If you prick us do we not bleed? If you poison us, do we not die? Shylock asks of his persecutors, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. He is talking as a Jewish man, stigmatised and outcast; denied the same rights as contemporaries. As a non-heterosexual man, I ask of the blood service: If you need us to, will we not bleed? If not, could thousands more not die?
It is currently illegal in the United Kingdom for men who have had oral or anal sex with other men to give blood to the national blood service; a protocol commonly referred to as ‘the blood ban’. The blood ban has lead to the current ‘give blood, because we can’t’ campaign which encourages people donate blood, but makes them aware of the fact that due to dated and widely unfounded stigma gay, bisexual and queer men can’t. This article is concerned not with a reaffirmation of what is widely undisputed; that people need to give blood in order to save each other’s lives, but with the question of why can’t these men can’t give their blood, which is no less valuable than blood from anyone else.
The often unspoken but widely known reason behind the ‘gay blood ban’ is the offensive and dated association between gay men and Aids; this is a tsunami of bile pushing against the waves of gay liberation and its trudge towards equality. It would be foolhardy to deny that Aids was prevalent amongst the gay male community in the 1980s, due to general ignorance followed by a lag in people taking control of their sexual health. Nowadays the gay community as a whole is very aware of the risk of unprotected sex and as such, we belong to a generation in which gay men are not having unprotected sex and are not contracting HIV, and who are in the same biological health as heterosexual men and women. The blood ban, which was initially a reaction to the 1980s Aids pandemic, now seems only to suggest that the wider community has failed to appreciate that men who have slept with other men at some point in their life are no more diseased than those who haven’t.
Another argument, thankfully not put forward by the blood service is the concept of ‘Gay Blood’. The theory is so idiotic that it’s barely worth mentioning except in order to dispel just in case anyone believes it. Basically, it goes something like; gay men have gay blood which holds their gayness and if you give it to straight men then they’ll ‘go gay’ too. Surprisingly enough their have been no confirmed cases of anyone’s sexuality changing following a blood transfusion, and if there were, I pose the question what happens to a gay man who can legally only receive ‘straight blood’, will he be forced go hetero or die?
Regardless of the origins of the blood ban and the arguments for it, the fact remains that it perpetuates a negative view of non-heterosexual males. Its existence in the new decade shows that gay, bisexual and queer men remain marginalised within society and do not have the same rights as heterosexual males. As a student population we encouraged to give blood, but as a gay student, one is turned away. Evidence given in 2008 to a Tasmanian tribunal on their blood ban suggested that if gay and bisexual men who practised safe sex were allowed to donate, one HIV-positive blood donation would be likely to slip through the clinical screening process once every 5,769 years. That’s once between now and the year 7778. This statistic like thousands of others shows just how ludicrous and flawed the ban itself is.
It is remarkable how many people have no idea about the ban, and who are outraged when they find out about it. The simple fact is that there is a shortage of blood in the United Kingdom and lifting the ban would mean more blood available to those who need it. At the next University of Manchester Students’ Union General Meeting, a motion regarding the ban will be put forward and within it there will be some key arguments relating to the ban; this is a great way of having your say and being proactive, as well as learning more about the issue itself.
This week is LGBT Awareness week and as part of that we will be running a stall which informs people about the ban, campaigns against it and embraces the ‘give blood because we can’t’ ethos. We will be outside the John Rylands Library on Tuesday afternoon and there will be a general Awareness week stall and events all week in the Students’ Union.
