The Faithful Departed

I n December 1984, thirteen-year-old hemophiliac Ryan White was diagnosed with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), during a time that the disease was still poorly understood by both the public and the scientific community.In the years that followed, as White became a poster child for AIDS understanding, research, and increasing public support, societal perceptions about both White and the nature of AIDS slowly shifted.No longer branded as "secretly homosexual," media accounts began instead to classify White as "an innocent victim" of AIDS. 1 The language of innocence and victimization-which White and his family consistently rejected-implicitly contrasts "innocent" people who are diagnosed with AIDS with those whom some perceived to be "guilty"-namely, homosexuals. 2 From the 1980s to the present, the struggle of Western society to conceptualize and understand HIV/AIDS and the variety of men, women, and children who contract it every year has been centrally important to the development of social attitudes, public policy, and perceptions of human sexuality.There are a number of influences that shape public perceptions of disease, particularly HIV/AIDS, as the case of Ryan White as "victim" versus "homosexual" suggests.Susan Sontag has contended that people understand both diseases and those who contract them through metaphor.Indeed, for Sontag, "one cannot think without metaphors," and human need for such metaphors when dealing with the largely invisible (and often 1

American Constitutional Law and Politics

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