Our Blood is Also Red

"If you prick us, do we not bleed?"

When Shylock asked that question in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, it was a plaintive cry denouncing a form of politics that denies and glosses over common humanity, separating out some for treatment unequal to that of others. But in the case of gay men being excluded from blood donation, it's a too-apt slogan because not only is our blood as red as that of any red-blooded American specimen of masculinity, it's just as useful to those who need it. The fear of HIV and AIDS may be gut-level instinct, but it's no basis for decision-making when the safety procedures already in place for the screening of all blood donations ensures that there's virtually zero risk of HIV-tainted blood from any donor, gay or straight, finding its way to recipients.

When, in 1983, the current policy regarding who could give blood--and whose donations would be turned away--was formulated, the putative reasoning for it was that gays giving blood could lead to a contaminated blood supply, with recipients of tainted blood at risk for contracting HIV. The argument was couched in scientific terms, but the social view of gays played a part.

Over the course of the years, it's been increasingly evident that it's an anti-gay stigma that keeps the blood donor ban in place, and not sound science or health policy. Indeed, much like the ban on gays in the military, the reflexive denial of gay participation works against common sense and practical goals: blood donations are never equal to demand, just as enlistment numbers cannot fill the need for boots on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, gays are ready and willing to pitch in and do their part--if only they were allowed to do so.

In both cases, too, there's a dubious policy in effect. THe military has its "Don't Ask Don't Tell," and though in the case of blood donations there is an asking, who's to say that those doing the telling are telling the truth? While there's no swab test (yet) to show who is gay and who is straight (and who falls in between), there are highly accurate and thorough tests for donated blood to screen for HIV and other disease factors--so telling a gay man that the fact that he's had sex with another man at any point in the last thirty-odd years (since 1977!) disqualifies him is not a matter of precaution, it's a matter of anti-gay absurdity at the cost of the sick and the injured.

Blood is a primal symbol for human beings. It speaks of lineage, and of life--of vitality, and strength; of innate virtue, and quality of character. It even speaks of talent: we say of a gifted person that the thing for which he displays an unerring competence is "in his blood." The physiological role of blood is to transport oxygen and nutrients to the cells, as well as to distribute body heat and circulate the immune system's infection-fighting agents, but in a psychological sense blood has to do with who we are, and who we wish to be. If anything, I suspect, what drives the fear of gay donors is less a legitimate concern of HIV contamination in the blood supply than an unarticulated and irrational fear that, somehow, accepting the blood of a gay means a risk of catching his "gayness."

For years now, GLBT equality groups have taken the American Red Cross to task for not accepting the blood of openly gay people. That criticism is mispaced: the Red Cross has to follow guidelines laid down by the Food and Drug Administration. In a sign of real political progress, eighteen lawmakers recently lobbied the FDA's Commissioner, Margaret Hamburg, to drop the ban, saying that it was not justified by "a single piece of scientific evidence," as Sen. John Kerry put it. But science is not the basis of the ban at this point: prejudice is. Another sign of the true color of the politics of blood: not one Republican joined the seventeen Democrats and single Independent who spoke out.

Another famed quotation springs to mind in this context: 1 Corinthians, 13:11 reads, "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, my understanding was that of a child, and I thought in the way of a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things." There are many ways in which we, as a culture, could stand to grow up. Accepting that the practical costs of enforcing prejudice--at the expense of public health--is simply too high is one of them.