The Price of Blood

March 19, 2025·31 min·2 clips

Brandon Wolfe escapes the Pulse shooting by running through a door smelling of blood and smoke, only to realize his best friends Drew and Juan — who had each secretly told him they planned to propose — were still on the dance floor.

1. Not Past It traces the history of blood banking from 1920s professional paid donors through the 1937 founding of the U.S. blood bank system, connecting it to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting and the FDA's ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men. 2. Host Simone Polanin interviews Brandon Wolfe, a Pulse shooting survivor; Dr. Chris Beirer, director of the Duke Global Health Institute; and legal and medical scholar Sarah Chin. 3. The episode's central argument is that blood donation policy has never been medically neutral — it has always reflected social hierarchies, from the racial segregation of blood supplies in World War II to the indefinite 1983 ban on gay men. 4. The opening scene depicts a 1920s professional blood donor being paid $50 to have his wrist cut open and his artery connected arm-to-arm with a dying patient, illustrating how crude blood transfusion was before blood storage was understood. 5. Austrian scientist Karl Landsteiner's discovery of blood types at the turn of the 20th century made transfusions safer; before this, mixing incompatible blood types caused the blood to 'agglutinate like curdled milk,' and the patient died. 6. In the 1930s, Chicago physician Bernhard Fantus developed the blood bank — collecting, typing, and refrigerating blood in advance — eliminating the need for professional donors and last-minute type matching. 7. World War II transformed blood donation into a patriotic act; the American Red Cross collected blood nationally and a poster of a fallen soldier receiving plasma read, 'He gave his blood. Will you give yours?' 8. Brandon Wolfe moved to Orlando from Portland at 19 or 20 years old; Pulse nightclub was one of the first places he could hold hands with another man without looking over his shoulder. 9. On June 12, 2016, Brandon and his friends Drew and Juan arrived at Pulse on Latin night; around 2 a.m., Brandon stepped into the bathroom and heard the first gunshots. 10. Brandon ran out of the nightclub with strangers, 'locking arms and making a sprint for it,' through doors smelling of blood and smoke, and arrived in a parking lot before realizing Drew and Juan — who had each privately told him they planned to propose to the other — were still on the dance floor. 11. Drew and Juan were among the 49 people killed; the gunman fired over 110 rounds from an assault rifle. 12. As blood banks put out urgent calls for donations after the shooting, gay and bisexual men who lined up to donate were turned away under the FDA's 1983 indefinite ban on men who have sex with men. 13. Dr. Chris Beirer, then a medical student at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, recalls hospitals in the early 80s 'overflowing' with AIDS patients; half the gay men in New York were already infected with HIV, and he was negative while his partner Ed was positive. 14. The 1983 FDA ban was drafted before reliable HIV blood tests existed and was described in the FDA's own language as an indefinite exclusion of 'men who have sex with men,' a category the policy defined by sex assigned at birth. 15. Beirer notes the ban was enacted during a period when the Supreme Court upheld sodomy laws in 1986, ruling that the Constitution did not protect private consensual sex between gay adults — 'medical decision-making in a neutral, gay-positive society is not what it was.' 16. Other groups excluded from blood donation at various times included commercial sex workers, injection drug users, and Haitians who immigrated after 1977; at the start of World War II, Black donors were turned away, and after protests, their blood was accepted but segregated by race until the 1970s in some states. 17. The FDA progressively loosened the ban: lifting the Haitian exclusion in 1990 after protests, changing the gay men's ban to a 12-month abstinence requirement in 2015, then a 3-month requirement in 2020. 18. In 2023, the FDA proposed new donor questionnaires based on individual sexual risk behavior rather than gender identity, removing the categorical ban; the study supporting this change was partly conducted in Orlando, where Brandon Wolfe participated as a blood donor for the first time. 19. Listeners interested in LGBTQ history, the AIDS crisis, public health policy, or the political history of blood banking will find this episode dense with specific people, dates, and legal context. 20. Listeners who find accounts of gun violence or AIDS-era death distressing should note the episode's content warning and may want to skip.

As heard by us

A sharp, humane history of how blood moved from paid labor to patriotic duty and unequal access.

Not Past It opens in a grim 1920s hospital room and traces blood as it moves from a paid medical service to something collected, stored, and later wrapped in wartime duty.

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The blood-bank origin story that starts with an arm-to-arm hospital procedure and ends with wartime appeals.

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