In this week’s episode, we wade into the bloody (and sometimes gory) side of science.

Part 1: Shawn Musgrave wants to donate blood, but runs headfirst into the FDA’s lifetime ban on gay men as donors.

Shawn Musgrave is a lawyer, journalist, lawyer-who-represents-journalists, and somewhat recent transplant to New York. His work has appeared in The Intercept, POLITICO, The Verge, VICE, and the Boston Globe, among other publications, as well as in the Netflix docuseries How to Fix a Drug Scandal.

Part 2: While working with the condor recovery program, Molly Astell opens a freezer to find every researcher’s nightmare.

Molly Astell is a wildlife biologist who originally never wanted to be one of those "bird people", yet went on to exclusively work with endangered birds in their career. Fourteen of those years were spent working as part of the California condor recovery program in a variety of different roles, mostly with the wild condors in southern California, but also with the captive breeding birds in Boise, ID. Currently, they are a graduate student at Boise State University doing research with condor data they helped to collect, and is discovering the joys of teaching biology to undergraduates.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

It's 2006, I'm 16 years old and I am walking into my very first blood drive in the suburbs of Tucson, Arizona in a mall near our house. I'm going there with my mom. She's a nurse. She's instilled in me and my siblings that at any point, somewhere out there, there is a patient who needs blood. So giving blood is an easy way to do a good thing, maybe even save a life while sitting in a recliner and sipping a juice box.

So I get to the blood drive and I start filling out the intake paperwork. I get to this question, "Since 1977, have you had sexual contact with another male even once?" This question was on all the blood donor forms at the time. Since the AIDS crisis, queer men had a lifetime ban on donating blood, or any guy who had explored this side of their sexuality even once. One bicurious blowjob and no juice box for you.

Shawn Musgrave shares his story at QED Astoria in Queens, NY in November 2024. Photo by Zhen Qin.

Now, at 16 when I read this question for the first time, I haven't had sexual contact with anyone, male or otherwise. A good Evangelical that I am, I'm still a virgin and I am incredibly repressed. I know, though, at 16 that I'm attracted to other guys, even if I can't admit it to myself or my family or the Red Cross. So I just check “no”, like no sexual contact with males. No, ever, and I move on.

All through high school and college, I keep checking that box. Anytime there's a blood drive, I sign up to give blood and I get to this question. Essentially, the Red Cross is checking in on me a few times a year to ask, like, “Are you still in the closet?” And check, check, check.

It wasn't until the summer after college, summer 2012, that I finally admit to myself, after years of repression, like, yes, I want to hook up with men.

So I get on Grindr and I delete it immediately. It is too much, too fast for my prudish, former evangelical sensitivities.

So I get on OkCupid, like a widowed retiree, just trying to find love again and I find a cute guy. Romantic that I am, after we hook up, I basically move into his apartment the next day and we've been together ever since, 12 years now.

But from the first time that we hooked up, I can't give blood anymore, even once, is the rule. So I actually had to come out, not just to my friends and family, but I had to come out to the Red Cross too. I had been such a faithful blood donor that they start calling me after a little while. I dodged their calls for a bit, but then they just keep calling. So finally, I tell this poor Red Cross volunteer, like, “Listen, since the last time I gave blood, I've had sex with a man more than once, so I can't come back.”

Like, that's the FDA's rule. That's not my rule. I can't come back. It was a horribly awkward phone call, and I stopped getting calls after that.

This was the rule, this total lifetime ban on donating blood for queer men for more than 30 years, from 1983 to 2015. In 2015, the FDA relaxed the rule a little bit. Turns out they needed the gay blood, so they dialed it back a little bit. The rule changed from a lifetime ban to queer men being able to give blood if they hadn't had sex with another man for a year. So just like year‑long dry spell and like, come on in. It's great incremental progress, but didn't do anything for me. There's a big victory for gay monks.

Then in 2020, during COVID lockdown, there was a really big blood shortage, so the FDA shortened this celibacy period from a year to three months. Okay, great. Still didn't do anything for me.

Finally, last year, May 2023, the FDA totally overhauls the rule. Guy‑on‑guy is totally fine now, according to the FDA. Love is love. You don't have to be straight or a gay monk to give blood now, but you do have to be what I call backdoor monogamous, by which I mean that in the past three months, you can't have had any anal sex with any new partners or multiple partners. Backdoor monogamous. And you also can't be on a drug called PrEP, which is an amazing drug that radically reduces your risk of HIV transmission.

Now, my friends, I am that aggressively monogamous queer unicorn that the FDA has been looking for. I am so monogamous that I sometimes sheepishly confess it to other queer people. It feels kind of retro now. And even for, I'm sure, some of the straight people here in open relationships or polycules or something, but super monogamous backdoor and otherwise. I'm also not on PrEP, which is an amazing, amazing drug, but it's for the homosexually adventurous, not for a monogamous man like myself.

I realized last year, oh, after a decade, I'm not excluded anymore. I can donate blood again. And I am just beside myself.

I sign up for the first blood drive slot that I can get and I start bragging to everyone. I can give blood again. Like, I do an entire triumphant standup set at a gay bar in Brooklyn. Just like I am going to drink enough juice boxes for all of you people of Good Judy.

So, last October, I go to the blood center around the corner from our apartment in Harlem. I sit down and I start doing the intake paperwork and that question that had hounded me for years, it's not there anymore. I proudly check those monogamous boxes and I fill out the rest of my medical history. I can't remember my blood type more. It's been such a long time. But I do the best I can and I give my paperwork to a technician.

She looks at my paperwork and she says, "I'm sorry, you can't give blood today."

I had gone there prepared for an argument, just in case the sexual history rules had not trickled down to the blood centers yet, but that wasn't the issue.

She tells me, “You're taking one of the medications on my list. One of the drugs that you take can actually cause birth defects, so we can't risk giving your blood to someone who's pregnant. I'm sorry. Your blood's no good.”

I'm stunned. I've been spending the last decade meticulously tracking the FDA's stance on my sex life and I have overlooked some pretty crucial fine print on one of my pill bottles, like birth defects. This was complete news to me.

And I'm on a couple of medications, so I ask her, “Well, which one?”

Folks, the drug that snatched the juice box from me, that stopped me from making queer history that day, was Propecia, generic name finasteride. Those of you who are not laughing don't know it's a hair loss medication. It's a tiny pill of my vanity and my fear of getting older and my desperate quest not to have my dad's hairline. That's what Propecia is.

So I'm mortified and I apologize, and I leave. Walking home, I try to console myself. Like, maybe this humiliation I'm feeling with my shattered pride and my tainted blood, maybe this is still some small victory against discrimination. Now, for the first time since coming out, it's not homophobic bigots or outdated rules about who I had sexual contact with even once or when or if it was anal, which the FDA really cares about still. The thing keeping me from donating blood now, just like so many straight men in here, is my fight against male pattern baldness, not my queerness.

Thanks.

Part 2

When I was 34, I was working with the California Condor Recovery Program. We were a group of about 15 or so people, working to recover the endangered California condor. So we'd be out doing observations, monitoring the birds, doing health checks. Then we would also have these pre‑release birds, which were captive bred juveniles. And we would release them into the wild to kind of like help grow the population.

Molly Astell shares her story at The Lookout Room at Boise State University in September 2024. Photo by Joe Rodman.

So for these captive release birds, these pre‑release birds, we kept them in this giant flight pen to kind of let them get used to their surroundings before they're going to be released. One of our job was to keep them well fed. Also, it's worth noting that they're about at this age where in the wild, normally, the parents would still be kind of taking care of them, teaching them how to scavenge, how to find food, maybe give them a free meal or two. So to help get this done, we had this giant walk‑in freezer. We kept it stocked with about 20 or so calves, a couple dozen rabbits, maybe a few elk, if we happen to have them. But that's kind of how we got that job done.

It's also worth noting condors are scavengers. They're vultures. They eat a lot of dead stuff, so hence, all of the carcasses in the freezer.

At this point, I had been with the program for about 10 years or so. It was nice because there's always somebody else in charge. In my case, it was this big, intimidating guy, who just picture sasquatch but with blonde dreads. That's what he looked like. He was always so confident and decisive. But it was nice knowing somebody else was going to make the decisions. I just had to go do the thing. I didn't have to stress about it.

One day, we're having our weekly Monday meeting sitting around this big office table with like a condor banner on it. It was pretty cute. He announces that he's accepted another position, which leaves me in charge.

I'm like, “Are you kidding me? I am the exact opposite of this guy.” I'm quiet, I'm shy, I'm introverted. I like to really think about things. I don't just make decisions.

But I put on my best. I got this face, even though, deep down, I have to admit, I was really worried about how I was going to measure up. I didn't want to fail my team.

But fast forward a few weeks, everything is going good. It's weird being in charge. I'm out there on the refuge with my biologist Erin, who I guess now I'm in charge of, because that's my job. But anyway, we're getting ready for the pre‑releases to come, just checking out, making sure everything is good, and we decided to go our separate ways for the day.

So I get in my truck. It's a hot August day in Southern California. I'm just kind of driving on my way out and I pass our big freezer. I'm like, “You know what? I'll just stop and make sure everything's okay.”

So I get out of my semi‑air conditioned truck, which is just barely functioning, and I step up to the freezer and I just stop dead in my tracks. Because what I see is the last thing you see before the worst day on condor crew. The thermometer doesn't say 10 or 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It is way higher than that. Also, it's worth noting we haven't been in there for at least a week and I do not know how long this thing has been down. So I'm not sure what's on the other side of the door but it's not going to be good.

I'm also like, “Okay, what do I do? What do I do? Oh, right, I'm in charge. Okay. Let me think about this.”

It seems logical, like first step, let's get a freezer repair guy out here. Yeah, that sounds good. So I head back to the house and I'm Googling freezer repair man. I found someone who's like an hour and a half away, because we are on a wildlife refuge in the middle of nowhere. We don't even have an address.

So I'm trying to get this freezer repair guy out to the refuge using whatever directions I can try to figure out to get them out there. But we get that sorted. Then I call up Erin.

I'm like, “All right, Erin, we have a problem. Freezer's broken down.” And she is not happy.

But she's like, “Okay, I'm going to head out there. We'll figure this out.” So she's on her way.

I'm like, “All right. What do I need to make this work?” And I'm like, “Okay, well, I have my carcass suit, right?”

I don't know if you all have a carcass suit, but my carcass suit is like this old tan, denim, one‑piece zip‑up thing. It's got all these holes in it and some stains that I'm never going to get out of it. I've had it since 2007. I'm weirdly proud of this old thing.

So I get my carcass suit on. Then as I'm leaving, I see these bright green foam earplugs. I'm like, “Oh, I could stick those in my nose and that'll help with the smell, right? Sure.”

So I grabbed those. I head on down to the freezer and I step up to the door. I'm like, “All right, let's see how bad this is.”

So I start opening the door and, oh, my God, the smell was so bad. It was not even the smell so much as it just literally burned my eyes and throat. I've never experienced anything like this before. It was bad.

So I shut the door. I'm like, “Oh, my gosh. All right. Well, it's not my first freezer breakdown. We'll just somehow figure out how to clean this thing out. We'll dump everything at the carcass pit. It's going to be fine. Let's just see how bad it is.”

I open the door fully and, sure enough, it's awful. There are bloated decomposing carcasses everywhere, maggots everywhere. It's bad news.

But I'm kind of working through it in my head and then, finally, Erin shows up. She's got her much newer, nicer carcass suit on. And then she's got her N95 mask and I just take one look at her and I'm like, “Oh, this is bad. Okay. All right. We are dealing with a mess. I can tell from your expression you are not happy.”

09-08-2017_BCNWR_CACO-Workups_SHerrera (270).jpg

But we get to work, because what else are we going to do? We take turns just kind of closing our eyes, covering our mouth, running in, grabbing something, and then running back out. It's rough because, sometimes, you're just blindly running in, grabbing something, and it sort of slips and it takes a couple runs. We're taking turns and double‑teaming things, getting it out.

As we're going along, I'm still wondering about that freezer repair guy, like when is he going to get here? What if he gets lost? What if he turned back?

Finally, I get a phone call from him. He's at the gate and I'm like, “Cool.” I head out to meet him, just kind of like an older, heavier set gentleman with his red hat. I bring him up to the freezer and I'm still wondering, like, is this guy going to take one look at this and be like, “Absolutely not,” because I would understand.

But this guy is freaking superhuman. He just casually rounds up all of his tools. He walks into the freezer and just starts tinkering things. I'm like, “I can't even stand in there for 30 seconds. How are you doing this?”

And I'm looking at Erin, whose N95 mask has slowly moved up to cover most of her face. We're just like, “All right, let's just keep going.”

So we start cleaning out the smaller stuff, the bags of rabbits, the calves, until all that's left are two elk on the ground. If you're not aware, elk are really big. I just asked Google and Google says, on the lighter side, they're like 700 pounds, but could be over a thousand. They're big animals.

Luckily, one of them had been cut in half to make it a little easier to pull out when we needed to, so we managed to double‑team this and get half of the elk out. Then we go to get the second half, but it's like a third falling apart, a third liquefied, and a third just maggots. And it's not going anywhere.

But right around that time, I hear the freezer motor start to kick in, and I'm like, “Oh, thank God.” We have the freezer up and running,

And we just decide, “You know what? Let's just let this elk re‑thaw. We got most of it cleaned. We're in good shape. We're good to go.”

The other thing I should mention is that this is when our new releases were supposed to be delivered that day so this was very time‑sensitive that we get this done, because we're about to have a bunch of hungry birds there right now.

But we have most of it cleaned out. I managed to call some folks, work it out, get a plan to have some food there for our new release birds that night, and so everything's pretty good, in good shape.

I go home. I take a super long shower, and I'm just thinking to myself, “I might not be the best leader, but at least I know I can get in there, get dirty, and get things done.” Also, I have folks like Erin working right alongside me with me, even if it feels like we're in over our heads.

In the next few weeks, we managed to go out, restock the freezer. The new releases were there. They did well. We were able to keep them fed. They were released into the wild. And also, with the freezer working, a little bit of creativity, a couple of tow straps and two trucks, we managed to get the elk out of there. That was good news.

But, I don't know, just kind of thinking back on all of it, it's definitely not the biggest challenge I have, but one of the stinkiest probably for sure. But it kind of makes you think how it's not unique to wildlife or science, but you can't really control what happens in life. All you can control is how you respond to things.

I won't forget this challenge or any of the other challenges that I've had, but I will say if you guys ever need a messy freezer repaired, I do know a guy.