Gay Men Who Can’t Get Laid May Soon Get to Donate Blood

The United States has some
pretty harsh guidelines for blood donations if you’re a gay or
bisexual male: Don’t. The current policy is that if you are a man
who has had sex with another man since 1977, you are not permitted
to donate blood, ever. The policy was put into place in the early
1980s, a remnant of a time where we were a lot less knowledgeable
about the spread of HIV/AIDS and less certain about testing
accuracy. But nowadays, though gay men are still in the highest HIV
risk category in the United States, we know a lot more about
detecting HIV and preventing it from getting it into the blood
supply. There’s no longer a purpose for a blanket ban of all gay
men. After all, according to the Food and Drug Administration’s
(FDA) guidelines, heterosexuals who actually have sex with somebody
HIV positive or with a prostitute only need to wait a year, as do,
mystifyingly, women who have had intercourse with bisexual men,
even though the men themselves are permanently banned. Read a
current donor questionnaire
here (pdf).

But despite a lot of pressure from gay activists over the past
20 years to change this policy, it has stubbornly stuck. The FDA

acknowledged a few years back that these policies shut out some
low-risk donors while possibly not actually screening out some
high-risk behaviors well (because it seems to be focused on rate of
transmission among demographics rather than level of risk). But
still no changes have been made.

But yesterday a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services a
panel voted to recommend a change that would put gay men on par
with the other folks mentioned above. Rather than being permanently
banned, gay men and bisexual men would be able to donate blood if
they’ve been abstinent for a year.
According to Bloomberg News, such a shift would match current
blood donation policies in Canada, Australia, and the United
Kingdom.

The FDA doesn’t have to accept the panel’s recommendation but
they have expressed an interest in making changes, and the Red
Cross endorses the deferral. For those who are curious as to
whether there are gay men out there who have gone for a year
without sex (perhaps watching How to Get Away with Murder,
are you?), a University of California, Los Angeles study estimates
we would see 185,800 additional donors. It’s a gay romance
meet-cute waiting to happen!