This image placed upon the LGBT+ community was felt worldwide with blood donations being barred from the U.S. This created a myth of ‘dirty blood’ around not only MSM, but the wider LGBT+ community as their morality was placed into question by an infection considered by media at the time as a homosexual disease. On account of the spread of HIV and subsequent AIDS epidemic in the 80’s/90’s, men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) have been barred from donating blood since 1985, due to poor detection techniques that left donations of blood vulnerable to missed infections. The UK’s current policy guidelines on donating blood have a complex history of misassumptions and homophobic rhetoric that, to this day, still requires people to divulge intimate information around their sexual lives to complete strangers at donation centres.