What About the Gay Gene?

Homosexual men are upset about new FDA regulation that forbids homosexuals from making anonymous donations to sperm banks. The FDA says it's about AIDS, which makes sense. If you've been in the tropics, you can't donate blood because you could be carrying tropic parasites and diseases.

[T]he Food and Drug Administration is about to implement new rules recommending that any man who has engaged in homosexual sex in the previous five years be barred from serving as an anonymous sperm donor.

The FDA has rejected calls to scrap the provision, insisting that gay men collectively pose a higher-than-average risk of carrying the AIDS virus. Critics accuse the FDA of stigmatizing all gay men rather than adopting a screening process that focuses on high-risk sexual behavior by any would-be donor, gay or straight.

"Under these rules, a heterosexual man who had unprotected sex with HIV-positive prostitutes would be OK as a donor one year later, but a gay man in a monogamous, safe-sex relationship is not OK unless he's been celibate for five years," said Leland Traiman, director of a clinic in Alameda, Calif., that seeks gay sperm donors.

Why I find especially bizarre is that there is a sperm bank specifically for gays. Is this an effort to secretly and annonymously proliferate a "gay gene," if such a thing exists? Why would anyone wish to expose unwitting mothers to a gay gene? It would seem that, if gay men wanted to donate to sperm banks, they would do so upfront, so that mothers could decide upon the risk for themselves.