Opinion: Lifting the stigma against gay men brings new blood donors to the Red Cross
The American Purple Cross had a blood drive at Malibu Metropolis Corridor the opposite day. In a first-floor neighborhood room, donors lay on gurneys, plastic tubes snaking from their arms, tended by nurses. Afterward, they snacked on mini-Oreos and sipped from tiny juice containers.
All of it appeared very routine.
However this was a very new expertise for Jeremy Walker, 55, and his husband, Judd Stark, 59, homosexual males who got here of age on the horrifying daybreak of the AIDS period. Collectively for 30 years, and married for nearly 10, they’d not been in a position to donate blood because of federal guidelines that discouraged donations from people with elevated danger for transmitting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. For a really very long time, males who’ve intercourse with males have been presumed to characterize a hazard to the blood provide.
Opinion Columnist
Robin Abcarian
“It’s all the time enjoyable to not be excluded, even when you don’t need to be included,” mentioned Walker because the couple and I chatted in a shady courtyard on the Malibu Nation Mart earlier than heading over to Metropolis Corridor and the blood drive.
In 1983, two years after HIV/AIDS was found in america and earlier than there have been dependable exams, the Meals and Drug Administration banned males who’ve intercourse with males from ever donating blood. Individuals have been terrified after some high-profile incidents of HIV being transmitted throughout blood transfusions. Who might overlook the story of Ryan White, the Indiana teenager who contracted AIDS after a 1984 transfusion after which was barred from attending his college? Or Elizabeth Glaser, the Santa Monica lady who based the Pediatric AIDS Basis after she contracted HIV from a transfusion given to her throughout childbirth in 1981 and handed it on to her youngsters?
Judd Stark, left, and husband Jeremy Walker give info and have their vitals checked whereas getting ready to donate blood throughout a blood drive at Malibu Metropolis Corridor.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Occasions)
In 2015, the FDA lifted its whole ban and changed it with a one-year abstinence requirement for homosexual males. However that also struck pro-LGBTQ+ teams as stigmatizing a complete group of individuals. 5 years later, amid the COVID- 19 pandemic in 2020, the FDA shortened the abstinence interval to a few months.
Then simply final month, the company finalized new pointers for figuring out the eligibility of every potential blood donor — not simply homosexual males or, say, intercourse employees — individually, with a sequence of questions on their latest sexual historical past.
“The Purple Cross acknowledges the damage [the earlier] coverage has precipitated and that these are simply the primary steps in repairing relationships with the broader LGBTQ+ neighborhood,” a spokeswoman for the nonprofit mentioned in a press release on the brand new FDA pointers.
To any extent further, all potential donors can be deferred in the event that they report “having a brand new sexual companion, or a couple of sexual companion prior to now three months, and anal intercourse prior to now three months.”
The brand new pointers have been developed after a two-year pilot research decided that asking all donors in regards to the variety of companions and particular behaviors was as efficient at defending the blood provide as writing guidelines geared toward anyone inhabitants. (One group stays completely deferred: Anybody who has ever been contaminated with HIV can not give blood.)
Jeremy Walker, left, kisses his husband Judd Stark after Stark donated blood. Nina Minton, proper, the Purple Cross coordinator on the web site, walked them by means of the method.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Occasions)
The brand new method received’t go totally into impact till later this summer season. At Malibu Metropolis Corridor, Walker and Stark every answered the present donor questionnaire on their telephones and had a personal hallway dialog with Nina Minton, the on-site Purple Cross coordinator.
“I haven’t used the phrase ‘anal’ this a lot because the ’80’s,” Stark joked afterward.
This welcome change in public coverage comes at a time when homosexual and trans rights are more and more underneath assault, empowered by an ultraconservative Supreme Court docket. Purple-state legislatures are passing dozens of anti-LGBTQ+ legal guidelines, drag queens who learn books to youngsters are being demonized, and oldsters of schoolchildren are coming to blows over Satisfaction Month celebrations.
“I imply, this isn’t Selma, Ala., but it surely is a second,” mentioned Walker, a Malibu native who co-founded an independent-film publicity agency with Stark in New York in 1999. “To cite Mary Tyler Moore’s mom in ‘Unusual Individuals,’” he added, “‘I assumed we have been all completed with that.’”
Stark, who grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, didn’t come out till he moved to New York in his twenties. “I needed to get the hell out of there to a spot that was protected,” he mentioned, “and New York was nearer than San Francisco. The hatred we’re beginning to see may be very harking back to why I acquired out of Ohio within the first place.”
He left the movie publicity enterprise and now works for CRI-Assist, a half-century-old North Hollywood nonprofit drug and rehab heart.
On Friday, a spokeswoman for the American Purple Cross advised me that there had been a “regarding shortfall” in blood donations during the last month. Though the nation will not be experiencing the sort of nationwide blood scarcity disaster that we did in January 2022, the group collected blood from 26,000 fewer individuals than it wanted final month to satisfy the wants of sufferers. If you’re moved to donate blood, it’s fairly straightforward: You may go to the Purple Cross web site, name 1-800-RED-CROSS or obtain the Purple Cross Blood Donor app.
Walker and Stark found that their monogamous relationship and sexual practices certified them to offer blood even earlier than the brand new rule went into impact. Nevertheless, dangers from intercourse aren’t the one well being points that get screened. It turned out that Walker’s blood strain was barely too excessive, and he was not allowed to donate till he might convey it down.
“I’m stunned,” he mentioned, “however I’m motivated.”
