Up until 2015, any man who had had sex with another man was banned from blood donation for life.
So, this has evolved a long way, but the US has still maintained a fairly regressive policy that a lot of people believe puts irrational or homophobic restrictions on who could donate blood. We have good tests to diagnose people with HIV disease and we have sensitive assays to test blood products to make sure they are safe to be given for donation.
We’ve obviously come a long way both in terms of our understanding of the epidemiology of and our ability to safely test and screen blood products. When the ban was started, in 1985, blood banks had limited abilities to test blood products, so they banned donations from several groups who were found to have higher rates of HIV disease, including gay men. Back in the 1980s, the FDA placed restrictions on blood donations by gay men.
