Ron Woodroof

In mid-1980s in Texas, electrician Ron Woodroof is shocked to learn that he has AIDS. Though told that he has just 30 days left to live, Woodroof refuses to give in to despair. He seeks out alternative therapies and smuggles unapproved drugs into the U.S. from wherever he can find them. Woodroof joins forces with a fellow AIDS patient, Rayon and begins selling the treatments to the growing number of people who can't wait for the medical establishment to save them. Throughout the movie, he somewhat goes through the five stages of grief. He goes through denial when the doctor first tells him that he has HIV. He started to yell and scream and walked out on both doctors during the conversation. He went through the bargaining stage when he was

There wasn’t much information on how HIV was transmitted which is why many people were scared to those that were infected. They feared that HIV is associated death and that it was only associated with behaviors such as homosexuality. That HIV is the cause of someone’s infidelity, who was being punished. They thought that you can get infect yourself by touching a person who is infected with HIV. For example, when Rayon and Ron were at the supermarket and Woodruff saw TJ. Ron introduced Rayon and TJ to each other, but TJ didn’t want to shake Rayon’s hand. So, Ron put TJ in headlock and made him shake hands with Rayon. There was a stigma that the only way to contract HIV/AIDS is by having sex with men. When Ron found out that he had HIV, he told TJ when they were hanging out in his trailer and the very next day when Ron got into the bar, his friends started to call him names referring to the fact that he was homosexual because he had HIV. Everyone else in the bar started to back away from him as he came closer to them. Ron also lost his job since everyone thought that they could contract it from touching someone. His life pretty much went downhill from this point until he found a way to pick it back