Time to End the Ban
PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER
Victoria Schneps-Yunis
on Gay Blood Donations CEO & CO-PUBLISHER
Joshua Schneps
FOUNDING EDITOR IN-CHIEF
& ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
Paul Schindler
editor@gaycitynews.com
DIGITAL EDITOR
Matt Tracy
matt@gaycitynews.com
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Duncan Osborne
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Donna Aceto (Photography)
Christopher Byrne (Theater)
Susie Day (Perspective)
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Nicholas Boston, Kelly Jean Cogswell,
Andres Duque, Steve Erickson,
Andy Humm, Eli Jacobson,
David Kennerley, Gary M. Kramer,
Arthur S. Leonard, Michael T. Luongo,
Lawrence D. Mass, Brian McCormick,
Eileen McDermott, Mick Meenan,
Tim Miller, Donna Minkowitz,
Christopher Murray, David Noh,
Sam Oglesby, Nathan Riley,
David Shengold, Ed Sikov,
Yoav Sivan, Gus Solomons Jr.,
Tim Teeman, Kathleen Warnock,
Benjamin Weinthal, Dean P. Wrzeszcz
ART DIRECTOR
Marcos Ramos
ADVERTISING
Ralph D’Onofrio
718-260-2524
rdonofrio@schnepsmedia.com
ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES
Gayle Greenberg
Andrew Mark
Jim Steele
Julio Tumbaco
Miriam Nieto
Jay Pelc
Laura Cangiano
Kathy Wenk
Jeannie Eisenhardt
Lenny Vigliotti
Elizabeth Polly
Please call 212-22-1890 for
advertising rates and availability.
CO-FOUNDERS EMERITUS
Troy Masters
John Sutter
Gay City News, The Newspaper Serving Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual, and Transgender NYC, is published
by Schneps Media. Send all inquiries to: Gay City
News, One Metrotech North, Third Floor, Brooklyn,
NY 15201. Phone: 212-22-1890 Written permission
of the publisher must be obtained before any of
the contents of this paper, in part or whole, can be
reproduced or redistributed.
All contents © 2020 Schneps Media
Gay City News is a registered trademark
of Schneps Media
Fax: 212-22-2790
© 2020 Schneps Media
All rights reserved.
FOUNDING MEMBER
P E R S P E C T I V E : L e t t e r f r o m t h e E d i t o r
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
With the coronavirus
pandemic creating a
critical shortage in
the nation’s supply of
blood needed for transfusions, platelets,
and plasma, out gay Manhattan
State Senator Brad Hoylman has exactly
the right idea.
It is well past time for the US Food
and Drug Administration to end the
outdated and discriminatory ban on
gay men donating blood.
Last week, on March 19, the FDA
put out an urgent call for blood donations.
Many Americans who make it a
practice to frequently give blood have
been staying away in recent days in
the interests of social distancing to
slow the spread of COVID-19. Three
days after the FDA’s call for more donations,
Mayor Bill de Blasio issued
his own urgent call for blood donations
in what has become the epicenter
of the nation’s health crisis.
A review of the policy’s history
makes clear just why it is an irrational
hobbling of the nation’s public
health efforts.
In 1983 — just as the nation’s hysteria
about the emerging AIDS crisis
was shifting into high gear — the
FDA put a blanket lifetime ban on
blood donations by any man who had
engaged in sex with other men, as
well as on women who had engaged
sexually with such men.
Over time, however, the technologies
applied in screening blood donations
made it possible to prevent the
HIV virus from entering the nation’s
blood supply. As early as 1997, the
American Association of Blood Banks
began to recommend a rethinking
of this policy. Resistance within the
FDA, however, was strong. It was
not until late 2015 that the agency
adopted what it heralded as a major
reform.
It wasn’t really much of a reform
at all. The lifetime ban on donations
by gay men, other men who have sex
with men (MSMs), and women who
have sex with MSMs was reduced to a
ban on donations by anyone who had
engaged in such sex over the previous
year.
In other words, millions of gay men
and others could only give blood if
they had been sexually abstinent for
the prior year.
As Hoylman’s March 24 letter to
the FDA makes clear, this restriction
is absurd. The current blood screening
technology, the Nucleic Acid Test,
detects HIV in donated blood to the
degree that the risk of HIV infection
from such blood is only 1 in 1.47 million,
by the FDA’s own admission.
Abolishing the ban altogether would
put the US in line with best practices
internationally as observed by South
Africa, Italy, Mexico, and Argentina.
Consider the benefi ts. A 2014 study
out of UCLA Law School’s Williams
Institute found that allowing gay men
to donate blood would increase the
overall blood supply by four percent,
which is the equivalent of more than
615,000 additional pints. One pint
of blood can save as many as three
lives, which means that opening up
this pool of donors could make the
difference between life and death for
more than 1.8 million Americans.
When AIDS emerged on the scene
in 1981 and government offi cials in
Washington, Albany, and New York
denied, ignored, and dawdled, it was
the LGBTQ community that stepped
up to take our lives and well-being
into our own hands. From Gay Men’s
Health Crisis to ACT UP, Bailey
House, Housing Works, the Treatment
Action Group, and many more
institutions we built, a new model of
citizen and consumer healthcare advocacy
was born.
Gay men are eager to help our fellow
citizens. Don’t keep shutting the
door on us.
P E R S P E C T I V E : S n i d e L i n e s
Fighting The Cuomo Virus
To Free Imprisoned Elders
BY SUSIE DAY
It’s spring, yet most of us are
stuck inside, groping for a positive
attitude while hoping we’re
negative for the coronavirus.
Here, in the apartment where I shelter
with my partner, Laura Whitehorn,
there is constant turmoil.
Laura, who spent over 14 years in
federal prison, helped found Release
Aging People in Prison/ RAPP. Currently,
Laura has been going nuts,
blasting every shred of her already
shredded being into getting Governor
Andrew Cuomo — or anyone with
enough power — to release elders
and other vulnerable people in state
prisons before COVID-19 inevitably
swamps those facilities. Coronavirus
news changes every second, but, at
the moment I’m writing, New York
City has released 23 older people from
city jails — less than one percent of
all incarcerated adults in the state.
I fully support and admire Laura’s
efforts, but hey, it’s been weeks since
we’ve had one conversation without
Laura defi ling our “quality time” to
answer a text or make some urgent
phone call, hoping to get elders released.
Frankly, I would like to depressurize
this political pressure
cooker. That’s why I’m sharing it with
you. Here is an interview with my
life’s helpmate, in hopes that it will do
us all some good.
I get my iPhone and sit Laura down
➤ IMPRISONED ELDERS, continued on p.21
March 25 – April 08, 2 20 020 | GayCityNews.com
link
link
/GayCityNews.com
link
