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Abstract
As gay men began voluntarily withdrawing from blood donation in the early 1980s, lesbians in community with gay men in several U.S. cities organized drives to replenish the blood supply. These drives were sometimes the continuation of previously established drives by gay–lesbian organizations or faith communities, sometimes new initiatives in response to HIV/AIDS. However, after the initial publicity, mention of lesbian blood drives in print is both scarce and brief. Focusing on drives organized from 1983 to 1992 by a group known as San Diego Blood Sisters, this article is an initial step in documenting lesbian blood drives to inform and enrich conversations about histories of responses to HIV/AIDS, theoretical discussions of how community connections in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer spectrum are enacted and understood, and emerging research on intersections of gender and sexuality as they are expressed through blood donorship.
Notes
I am preparing two articles that explore, respectively, the gendering of blood donation through the changing participation of women as blood donors during and after World War II and the various motivations and implementations of blood drives in gay/LGBTQ communities from the early 1950s to the present.
Such mentions are often relegated to a footnote. Even more lamentably, only one of a handful of such examples is less than 20 years old (see Faderman Citation1992:293, Gould Citation2009:66, Shilts Citation1987:455–456, Treichler Citation1993:216 and Weston Citation1991:127). Illustrative of the tangential status of the Blood Sisters story, John-Manuel Andriote, author of Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999), does not mention the San Diego Blood Sisters in his book, although he briefly discusses their work in an interview available on the publisher's website: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/020495.html.
The term “men who have sex with men,” abbreviated as MSM, includes self-identified gay and bisexual men, as well as men who may identify as heterosexual who have sex with other men.
Two or three of the four commonly used blood products (red cells, platelets, plasma, and cryoprecipitate) can be produced from a single pint of donated whole blood. Therefore, according to the Red Cross, each donation can help save up to three lives (http://www.redcrossblood.org/learn-about-blood/blood-facts-and-statistics).
Brooks identifies as asexual, has written a series of columns on asexuality, and advocates for asexual people to be recognized as partners and allies by the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities; thus, LGBTQA.
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Notes on contributors
Beth Hutchison
Beth Hutchison teaches in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University. From 1994 to 2009, she was Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.