’DON’T BE SUCH A WUSS. Give blood. BE A HERO. Give blood. BE HUMAN. Give blood.’ These are examples of slogans from blood donation campaigns. Others are: ‘Drops for you, life for them’ / ‘Good people give’ / ‘Together we can save a life’ / ‘All types needed’ / ‘Find the hero in you. Give blood 3 times a year’. Except that, not everybody’s blood is wanted and not just anyone can give, save a life or be a blood donation hero. This is what Still Deferred is about. The solo exhibition Still Deferred is in dialogue with and is a continuation of the live performance Deferral (2013) that took place at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. During this performance Coble ,along with 11 gay men, spent 4 days addressing the United States discriminatory policy that deferred or refused blood donations from men who had had sex with men after 1977. The slogan “Be a hero, give blood” coined by the World Heath Organization (WHO) is a center point of this work. This statement in the context excluding gay men from being able to be blood donors begs the question of whom is allowed to be this hero and under what conditions. Using text and images from blood donor campaigns that urge, congratulate and frame blood donors as a certain type of ‘healthy, normal and heroic’ person Coble creates a series of hospital like curtains with text from these campaigns such as “Don’t be such a wuss, give blood, “Be human, give blood” and “Good people give”. The word “deferral”, scripted in Morse Code is then in Coble’s own blood blotted onto the curtains disrupting the divisive text. The gay men who collaborated on this work stitched over the WHO’s image of a hero with red thread in place of their own ‘illegal blood’ in an act of re-envisioning the gay male hero. While a more recent draft of the guidelines from the US Food and Drug Administration as of summer 2015 now states that a man should be barred from giving blood only for one year after he has had sex with another man. While this has been lauded as a successful step towards gay rights Coble insists that these protocols still perpetuates and represents a stigmatization and institutionally supported homophobia. This is a political deferral based on homophobia and fear rather than on scientific fact, which has been argued time and again by medical researchers and gay rights advocates alike. Gay men are still deferred. Along with this exhibition a zine Still Deferred: Blood and Heroes (ISBN: 978-91-982585-1-6) was produced and handed out for free. This publication offers historical and contemporary examples from the blood donation debates as well as documentation of the live performance Deferral, which functionedd as a contribution to the discussion.