The American Red Cross is now allowing gay and bisexual men to donate blood without restrictions that specifically single out a person’s sexual orientation or gender, the nonprofit group said Monday.
They phrased it “men who have sex with men” because that was - and is - undeniably a huge risk factor in the transmission of HIV. It was an unprecedented public health emergency and I don’t think people nowadays quite understand how severe it was. Which is great, really, we’ve come such a long way.
Communication infrastructure was nothing like it is today either, there was a real absence of information and people were extremely scared, especially gay men watching their friends die. A blanket ban was the only sane thing to do in the circumstances.
Did it need to persist so long, perhaps not, but even 20 years ago AIDS was much less preventable and treatable than it is today. And the gears of bureaucracy turn extremely slowly at the best of times.
As someone else has pointed out, this is far from the only group excluded from the donor pool. It’s not a moral judgment, just a screening heuristic at the demographic level. That’s how things have to operate at the level of public services; i.e. population-level policy.
I agree. As I said in another comment, the book And The Band Played On is a great history of the AIDS epidemic in the USA and really hammers home just how devestating it was to gay men. It’s a fact that gay men are the major risk group in the West for HIV transmission. Heterosexual sex is much less likely to spread it compared to anal sex. There was a lot of mismanagement of it, but screening was a good idea, when it was finally introduced.
