On June 12th, 2016, a shooter opened fire inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in the heart of Orlando, Florida. With 50 people killed and many more injured, the event is the worst mass shooting in United States history and has been widely accepted as an attack on the LGBT population.

 

An influx of wounded filled the nearby hospitals, and the local blood banks desperately needed more donors to provide blood necessary for saving these victims’ lives. One demographic in particular lined up outside these blood banks by the hundreds in attempts to help their community members, yet were turned away due to a single, long-standing federal ban: gay men cannot donate blood.

 

The so-called “blood ban” originated over 30 years ago, a combined result of genuine fear and uncertainty surrounding the AIDs epidemic and a deep-seated homophobia in the American culture despite the sexual revolution of the decades prior. However, the emergence of an entirely new and poorly understood epidemic is a thin justification for the burden the blood ban placed on the men who have sex with men (MSM) community back in the 1980’s.

 

Improved medical technology and a maturing culture leaves the FDA’s ban outdated, unnecessary, and in dire need of repeal. Its continued presence maintains a legacy of homophobia and federal prejudice that continues to negatively impact the same community whose members and allies feel their struggle with discrimination and oppression has persisted for decades.

 

The United States, 1983:

The AIDS epidemic had just started sweeping the nation. Medical professionals had been able to trace the disease back to the HIV virus, but couldn’t yet determine how it was spreading or where it was coming from. One of the few pieces of available information was that gay men seemed to be contracting the disease at significantly higher proportion than the rest of the population.

As people who received blood transfusions also began to contract AIDS, the FDA reached an understanding that transmission through blood and bodily fluids was extremely likely and therefore something that needed to be closely monitored.

 

Dawn Kerr, a student interning with Red Cross the summer AIDS emerged, recalls “people were afraid to do anything with needles, including getting shots or donating blood.  They were afraid they might get AIDS from the needles.  The donated blood supplies were extremely low because people wouldn’t show up for the blood drives.”

 

Panic and unease governed the American attitude. The FDA latched onto the one connection they could find by banning MSM from donating blood indefinitely, with claims that the ban was enacted to protect the nation’s blood supply from risk of contamination and prevent it from depletion. Constructing a connection between gay men and the AIDS outbreak soothed a concerned and primarily heterosexual population, and as same sex relationships were still heavily judged and widely unaccepted, the shift of blame onto an already-outcast community was met with little resistance.

 

The creation of the blood ban further perpetuated the stigma that all gay men posed a threat to the health of the nation and are in some way “dirtier” than their heterosexual counterparts. The nature of discovering and understanding illness was also a theme overlooked by the FDA in their rhetoric concerning the ban. No mention was made of potentially lifting the ban if more medical knowledge of HIV/AIDS was gathered, indicating an attitude of finality and condemning the entire MSM population for the decades that followed.

 

The United States, Today:

Significant strides in LGBT equality were seen in recent years with the Supreme Court ruling allowing same sex couples to marry and the repeal of the controversial Don’t Ask Don’t Tell act. Despite acceptance and equality slowly growing into the modern culture, no progress was made in lifting the decades-old discriminatory MSM blood ban.

 

The ban was once a convoluted mix of fear, realistic uncertainty. Now, it is blatant intolerance camouflaged by the word “precautionary”.

 

The final nature of the ban and the lack of flexibility with which the FDA creates regulations have prompted the LGBT community and its allies to push back. LGBT activism groups are leading the charge towards lifting the outdated ban, spearheaded by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the nation’s leading provider of HIV and AIDS care.

 

Anthony Hayes, the vice president of public affairs for the GMHC, has spoken very openly with news sources on the issue, stating “our federal blood policy is based on the ’80s, when fear and hysteria ruled. […] we have a policy that is based on discrimination instead of science and data”.

 

 Blood banks across the nation consistently run low on available blood for transfusions, and eliminating an entire demographic with outdated medical bias impacts both those facing the discrimination and those in need of donor’s blood. A ban that once claimed its purpose was to protect that nation’s blood supply is now acting as a negative force.

 

 The American Red Cross, the organization responsible for running blood drives across the nation and working directly with the donated blood has “[characterized] the blood ban as medically and scientifically unwarranted as far back as 2006.” The medical technology the nation lacked when AIDS was first discovered has now existed for years, capable of detecting the HIV virus in a blood sample as quickly as nine days after infection. This progress entirely eliminates the “medical need” for a blood ban to exist on gay men.

 

After years of continued struggle with the LGBT community, the FDA revised their blood donation ban in 2015. Originally a lifetime deferral was updated to a 12-month deferral after a sexual encounter with another man. While the revised ban is certainly a step in the right direction, it is still heavy with discrimination towards the LGBT community.

 

A 12-month deferral effectively eliminates nearly every sexually active gay man, eternalizing the intolerance the original ban was steeped in. An artificial attempt to appease, the revised ban is a lack luster solution to an on-going battle with internalized homophobia.

 

What was once a disease no medical professional understood now has a fast and simple test to determine if the individual is infected. All donated blood goes through a rigorous medical screening process and is discarded if even the slightest risk of contamination is apparent.

 

Requiring a current, negative HIV screening test to be presented at the time of donation is an effective way to achieve the same goal as the ban with significantly less discriminatory implications. If the FDA is entirely committed to the use of the ban, it could also be further revised to only a 10-day deferral, seeing as it now takes only 9 to detect HIV in a blood donor’s sample.

 

HIV and AIDS are still very present in our society today, yet there now exist solutions that could both ensure the safety of the donated blood and erase the discrimination of the MSM blood ban. In a nation that claims to value advancements and forward thinking, the blood ban strays far from that ideal and creates a regressive atmosphere.

 

Ensuring the safety of the nation’s blood supply is indeed a top priority, yet preventing those with a desire to save someone’s life absolutely is not. Progress has been made, but while the ban still exists the FDA perpetuates a discriminatory culture where one should no longer exist.