Behind the Public Life of Ryan White, Two Women Who Loved Him

"Did you know that Ryan was my first love?" Heather Stephenson asks Jeanne Ginder-White, the mother of Ryan White, the Kokomo teenager who became the public face of AIDS in the 1980s. He died 25 years ago, on April 8, 1990. Listen to their conversation, recorded last year at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

White was a hemophiliac, and he was expelled from middle school after he got the virus from a tainted blood transfusion. His fight to return, and his advocacy for people with AIDS and HIV, made him a national celebrity. But Kokomo was never home again.  At the start of his freshman year, Ryan White moved to Cicero, Indiana with his family, and that’s where he met Heather Stephenson.

Last year, StoryCorps recorded a conversation between Stephenson and Ryan White’s mother, Jeanne Ginder-White, at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, after the museum won a  a National Medal for Museum and Library Service. Ryan White’s childhood bedroom is on exhibit at the museum. Their interview is archived at the Library of Congress. The full interview is available on the museum's website.