Wanna help save lives? West Hollywood is hosting a community blood drive on Friday, April 3 in partnership with UCLA Health. The drive will take place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Doheny Room at the West Hollywood Park Aquatic & Recreation Center, 8750 El Tovar Place, next to the library. Appointments are recommended. Walk-ins are welcome.
What makes this newsworthy, aside from saving lives, is that gay men are now encouraged to donate. For many queer men living in West Hollywood, walking into a blood drive and actually being eligible to give is news to them.
Forty Years of Being Told No
Most probably know by now the U.S. government put a lifetime ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men back in 1983. This was 2 years into the AIDS crisis. At the time there wasn’t even an approved test yet to screen donated blood for HIV. The ban covered any man who’d ever had sex with another man since 1977. It stayed that way for 30 years.
In 2015 the FDA finally lifted the lifetime prohibition, but replaced it with something that felt like the same thing just with different paperwork. Men who have sex with men could donate, but only if they’d been completely abstinent for the previous 12 months. Good luck with that – gay or straight. For most that was a non-starter. In 2020, during the COVID pandemic, when blood supplies were running critically short because donation events kept getting canceled, the FDA cut that waiting period to 90 days.
The American Medical Association, the Red Cross, and LGBTQ+ advocacy groups had been pushing to change it for years. Blood screening had improved enormously since 1985 and HIV transmission through donated blood in the U.S. had gotten extremely rare. The restrictions had outlasted the science behind them.
What Changed in 2023
The FDA finalized new guidelines in May 2023. The American Red Cross implemented them in August of that year.
These new, evidence-based guidelines are designed to be more inclusive and equitable by assessing all potential donors based on individual risk-related behaviors rather than gender or sexual orientation. The revised Donor History Questionnaire is gender-neutral, ensuring that all donors are asked the same screening questions regardless of identity. This change has expanded eligibility for many individuals, including members of the LGBTQ+ community who were previously excluded under older policies.
There are no eligibility criteria specific to men who have sex with men. What the questionnaire does ask — of all donors — is whether they’ve had a new sexual partner or multiple partners in the past three months, and if so whether they’ve had anal sex in that period. If the answer to both is yes, the waiting period is three months from last anal sex contact.
Donors on PrEP or PEP face a separate deferral. Those medications interfere with how HIV screening tests detect the virus, so the FDA requires a three-month wait from the last oral dose, or two years from an injection.
Research done around the time of the 2023 change estimated the new policy could increase the national blood supply by 2 to 4 percent.
About the April 3 Drive
UCLA Health’s Blood & Platelet Center has been operating since 1975. It collects around 60,000 blood and platelet donations a year and supplies roughly 75 percent of transfused blood across its hospital system, which includes Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital, and Santa Monica UCLA Hospital.
The event is free. Reserve a spot at the UCLA Blood & Platelet Center donor website.
