I had a gay male friend complain about this to me recently, and while I'm about ten trillion light years from being a gay rights icon, I see this as the kind of idiotic discrimination that always comes when the irrationally prejudiced are trying their hardest, and failing miserably, to maintain their bigotry in a society moving on from an age of darkness into a more enlightened era. In the 1950s and 1960s, when black and white began to integrate, there were holdouts in positions of power who opposed the integration at every turn. Nowadays, most people look back on them with shame, and those who see them more fondly are ridiculed as artifacts of a bygone age. Or perhaps as having been produced in trailer parks by various combinations of severe inbreeding and alcoholic mothers who drank a six-pack of beer a day throughout the pregnancy, only to flunk out of school after about the fourth grade at latest and immediately blame other races for their inability to find success. In time, I believe that this policy, too, will be viewed as a societal shame and as a drain on us all, and those who crafted and supported it as misguided at best or, at worst, as evil bigots, millstones tied to the neck of society that held us back by decades when we should have known better.
And make no mistake, this policy hasn't been something that would have been supported by contemporary "popular" knowledge, to say nothing of contemporary scientific knowledge, for a few decades. The usual excuse for policies such as this are to prevent the spread of HIV, yet nearly every thinking person has known for at least 20 years now that one doesn't have to be a homosexual to contract HIV. Promiscuous heterosexuals, prostitutes and their clients, intravenous drug users, all of these are likely to contract HIV, yet when I went to give blood a few years ago (I was rejected for my pulse being too high) I was not asked any questions about sexual activity or soliciting prostitutes. If HIV is their excuse, they would be just as strict about heterosexual activity as about homosexual acts. But they're not. HIV is an excuse, a cover used to flimsily hide real issues of homophobia and bigotry that, as of 2012, already borders on the fanatical when compared to the opinions of many in society as a whole. Gays aren't fully accepted yet, but they're working on it, and when their inevitable victory comes, we'll be as ashamed of policies such as this as we tend to be of racially segregated schools.
