alternative lifestyles, including intravenous drug use,
promiscuous sex, and homosexuality. Indeed, mis-
conceptions about the disease’s transmission stirred
community resistance to White’s continued atten-
dance at school in his rural Indiana hometown.
When the family resisted the school’s initial decision
essentially to quarantine him by providing him sep-
arate bathroom facilities and disposable silverware
and its subsequent decision that White be home-
schooled, White was expelled. White found his case
the center of a national outcry, led by AIDS activists
who saw in this case manifest evidence of public ig-
norance. White himself became a leading advocate,
appearing before congressional panels, in national
magazines, and on network television, tirelessly ex-
plaining that casual contact did not transmit the dis-
ease and that its patients should be treated with com-
passion rather than ostracism.
When a district court ordered White reinstated,
fear of violence against the boy led the family to relo-
cate to nearby Cicero, Indiana, where White at-
tended public school without incident. Although he
often asserted that he wanted only to be healthy and
go to school, he accepted the importance of his fame
to educate people about the disease and the dangers
of stigmatizing AIDS patients. Celebrities such as Mi-
chael Jackson (who bought the Whites their home in
Cicero) and Elton John (who was at the hospital bed-
side when White died) and politicians such as Presi-
dent Ronald Reagan, who had consistently resisted
AIDS funding, all rallied about the boy’s quiet deter-
mination and easy charisma. White’s celebrity, how-
ever, was not without controversy, as gay activists
pointed out that opprobrium was still accorded those
patients whose lifestyle suggested that they somehow
“deserved” the virus.
Impact In 1990, White, at age eighteen, died from
complications of pneumonia. He had changed per-
ceptions about AIDS by arguing that with common-
sense precautions, patients could be treated with re-
spect. The year he died, Congress voted to fund the
Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emer-
gency Act, an unprecedented government support
of AIDS research, after stalling for years in the face of
public unease fueled by ultraconservative activists.
White’s heroic poise in the face of community preju-
dice and then ultimately in the face of death at a
young age raised awareness about the disease at a
critical moment in the epidemic, giving health agen-
cies an unparalleled example of grace under pres-
sure.Further Reading
Berridge, Virginia, and Philip Strong, eds.AIDS and
Contemporar y Histor y. New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2002.
Cochrane, Michel.When AIDS Began. London: Rout-
ledge, 2003.
Shilts, Randy.And the Band Played On: Politics, People,
and the AIDS Epidemic. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1987.
White, Ryan, with Ann Marie Cunningham and
Jeanne White.My Own Stor y. New York: Signet,
1997.
Joseph DeweySee also ACT UP; AIDS epidemic; AIDS Memorial
Quilt; Homosexuality and gay rights; Hudson, Rock;
Jackson, Michael; Johnson, Magic; Louganis, Greg;
Medicine; Reagan, Ronald.White Noise
Identification Postmodern novel
Author Don DeLillo (1936- )
Date Published in 1985The novel brought DeLillo’s works to a wider audience and
defined the postmodern experience in America.White Noise(1985) opens in a mildly comic fashion
as professor Jack Gladney, chair of the Hitler Studies
department, looks out his office window and watches
families arrive in their vans and unpack hordes of
possessions for arriving students. Gladney is obsessed
with death, his own and his wife’s, and his life is con-
structed around attempts to evade the inevitable.
His obsession reaches its apex when he and his fam-
ily attempt to escape after a chemical spill labeled as
an “Airborne Toxic Event.” Gladney learns that he
has been contaminated and that the dosage is likely
fatal, but the doctors cannot predict when his death
will occur.
The incident exacerbates Gladney’s rampant in-
securities, which he masks with repeated spending
sprees, believing that possessions will confer security
and fulfillment. Thus he and his family are the ulti-
mate consumers—of food, clothes, and TV news and
shows. The irony, of course, is that goods and a large1044 White Noise The Eighties in America