February 20 2026, 08:15 
When Dallas Buyers Club hit theaters in 2013, it was initially greeted with widespread critical acclaim. The film, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée from a script by screenwriters Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, tells the story of Texas cowboy Ron Woodroof, who — after being diagnosed with AIDS in the mid-1980s and experiencing unmanageable side effects from AZT (the only FDA-approved treatment for the disease at the time) — established an illegal operation to procure and provide alternative drugs to AIDS patients in the Dallas area.
Dallas Buyers Club was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, with star Matthew McConaughey taking home the award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Woodroof and Jared Leto winning Best Supporting Actor for the role of Rayon, a fictional trans woman who shows Woodroof the error of his homophobic ways in the film.
Related
These 10 essential movies about Black people living with HIV will open your heart & mind
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today
But while critics praised Vallée’s movie, many HIV/AIDS activists took issue with some of its themes. In his book Never Silent — excerpted in Vanity Fair in 2021 — advocate Peter Staley, who was offered a role in the film, accused Wallack of injecting AIDS denialist pseudoscience and conspiracy theories into the story. According to Staley, Vallée ultimately excised many of those themes at his insistence. But others have criticized the film for suggesting that the treatments Woodroof provided to AIDS patients were more effective and safer than AZT.
The film has also been criticized for its portrayal of Rayon, and for casting Leto, a cisgender male, as a trans woman.
Meanwhile, those who knew the real Woodroof questioned some of the changes the filmmakers made to his story.
Public records indicate that Woodroof was born in February 1950 in Dallas. He married and divorced three times between 1969 and 1986, and shared a daughter with his first wife. According to Slate‘s Aisha Harris and others, Woodroof worked off and on as an electrician, and was not, as the film portrays, a cowboy, but merely a rodeo enthusiast.
It remains unclear exactly when and how Woodroof contracted HIV. According to journalist Bill Minutaglio’s 1992 profile of Woodroof for the Dallas Morning News, he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. But according to Borten, Woodroof was told by his doctor that he’d likely contracted the virus years before. Woodroof even speculated that he may have contracted HIV from a woman he believed to be an intravenous drug user in 1981.
If a drug looked promising, [Woodroof] would find a way to smuggle it into the country.
Journalist Sherry Jacobson
According to a 2014 profile on Biography.com, Woodroof was told he had only six months to live. He was prescribed AZT, but nearly died of the side effects. Despite this, and his criticisms of the treatment, Staley notes that Woodroof was not among those who falsely claimed that it was AZT (and not HIV itself) that killed AIDS patients.
In 2013, Dallas Morning News staff writer Sherry Jacobson, who knew Woodroof, wrote that he later “immersed himself in medical journals” at the University of Texas Southwestern’s medical school library, “searching for anything that might suggest an AIDS breakthrough.”
“If a drug looked promising,” Jacobson wrote, “[Woodroof] would find a way to smuggle it into the country.”
In his 1992 profile, Minutaglio reported that Woodroof was smuggling drugs across the Mexican border as early as 1986. But he reportedly didn’t establish the Dallas Buyers Club until 1988. The operation joined a network of other similar “clubs” in cities around the U.S. that distributed medication to AIDS patients who could otherwise not access them, either because they couldn’t afford them, were unable to take part in clinical trials, or were desperate to try treatments that were unapproved by the FDA.
According to Minutaglio, Woodroof claimed to work closely with labs “to insure the purity” of the meds he distributed, and kept his mark-up to a minimum. Woodroof even cashed in his own $100,000 life insurance policy for $65,000 to fund the Dallas Buyers Club, according to Jacobson.
I never witnessed any homophobia in the time I knew him … He fit right in the gay environment without problems.
Dr. Steven Pounders
Woodroof was particularly evangelical about a drug called peptide T, which he credited for relieving his AIDS-related dementia. In 1990, he sued the FDA, challenging its ban on the treatment. While a federal judge ruled against him, the lawsuit reportedly led to a deal in which the FDA allowed Woodroof to obtain peptide T for his personal use while providing the agency with data on its effects. (As Staley notes, studies would ultimately show that the treatment was essentially worthless.)
Those who knew and interacted with Woodroof describe him as a foul-mouthed risk-taker, who seemed to revel in the excitement of his underground business — often dressing up in disguise when smuggling drugs into the country. Minutaglio told NPR in 2013 that the Dallas Buyers Club had something of a “Wild West” reputation among similar operations.
“People kept saying, ‘Well, the Dallas Buyers Club, they’re the pirates. They’re the ones really out on the edge pushing the envelope, doing more crazy and intense work than anybody else,’” he said.
Woodroof’s own sister described him as a promiscuous drug abuser in a 2012 interview with The Daily Mail. But others say he was not quite as wild as he was portrayed in Vallée’s film.
“He was outrageous, but not confrontational,” Jacobson wrote in 2013, recounting an incident in which Woodroof brought a gun to an appointment with his doctor, Steven Pounders, and later sent a dozen roses as an apology.
His life was about staying alive, helping others, and making money.
Dallas Buyers Club receptionist Mary Franklin
Nor was he, by most accounts, a homophobe. Many who knew him were reportedly shocked by that aspect of McConaughey’s portrayal in the film.
“I never witnessed any homophobia in the time I knew him from 1988 through his death in 1992,” Pounders told Slate’s Forrest Wickman in 2014. “He fit right in the gay environment without problems.”
Others insist that Woodroof was not even straight.
“That was not the Ron Woodroof I knew,” Penny Krispin, a close friend and nurse, told the Sunday Times of London, according to Wickman. Describing Woodroof as “one of my gay patients,” Krispin added that she “never knew anyone who thought Ron was straight.”
Pounders, meanwhile, claimed that Woodroof’s third wife, Brenda Shari Robin, understood him to be bisexual.
“I don’t know if Ron was gay or bisexual, but he clearly had many friends and supporters in the gay community,” Minutaglio told Wickman.
Regardless of how he was portrayed in Hollywood’s biopic version of his life, those friends and supporters continued to remember Woodroof fondly over two decades after his 1992 death from AIDS-related complications. As Dallas Buyers Club receptionist Mary Franklin told Jacobson in 2013, “His life was about staying alive, helping others, and making money.”
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.