Dear Red Cross,

Many colleges, universities, and even high schools host frequent blood drives through your foundation. Getting younger people involved in these types of charitable work and donation is a very good way to ignite a further involvement.

However, before we are able to donate blood, we must answer a series of questions about our life experiences, i.e. where we have traveled, if we have been on specific medications in the past 6 months, if we have received any tattoos in the past year and, more relative to a specific community, if we are a male who has had any sexual encounters with another male in the past 40 years.

If our answer to that last question is yes, we are barred from donating blood for one year.

In the United States, if you are a male who has had sexual relations with another male, you must wait one year to donate blood. This is also the case for women who have had sexual relations with men who have had sexual relations with another man. This is not only a policy in the United States. Many countries defer blood donors for a year if they have had relations similar to those previously stated.

This means that you must refrain from these sexual acts for a full year before you can donate blood. That just isn't fair or realistic for the community of humans in general.

However, on the other side, many countries believe that blood is blood and if it will help save a patient's life, it is good to be donated. There is no turn aways and no deferrals.

In this writer's opinion, the United States should follow in those countries footsteps and accept that blood is blood.

When blood is donated, it goes through various tests and procedures to ensure that it is viable to be donated because, granted, even if you seem to be the poster child for blood health according to the survey you take before donating, there still could be something wrong with your blood in one way or another. It would not be any different to test blood for HIV or AIDS after it has been donated. This will allow the men and women who are stifled from this restriction to donate blood and if, per chance, they are infected, then the blood can be discarded. If the men and women can prove their HIV status, why can't their blood be taken?

Blood donation is at a low right now. According to the Red Cross Foundation, a person needs blood every two seconds. The less healthy people you allow to give blood, the less people that will be helped.

So, this is a plea from myself and many others in the LGBTQ community to the men and women who take blood for Red Cross donations: please do not encourage the stigma on homosexual acts by not accepting our blood. If we are free of STDs and able to provide proof, then our blood is just as good as those of straight men.

Sincerely,

Eager to give, yet stigmatized blood donors