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By Root 1145 0

the back of which my record of regular “deposits” throughout high school and college remains legible in indelible ink. Nowadays, though, I only keep the card on me should I ever need blood in a medical emergency, not because I regularly give it. The last time I tried was in 1984 during an employee blood drive at a large Seattle company. Together with co-workers, I lined up outside the humming bloodmobile in the parking lot and was at last ushered inside. As I sat to fill out the standard form, my eye fell upon a question I’d not seen before, one directed at men: “Have you ever gone down on a guy?” Well, that may not have been the exact wording, but the query’s intent was clear. Why, yes, I have, I thought, with none of the nascent pride that, in a more intimate situation, might have accompanied this declaration. (I wasn’t out to my boss, who was capable of scaring me into stunned silence first thing Monday mornings with his “So, didja get any snatch this weekend?”) Perplexed at first, I quickly gathered that the questionnaire was fishing for gay men who might have AIDS, which seemed sensible, given the infections transmitted through blood products and the lack of a blood test to prevent such accidents. Still, I felt unaccountably ashamed of myself. Suddenly squeamish at the sight of blood, or so I claimed, I handed back the form, covered my unbandaged arm, and slipped back into the office. A purloined doughnut provided the phony proof that I’d gone through with it.

Fifteen years later, during the Bay Area’s 1999 blood drought, I looked forward to rolling up my sleeve again and this time doing the deed. Since all blood banks had begun using the ELISA-HIV test (which detects antibodies to the virus) shortly after it was introduced in 1985, I assumed that the gay restriction had been eased. I myself had tested for HIV half a dozen times since then and had always come up negative. Twice shy, though, I went online to scan the donor guidelines before making the trip to the blood bank. Good thing. The restriction hadn’t changed. It was easy to imagine the red rush of embarrassment at being told in person, “No, sir, you do not qualify.”

The question in question, number 9, hasn’t changed in wording since then, a fact I confirmed on my recent tour of San Francisco’s blood center. Under current FDA rules, all potential male blood donors must be asked verbally during the screening interview if they’ve had sex, “even once,” with another man since 1977, the year identified as the start of America’s AIDS epidemic. If the answer is yes, regardless of whether the sex was safe or the partner HIV negative, he is barred for life from donating blood (permanently deferred is the official term). It so happens that my first homosexual encounter was in 1977 at age sixteen; even if I’d sworn off men right then, I still couldn’t give blood today. To be considered a qualified donor, a healthy gay man needs to have been celibate for the past twenty-seven years, a prerequisite that leaves me pondering: Can a guy who’s not had sex in over a quarter century rightly be called “healthy”?

For the sake of argument, I can set aside the fact that the majority of gay men are HIV negative and committed to remaining that way. I can also ignore the assertion that, should gays be welcomed, blood centers will be misused as HIV testing sites, the presumption being that, illogically, fearful individuals would prefer a test site that demands documentation of who you are and is answerable to the federal government. At the same time, I fully accept that gay men in general are considered a high-risk donor pool. But why is there such inconsistency between what’s required of gay donors and other groups? Straight men who’ve had sex with a prostitute, for instance, are barred from giving blood for just twelve months after that encounter. The FDA, I’ve learned, has argued that a data deficit is what keeps them from giving gay men this same “temporary deferral.” The agency simply has no solid statistics on HIV infection rates among gay men who’ve abstained from sex for a year