Blood Wanted: No Gay Men Need Apply
Blood Wanted: No Gay Men Need Apply
Photo from http://pmc-sa.org/?p=32
This past week I went to donate blood for the first time. As I filled out an extensive questionnaire meant to ensure my donated blood would not pass on infectious diseases, I noticed the official list of people who may not donate blood. It banned people with certain diseases (among them HIV)…and men who have had sex with men ever since 1977.
That caveat surprised me. I’m sure it was intended to prevent the spread of HIV, which used to be thought of as the “gay man’s disease.” But now days, really, is that necessary? The times they have a-changed, to paraphrase Billy Joel. We as a society know so much more about HIV/AIDS, as does the medical community specifically. We know that HIV is not exclusive to gay men, and we know how to test for it.
Well, it looks like politicians are catching on. Today I read an article in the paper talking about repealing that FDA-mandated ban. Here’s an on-line article that I found about it with more specifics.
Tags: donating blood, FDA, gay men, HIV/AIDS
March 9th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
I’ve donated blood many times and now that you mention it, I remember seeing this as well and being a little taken aback. Some things certainly only take time to catch up with social changes… and time and time…
On a very unrelated note, I had a similarly awe-inspiring reaction yesterday when I was jumping from page to page on Wikipedia. I started by looking up the famous photographer and model Bunny Yeager, which led me to Lisa Winters, a Playboy model Yeager had discovered. But when I was directed to Winters’s page, I was taken aback by a notice at the top that said the page was in question of deletion because “Being a Playboy Playmate is not enough to meet the new notability criteria for pornographic actors and models.” Though I suppose it makes sense, it was still a bit shocking when I went through the criteria Wikipedia has for a pornographic actor and actress to appear on the page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Winters