Gays were not alone, however, in questioning the wisdom of an exclusionary policy that might have a negative effect on the “adequacy” of the blood supply.
It is important to remember that this occurred when 25 states still criminalized sex between consenting adults of the same sex (and, in 1985, the US Supreme Court, in Bowers v Hardwick, upheld the constitutionality of Georgia’s sodomy statute). Gay organizations just coming to grips with a new threat to the survival of their communities were concerned that an explicit ban on blood donations by gay men would add to stigmatization and homophobic attitudes. In 1983, almost a year before HIV was identified as the etiologic cause of AIDS, and 2 years before the licensure of the antibody screening test designed to detect infection, political pressure began mounting to prohibit “high risk” donors from donating blood. But a review of the history surrounding the decades-old “lifelong ban” on gay men donating blood makes clear that far more was at stake. The scientific evidence justified the new policy, Hamburg explained.
The new policy excluded only those men who had had sex with another man within the last year. The old policy barred any man who had had sex with another man between 1977 and the present from donating blood. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), announced that her agency had decided to amend a policy in place since 1986.
