 1990, US President George H. W. Bush signed the Ryan White CARE Act. The law created the most important federal programme in the USA for the care of people with HIV. It was named after a teenager from Indiana who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984 and then fought for his right to continue going to school. Ryan White died a few months before Congress passed the law.
The queer core of the story lies in the name. The historian Paul Renfro shows that White became the face of the law precisely because he did not fit the common image of a person with AIDS: not gay, not a drug user, but white, charming and perceived as heterosexual. One political strategist noted: "We needed a superstar. And we found him in Ryan White." Like Ryan White, around half of all people in the USA with the blood disorder haemophilia were infected with HIV between 1982 and 1984. That White's blood products were infected at all also had to do with homophobia. The authorities and the blood industry long resisted testing and heat treatment and instead banned gay men from giving blood.
The openly homophobic Senator Jesse Helms saw through the calculation. "America's homosexual lobby", he mocked, had known that this story was too good to pass up. At the same time Helms claimed that "innocent victims" like White would never have been infected without the behaviour of the very people who were now demanding respectability. The law nevertheless passed Congress by a large majority. Renfro's analysis has a bitter flip side: White's innocence needed the guilt of groups that were already stigmatised. Strikingly few advocates used the word "gay" when campaigning for the law.
On its thirtieth anniversary, the US Department of Health and Human Services called the programme a cornerstone of American HIV policy. Secretary Alex Azar declared in 2020: "What was once a deadly disease is now a treatable chronic condition."