Research cited by Health Canada said current risks of contracting HIV from the blood supply, with all samples tested, was estimated to be "very low," at 1 in 20.7 million. This meant at the time that men who had sex with men could not donate blood if they'd had sex during the period prior to the donation.įor years, advocates said the policy was discriminatory and not based on science. This follows several changes to the blood donation regime over the past decade that saw deferral periods for donations by gay men progressively lowered from a lifetime ban to three months in 2019. The policy change - to be implemented by September - marks "a significant milestone toward a more inclusive blood donation system," it said. "Under the new screening approach, Canadian Blood Services will introduce a sexual behaviour-based donor-screening questionnaire that will apply to all donors of blood and plasma," the health department said in a statement. This post originally misstated the name of Indiana University.Instead, donors will be screened for high-risk sexual behaviours, regardless of gender or sexuality. Photo ( cc) via Flickr user See-ming Lee. The more we know about the way people really have sex, the harder it is to file straight and gay people into easy categories: one safe, the other risky one natural, the other dirty one in this hole, one in the other. He suggests that eligibility questionnaires "be made more detailed for men who've had sex with men, in order to more accurately identify the degree of risk." Hopefully, studies like these can help foster accuracy on a cultural level, too. Gay rights advocate Peter Tatchell has argued that blood donors ought to be treated as individuals, not sexualities. If they do it with a man who also sleeps with men, they'll only be barred from donating blood for one year.
At the same time, almost half of straight women today will engage in anal sex. When they are, many of them use protection. This study suggests that many gay men are not even regularly engaging in anal sex, the sexual activity that puts them at greatest risk of disease transmission.
#Gay men sex manual#
draws a distinction between engaging in oral, anal, or manual sex, the United States bans gay men from donating blood for life if they've ever engaged in sex with another man. When blood screeners ask men if they've ever had sex with another man, what do they mean? Though the U.K.
#Gay men sex series#
The most common series of activities in the encounter-reported by 16 percent of men-involved "holding their partner romantically, kissing partner on mouth, solo masturbation, masturbating partner, masturbation by partner, and genital–genital contact." Half of participants who engaged in anal sex employed a condom. By contrast, only 36 percent of men reporting receiving anal sex and 34 percent of men reporting giving it. Around 75 percent of participants reported kissing their partners, giving oral sex, and/or receiving oral sex in their most recent sexual encounters. The results: Despite the popular perception, "sexual behaviors involving the anus were least common," researchers found.
Did it involve kissing, cuddling, masturbation, oral sex, anal sex? Did it happen with a boyfriend, spouse, stranger, or sex worker? Was it in a car, a home, a club? Were condoms used? The study hopes to combat "the almost exclusive focus" on HIV in most academic research on gay male sexual behavior, as well as to increase understanding of the "diversity and complexity of these men’s sexual lives." To do that, they asked gay and bisexual-identified men ages 18 to 87 to chart their most recent sexual experience. In the Journal of Sexual Medicine, researchers from Indiana University and George Mason University surveyed nearly 25,000 gay and bisexual men in an effort to better understand how they experience sex.