ACTUALLY, HOLLYWOOD, THE REAL RON WOODROOF WAS NOT STRAIGHT OR HOMOPHOBIC…
Ron Woodroof, born in 1950, was a Texas electrician diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 and given six months to live. He quickly began a regimen of the only AIDS drug on the market, AZT, but it had little effect and he nearly died. After combing the catalogues of non FDA-approved drugs around the world, he started smugging in experimental treatments and thus began his Dallas Buyers Club, which he ran from his Oak Lawn, Texas, apartment, starting in March 1988. There were soon 60 drugs available to HIV/AIDS members in his network and he prescribed himself three. “I am my own physician,” he claimed in a May 1989 interview with Dallas Morning News, adding, “The whole point of this is to give people options. If they see results, then that’s all that matters.” The film, Dallas Buyers Club, presents Woodroof as heterosexual in a neat story arc that shows him going from homophobe to being more accepting. The film’s original screenwriter, Craig Borten, spent three days interviewing Woodroof. Borten defends his assertion that Woodroof was “as racist and homophobic as they come” and that his diagnosis and association with the club changed him. However, William Waybourn, former President of Dallas Gay Alliance, knew Woodruff and recently told the Huffington Post, “I never saw the straight side of Ron. That’s what was the most surprising part of this whole movie. He worked in a gay center, he was surrounded by gay men and, as far as I know, had relationships with gay men.” Penny Krispin, a friend of Woodroof and also his nurse at the time corroborates this story, recalling to the Sunday Times of London, “Ron was one of my gay patients. I never knew anyone who thought Ron was straight.”
On film, Jennifer Garner plays Woodroof ’s doctor (and flirty love interest), but his primary doctor in real life was a man, Steve Pounders. Today, Pounders says he never saw the homophobia in Woodroof that is depicted in the film. Pounders told Dallas Voice, “He seemed to me very comfortable in the gay environment, like any other gay man. He fit right in without problems.” But was Woodroof gay himself ? “Brenda, his ex-wife, stated that he was bisexual,” says Dr Pounders.
Another thing about Woodroof that isn’t clear to some is whether his club was using its desperate members to make money on imported snake oils or whether he was genuinely providing a service to save or extend lives. In the 1989 interview, Woodroof explained, “We are not trying to make money on these drugs. We have a 17 percent gross mark-up or less. It covers the basic product cost and shipping.”
Six years after his initial diagnosis, Ron Woodroof succumbed to an AIDS-related illness in 1992.