With relaxed blood donation restrictions, gay men like me are ready to roll up our sleeves for coronavirus aid | Opinion

Enabling greater numbers of gay men to donate blood is a victory for science and a defeat for stigma. It’s good news not only for those of us blocked from donating since 1983, but for anyone involved in the battle against the coronavirus — in other words, for every one of us.

That’s the good news we should glean from Thursday’s announcement from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that significantly relaxes its recommendations for blood donations from gay and bisexual men, reducing the amount of time men who have had sex with men should wait before they give blood from one year to three months.

The bad news is that even the loosened restrictions continue to disqualify gay men simply for being sexually active, including married, monogamous male couples.

The FDA imposed its original ban during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when the cause of the disease was unclear and hysteria was at its height. Blood products contaminated with what later would be identified as HIV led to the deaths of thousands of hemophilia patients. The restrictions were imposed on any man who had ever had sex with another man and remained in place for 32 years.

During that time, the world advanced scientifically and technologically. Testing to screen blood for HIV has become standard worldwide, and dramatic advances have been made in medical data collection and analysis. The FDA loosened the restriction in 2015, opening the way for gay and bisexual men who had refrained from sex with another male for at least a year to donate.

On Thursday, the FDA said the change "will not be associated with any adverse effect on the safety of the blood supply,” and “may help to address significant blood shortages” arising from the pandemic. In a statement on its website, the American Red Cross called the move “an important first step toward our greater goal of an inclusive and equitable blood donation process that ... ensures a safe, sufficient blood supply.”

It’s about time.

The slaughter of 49 people at Pulse, a gay Orlando nightclub, in 2016 laid bare the inherent cruelty of the no-sex-for-a-year requirement, as gay men sought to donate blood in the wake of the massacre and were turned away. Ever since, advocates have focused on lifting these arbitrary, antiquated restrictions. After all, how did turning away willing, healthy, and otherwise eligible blood donors serve to protect, much less, improve, public health?

Generational change is one of the powerful forces that have made this week’s changes possible. Another is science, and the replacement of faith-based disdain for LGBTQ people with fact-based data.

For me as a gay man who witnessed the exhilaration of the liberated ’70s give way to the tragic decades of AIDS, the coronavirus pandemic evokes painful memories.

“This isn’t our first plague,” my BFF, also named Kevin, recently observed, and there’s a painful irony in the latest awful affliction serving to loosen rules the earlier epidemic inspired. Eliminating celibacy as a requirement to donate blood should be the next step, though it can wait until after we defeat the coronavirus. My gay brothers and I are ready to roll up our sleeves.