Is it HOMOPHOBIC to Ban Gays from Donating Blood?

• Report rights infringement
• published: 21 Jun 2016
• views: 2

A lot of places ban sexually active gay men, bisexual men, or men who have sex with men (msm) from donating blood. Some people say this is discriminatory and homophobic against the LGBT population. This issue came up again in the wake of the massacre by Omar Mateen at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida last week (June 12, 2016). About 49 people were killed and 53 more wounded when Mateen opened fire in the club with an AR-15, took hostages, and got into a shootout with police officers and a SWAT team. After the shooting, some gay men were upset that they weren't allowed to donate blood to help the victims. But why are these regulations in place? They're there because gay men have historically had very high HIV/AIDS rates, and many people who got blood transfusions in the 1980s were infected by tainted blood. In order to prevent this from happening in the future, blood centers began to screen out donors from high risk groups, including, but not limited to, men who have sex with men. HIV/AIDs first came to the attention of modern medicine when large numbers of well-off middle and upper class, relatively young American men began to die mysteriously in the 1980s due to AIDS. One theory is that HIV originated in central Africa as an infection among monkeys and apes. When locals hunted and butchered these animals for food, they were sometimes infected by the monkey or ape strain of HIV. The virus jumped species and then started to spread among people through sexual contact or contact with blood. But HIV didn't spread widely in Africa until the colonial era, because before that people didn't move around as much. When central Africa was colonized by Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th century, however, they built railways and roads, put steamboats on rivers, recruited laborers for mines, and cities grew up. People started moving around a lot. There was a lot more prostitution and sexual promiscuity because people were moving around more. That allowed the HIV virus to spread more widely in urban populations instead of being limited to a few hunters in the forest. Innoculation programs set up by colonial administrators may have also spread the disease through the reuse of needles. But nobody paid attention to HIV as long as it was mainly poor Africans dying from it. In the 1960s the former Belgian colony of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), won independence. Congo may've been one of the early centers of the early HIV/AIDS epidemic. French-speaking doctors went there to help the country. Many of these doctors were Haitian. Some Haitian doctors and other aid workers in Congo may've been infected with HIV there and then brought it back home to Haiti. The disease then began to spread in Haiti, once again without attracting much attention from the medical establishment. Haiti was a popular tourist destination for Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. It was one of the major tourist destinations in the Caribbean at the time. Some of these tourists were gay men who were sex tourists. They picked up HIV in Haiti and then brought it back to the USA. In the 1970s the US had a gay sexual revolution. Gay men used to be underground, and homosexuality was illegal. But by the 1970s, American gays became more open, and also more promiscuous. They began to engage in extreme promiscuity. Under these conditions, HIV spread quickly among gays. Then in the 1980s, the HIV progressed to AIDS and many of them began dying. Among the dead were prominent celebrities like Rock Hudson, and Freddy Mercury. This is when US doctors started to pay attention to the disease. Another (conspiracy) theory says HIV was secretly invented by the government to kill gays, black people, etc. Is it really homophobic to stop gay men from donating blood? The problem is that men who have sex with men still account for a disproportionate amount of new HIV infections. Msm make up an estimated 2-5% of the population, but account for over 70% of new HIV infections every year. Since the infection rates are so high, it makes sense to screen out men who have had recent sex with other men. It isn't discrimination or homophobia, it is just safety precautions. Heterosexuals who fall into high-risk categories will also be screened out. For example people may be banned from donating blood if they're injection drug users, have recently gotten a tattoo, travelled to high HIV countries, had sex with a sex trade worker, had sex with an intravenous (IV) drug user, and so on.