Blood donation — Photo: New Africa “I remember the first time I went to donate blood as an adult, in the late ’80s,” says Scott Weiner. “The questionnaire said if you’d had sex with a man since 1977, you couldn’t donate.
I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach, that I was permanently banned from donating blood for the rest of my life. It was really demoralizing, and made me feel like a second-class citizen.” Weiner came of age as a gay man in 1987, when he was 17, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. “There was no effective treatment for HIV,” he says. “People were dying in obscene numbers.
It was a very scary time to come to grips that I was gay.” Now, almost 33 years later, the Democratic state senator from California who
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