Rohn Neugebauer was a healthy 48-year-old Pennsylvania before he died unexpectedly of a heart attack on March 16. He was also an advocate for organ donation, playing a major role in the fundraising efforts of the Center for Organ Recovery and Education. Yet after Neugebauer's death, the hospital would not accept his donation of tissue and organ because Neugebauer was gay. 

The vague policy goes back to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which states in guidelines for preventing transmission of HIV that, "men who have had sex with another man over the past 5 years should be excluded from donation of organs or tissues" under most circumstances, unless the risk of the organ recipient not receiving the transplant is so fatal that it outweighs the transmission of HIV. The Center for Organ Recovery and Education, where Neugebauer raised money, stated to Think Progress that sexual orientation is irrelevant in organ donation and tissue donation requires screening that considers a sexually active gay man as a high risk for transmissible diseases. 

Even in 2014, the federal government implies that all gay men are HIV positive. Gay men are still rejected as blood donors, a policy that the American Medical Association publicly rejected just last year, citing it, "discriminatory and not based on sound science."

In 2010, the Williams Institute, a UCLA think tank on LGBT issues, found that lifting the ban on blood donations from gay men could raise the number of eligible donors by 2.6 million and the number of pints likely to be donated by 219,200 per year, which could save thousands of lives.