Johann Hari

When David Cameron and Nick Clegg stood on the doorstep of Number Ten Downing Street to declare their ConDem coalition to the world - shiny and smiling and suddenly yoked together - every journalist in Britain reached for civil partnerships as a metaphor. Till Elections Us Do Part... for richer or richer... With this ditched policy on inheritance tax, I do thee wed... But what will the new government mean for actual gays? Should we be scared, or celebrating?

In the run-up to the election, something extraordinary happened to the gay vote. When he became Tory leader, David Cameron realised that gay people are a hugely important voting block: we are 5 percent of the population, disproportionately likely to vote, and disproportionately living in urban swing seats. So he worked hard to strip the Tory brand of its long history of anti-gay crusades. This was tricky, because until 2005 Cameron had been a firm supporter of the homophobic Section 28 and he savaged Tony Blair for "moving Heaven and Earth to allow the promotion of homosexuality in our schools." But nonetheless, he apologised, got a Tory Party conference to applaud his newfound support for civil partnerships, and promoted openly gay candidates. It seemed to be working: with six months to go to the election, 39 percent of gays were primed to choose the Conservatives, more than any other party. It looked like a moment of real optimism, when homophobia had
been driven out of mainstream British politics, and gay people could choose from across the political spectrum.

But then, under the heat and lights of the election campaign, the Tory claims to modernisation seemed to suddenly melt away. Cameron did two interviews with the gay press - and both were disasters. In his interview with Attitude, he lied when he claimed he had never voted against gay adoption. When we showed him the vote in Hansard, the parliamentary record, he simply mumbled: "Well, that's not my recollection." When we read him the comments of the far-right politicians he has chosen to ally with in Europe, calling gay people "faggots" and "paedophiles", he refused to say these comments were homophobic. In his interview with Gay Times, when asked about the contradictions in his record, he was so stumbling and uncertain that he eventually demanded they stop recording, and stammered: "Can we stop for a second?... I'm finding it... I'd almost like to start again from scratch... I'm finding the whole thing actually..." and turned bright red.

Then it got worse still. Cameron's Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling, was caught on tape saying it should be legal for Bed and Breakfast owners to refuse to rent rooms to gay people - and Cameron refused to sack him. Does anybody doubt that if Grayling had been caught saying B&Bs should be allowed to throw out black people, he would have been fired on the spot? Then a leading Conservative candidate, Philip Lardner, announced that homosexuality is "not normal behaviour" and he would "not encourage children to indulge in it."

And then came the worst revelation of all. The Observer newspaper alleged that a leading Cameroon Conservative, Philippa Stroud, had been involved in trying to "drive demons" out of gay people and transsexuals, in ceremonies at her extreme evangelical Church. One transsexual victim told them: "The session ended with her and others praying over me, calling out the demons. She really believed things like homosexuality, transsexualism and addiction could be fixed just by prayer." Stroud refused to comment directly on the story, and has not answered repeated inquiries about whether she believes gay people are possessed by demons. David Cameron refused to condemn her. The Tory rebranding had bled from a Richard Curtis film to a remake of the Exorcist.

After all this, the Tory vote collapsed to just 9 percent, according to a poll for Pink News. That means Cameron managed to attract only half the number of gay voters that Michael Howard, the author of Section 28, achieved in 2005. Given how close the election result was, it's fair to say It's the Gays Wot Lost Cameron His Majority.

And yet, and yet... we still got Cameron as Prime Minister. He immediately appointed as Minister for Equality Theresa May, a woman who supported Section 28, opposed an equal age of consent, and as recently as 2008 voted to discriminate against lesbians. Some Equality.

He got only 36 percent of the national vote - but the Liberal Democrats decided to team up with him. To a lot of gay voters - who opted for the Lib Dems more than any other party - this was a real shock. A YouGov poll of Lib Dem voters found they describe themselves as "leftwing" over "rightwing" by a ratio of 4:1, and most thought they were voting to stop Cameron, not install him.

How will they work with the Tories on this issue? The Liberal Democrats, and Clegg specifically, have a superb record on equality for gay people. They were the first party to demand the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and the first to demand the huge advances that were finally made under the last Labour government. In his political career, Clegg has consistently supported renaming civil partnerships marriage and ending the ban on gay men giving blood. Most impressively, he demands much more intrusive inspections of schools to ensure they are clamping down on homophobic bullying - and he was brave enough to say in his interview with Attitude that there should extra monitoring of faith schools, where homophobic bullying is significantly worse. During the election campaign, pictures emerged of him when he was a (hot) student at Cambridge, playing a gay man in a play. Clegg is sincerely and deeply committed to equality for gay people.

So... There are reasons to be worried about the new government, for sure. The most pro-gay government in British history has been defeated. There are now a slew of weird and gay-hostile Tory backbenchers back within reach of power, and a Tory Prime Minister who is reduced to stammering incoherence on this issue. But before he is anything else, David Cameron is a vote-seeking automaton - and he knows there are more votes in being pro-gay than in being a homophobe, so I suspect he will try to throw us some bones over the next few years. It's possible civil partnerships will be renamed marriage, and the blood ban will end. And if the ugliest instincts of the Tory party do prevail, I am sure Clegg will block them: it is impossible to imagine him as Deputy Prime Minister supporting anti-gay prejudice.

Few gay people will be inclined to toss confetti over the Clegg-Cameron civil partnership, and I certainly won't. But, on this issue, we don't need to panic either. Britain has come too far, and the British people have become too liberal, for us to be dragged back into the 1980s.

This article appears in the current issue of Attitude, Britain's best selling gay magazine. I'm a contributing editor. To subscribe, go to www.attitude.co.uk

The Conservative Party's claim to have abandoned its long history of homophobia seems to be imploding as the general election approaches.

David Cameron's putative Home Secretary has just announced that he thinks B&Bs – places open for hire to the public – should, in practice, be legally permitted to put up signs saying "No Gays". How is this different to turning away black people or disabled people or Jewish people – except that Cameron would sack Grayling if he supported discrimination against them?

Meanwhile, Cameron has given two interviews to the gay press – and both have led him to tell shocking untruths, or demand the interview be stopped.

In his recent interview for Gay Times with a sympathetic former Tory researcher, Cameron offered a few tongue-tied answers defending his record – he supported the homophobic Section 28 laws until 2005, and included it in his personal election literature – before suddenly snapping that the cameras should be switched off, and adding: "Can we stop for a second?... I'm finding it... I'd almost like to start again from scratch... I'm finding the whole thing actually..." and then he petered out. No other issue has reduced him to such inarticulate stammering.

In his interview with me for Attitude, Cameron denied voting to ban gay people from having the chance to provide an adoptive home for children in care. When I showed him the vote in Hansard, he mumbled, "That's not my recollection." He repeatedly said that he wouldn't ally with homophobic parties in the European Union, but when I showed him evidence of his closest European allies – indeed, those who were invited to address the Conservative Party conference – calling gay people paedophiles and "faggots", he simply kept repeating: "I'm not allied with parties that have views on homophobia or racism that I think are unacceptable."

Only a few years ago Cameron was attacking Tony Blair for "moving heaven and earth to allow the promotion of homosexuality in our schools". It's a statement that shows he really didn't understand what homosexuality is: did he think a child can be taught to be gay?

Now he is allowing his leading law and order spokesman to advocate open discrimination against gay people. It is the intermediate stage – when he said he "abhorred homophobia", despite choosing to ally with some of the worst homophobes in Europe – that seems increasingly like a vote-wooing anomaly.

Grayling's excuses for allowing on-going discrimination against gay people are bizarre. Nobody is forced to open a B&B. They choose to do so – and that means they can't turn away people based on arbitrary prejudices.

Gay couples aren't barging into people's homes and demanding a bed for the night. They are simply trying to use a publicly advertised service, without having the door slammed in their face because of a harmless natural difference they were probably born with.

This is a tragedy primarily for the large number of naturally right-wing gay people who want to vote Conservative.

It will be a great day for Britain when gay people can choose any party on the political spectrum, knowing it won't support prejudice and bigotry against them. David Cameron told us that day had come. His actions, alas, show that it has not.

The sports fields of Britain are one of the final ramparts of homophobia – a place where gay men are still obliged to go through the 1950s misery-go-round of fake girlfriends, suppressed love, and self-denial. But this month, those ramparts may have begun to crumble. Gareth Thomas is the ninth most capped ruby player in history, the former captain of the Welsh team, and one of the most popular sportsmen in the country. And he is now openly gay.

Thomas towered over the dancing throng at his coming out party this Thursday in the London club Movida. He is a meaty 6’3 giant, and he walks with the confident roll that comes form always being the strongest man in the room. Yet when we go into a corner and he speaks, he is surprisingly tender. He tells me in his lilting Welsh voice: “All those years I was terrified there would be a negative reaction – comments from the crowd or the opposition. It’s been the complete opposite. The first match after [I came out], the crowd gave me a huge cheer. It’s like I’m finding out that the world is a brilliant place, a place where I can be happy. It’s an amazing thing.”

For the first 35 years of his life, Thomas tried to bury his sexuality. He confides: “I used to visualise it as a little ball. I know it’s crazy, but I’d imagine this little ball in my stomach and I’d have an encounter with a man and the ball would just be there. Then from that day to the next encounter, be it one month, two months, three months, all I could see was this gold liquid dripping out of the ball. That was the real me seeping out… I didn’t want it to be there. I’d walk along cliffs and think it would be much easier if I just fell off.” Now, he realizes it didn’t have to be this way. “I feel normal at last. Everyone has been so accepting – basically, they don’t give a fuck. I haven’t lost anything – my career, my fans, my friends – but I’ve gained so much. I came home from that game and went straight to my mum and dad’s. They cracked open a bottle of champagne. I didn’t know what we were toasting but my mother was like: ‘The rest of your life.’”

Gay men who are naturally effeminate have had visibility for several generations now – and it’s a good thing. But the many gay people who are nothing like this have been left lonely and sometimes feeling that they can’t be “really” gay. They have been alienated by the rigidity of the stereotype. Thomas says: “Growing up I wasn’t aware of a single gay person in our town. The only people who were gay that you had any idea of were Kenny Everett and people like him on the TV. I thought – that’s not what I am, I can’t be gay. Somebody can be as camp as Christmas or as butch as they like and they deserve respect, but it’s strange there are so many gay celebrities in the same mould. Who created the gay stereotype? Not me. I’m not a stereotypical gay man but I am a gay man as much as anyone else.”

He knows he just broke the stereotype – hopefully fatally. “I hope it shows gay people come in all types. There may be an 18 years old who put his rugby boots away because he was gay and thought he wouldn’t be accepted, but now he can go back to the cupboard and dust his boots down.” Today, Ofsted says homophobic bullying is “endemic” in our schools, and a Stonewall study found that 41 percent of gay kids get beaten up and 17 percent get told they will be killed. This burns a big hole in that culture. When the heroes of the most macho boys reveal they are gay, it scrambles the prejudices on which homophobia is built.

The party was full of gay men who agreed. On the dance-floor I talk to Phil Hurt, a tall 29 year old who works for an investment bank. He says: “If you’re a young gay person at school, you get these unspoken signals that sport is something you’re excluded from. You’re not allowed to be sporty or masculine because you’re gay. It was only in my twenties I realised it was bollocks and I thought – I can play rugby if I want to play rugby.” So he joined the Kings Cross Steelers, an amateur gay rugby team. “The greatest moment of liberation is when it becomes unconscious. I don’t think of it as a gay rugby team any more. I just play rugby. We have lawyers and train drivers and go-go dancers and every kind of man you can imagine. Gareth has just taken that a whole mile forward.”

The depth of the cultural change that this marks was underlined by Paul Burstyn, the editor of Time Out’s gay section. He is from the same town as Thomas, Bridgend – a place that used to be famous for rugby and is now famous for teenage suicides. Staring over with pride at Thomas, Burstyn said: “I fled that town because the rugby culture was so barbaric and macho and brutal. They were the people who went queer-bashing. I never thought I would live to see an openly gay rugby player from Bridgend, never mind one who was applauded locally, by the community, by everyone. I thought even now the local press would be snide and mocking. But they haven’t been at all. They have all praised his bravery and shown him as a hero. It’s a sign that something really deep is changing.”

Yet there were ghosts at the party, reminding people why it has taken so long for this step to happen – and why it may not be followed by a wave of sportsmen finally coming out. The great gay equality campaigner Peter Tatchell was there and couldn’t help but think about his old friend Justin Fashanu, the first and so far only Premiership footballer to ever come out in 1990. After eight years of being viciously hounded by the tabloids and on the terraces, he locked himself in his garage and gassed himself. Tatchell said: “If Justin could see this, I think he’d ask – after all this time, where are the other Premiership footballers? Statistically, there must be about fifty gay men in the Premier League. Where are they? Why are they so macho on the pitch and so cowardly about coming out? The fear of coming out is far worse than the consequences… Gareth has shown – coming out brings you public respect and admiration.”

Twenty years ago it was common for black players to be greeted with monkey noises and inflatable bananas. That world has been wiped out now. If there are going to be more Gareth Thomases – especially in football - there needs to be a parallel campaign that is just as tough on anti-gay bigotry. You could see the first steps towards it in 2007, when it was alleged - falsely - that Ashley Cole was gay. The website for fans of rival team Arsenal organised systematic homophobic abuse against him, including printing up huge £20 notes depicting "Queen" Ashley. The Football Association's response, after prompting from Tatchell, was a model of how to react. The fans at the next match were inundated with anti-homophobia flyers. Anybody caught trying to bring in homophobic material was banned. CCTV cameras were trained on Arsenal fans so anybody leading homophobic chants could be banned from future matches too. The abuse withered away. They gave homophobia the red card. Now that effort needs to be stepped up.

The party was full of living proof of how far homophobia has been rooted out of professions where it was, until recently, impossible to be openly gay – from the government minister Chris Bryant to the pop star Will Young. Young told me: “It’s just so wonderful. I’ve been saying for years the last bastions of the closet are Hollywood and sport. It’s one small step for a gay man, a huge step for gaykind.”

Better than almost anyone else, the actor Sir Ian McKellen was able to understand how Thomas was feeling. He came out when he was the same age, in the 1980s, at the height of the Thatcher’s government’s demonisation of gay people. “Oh, I recognize that smile on his face,” he said. “There’s such a rush of excitement. I was just talking to him and, just like me after I came out, he said – I’ve never been to a club like this. I don’t know what to do! And I said – now you can find a boyfriend, Gareth. And he beamed.”

At the end of the night, after the champagne was bled dry, I asked Thomas what advice he would give to the scores of closeted sporting heroes. “It needs to be a personal decision,” he said. “Nobody should be made to feel they have to come out. But I would tell them coming out causes you such a small amount of pain to get such a huge amount of happiness. You don’t have to be so unhappy, and you can do so much good. The letters I get from kids… I know it’s changed people lives. I’d say to them – everybody deserves a chance to be happy in their life. You do too.” And with that, he danced away, smiling.

Under the current Labour government, there has been a stunning sweep of progress for gay people – with civil partnerships, an end to Section 28, and openly gay people in the army and the government. The culture of Britain has been changed forever, and for the better. Yet when I interviewed Gordon Brown for Attitude last month, it became clear that – although he is genuinely proud of these advances, and eloquent in their defence – the internal pressure for further improvements has leaked away. He had few ideas for how to carry on beating back irrational prejudice against gay people.

So it is impressive that Nick Clegg has articulated – in full, and with striking passion – an action plan the next stage in the fight to make gay people truly equal. It starts with the few areas left where gay people are still unequal under the law. Civil partnerships should, he says, be called marriage, and have exactly the same rights, rather than the inferior second-rate option they represent today. The ban on gay men donating blood – as if we are all Typhoid Marys – would end.

But he also wants the government to begin the harder job of tackling homophobia out on the streets and in the playgrounds. He knows why: some 41 percent of gay children get beaten up in school, and they are six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight siblings. So he says every school must teach that homosexuality is “normal and harmless and something that happens”. There can be no religious excuses. He wants to see this tightly policed: “We need to put serious pressure on them. It needs to be a requirement.”

In the same way, he said the government needs to drive homophobia out of the police, where a 2005 Home Office study found it to be “endemic.” He compared several recent cases where gay people were murdered and the investigations appeared to go badly wrong to the Steven Lawrence tragedy, and said there needs to be a change of culture “on patrol, on the beat, in the changing room, in the officer’s mess, in the staffroom.”

And he defended the least popular and most vulnerable group of gay people – the refugees who reach our shores because they would be murdered at home for being gay. Today, they are often deported and told to “hide” their sexuality back home. When I asked if they had a right to remain, he said: “Of course! And, by the way, it’s not just me that says this, it’s international law that says it.”

This is genuinely brave, because Clegg is taking the fight to the last remaining bastions of bigotry. He will get a nasty kick-back from religious fundamentalists who say loving gay couples should never be allowed to marry, and who claim they have a “right” to teach homophobia to children in a way that produces such disproportionate rates of violent bullying and suicide. They right wing press will savage it as an attack on “freedom” – when in fact it is a defence of the freedom of gay people to live their lives free of irrational hate.

David Cameron claims he genuinely regrets his support for homophobic laws like Section 28. Clegg is sceptical, pointing to his recent decision to ally with “faggot”-baiting politicians in Europe – but he has also provided Cameron with an opportunity. When I interview the Conservative leader for Attitude soon, I will ask – will Cameron now support the Liberal Democrats’ bold programme to make Britain a genuinely equal country?

You can read my interview with the Prime Minister here.

Last night I was named 'Journalist of the Year' at the Stonewall awards at the Victoria and Albert Museum alongside Joan Bakewell. This was my acceptance speech:

The only gay award I've ever been nominated for before was 'Worst Dressed Gay Man In Britain', and I was beaten by David Furnish, so I am really chuffed by this. And I'm especially honoured to be named at the same time as Joan Bakewell. Watching her argue against religious bigots and defending gay people on the television was a really important part of my childhood. Long before gay people met in prestigious venues like this, long before we had gay cabinet ministers, long before it was trendy to be in favour of equality, Joan Bakewell was on our side, and it's a privilege to stand by her side today.

I'd like to thank the founders of Stonewall - I know a lot of them are here tonight - because I was a child during the horrible Section 28 rows realizing I was gay, and it was so important for me to see that there were gay people fighting back, and saying that it isn't us who have the problem - it's the people who want to treat us as lesser human beings. It is because of the amazing work led by Stonewall that we are now close to legal equality in Britain. it's because of your struggle that people of my generation can take these freedoms forgranted.

And I know Stonewall will be at the forefront of the battles that still need to be won. It's up to all of us to now change the culture of many of Britain's institutions - especially our schools. As Stonewall's research showed, in this country today, 42 percent of gay kids are beaten up, and 17 percent are told they'll be killed. That's a disgrace in a civilised society - and it can be changed.

And we also need to turn outwards towards the world. I have reported from places, like Iraq and Congo and the Gaza Strip, where gay people don't meet in the most prestigious museum in the country, surrounded by powerful people. They meet in underground carparks, and every moment they are terrified they will be captured and killed. We need to show solidarity with the gay people who are running for their lives tonight - and support the refugees who make it to our shore.

I'm so honoured to get an award from Stonewall because Stonewall's vision is so important. It says that we can be a country - and a world - where gay people are safe, and treated the same as everybody else. I think we can get there together.

The fight to win legal equality for gay people is almost won in Britain – yet the taste of champagne has been tainted by an unexpected dash of blood. In the past few years, gay people have finally begun to exercise the same rights as their straight siblings, yet there has been a sharp surge in violence against us.

In London, recorded homophobic attacks are up by 20 per cent. In Glasgow it's 32 per cent; in Liverpool it's 40 per cent; in Greater Manchester it's 63 per cent. James Parks is only the latest face to be kicked in by this trend: last week, the off-duty police officer left a club in Liverpool with his boyfriend and was lynched by a group of 20 teenagers who smashed his skull and left him close to death.

In a recession, violence always rises, and violence against minorities rises more. Attacks on Muslims, Jews, and black people are also spiking across Britain. But recorded violence against gay people has shown the most extreme rise. Last year, an 18 year-old hairdresser in Liverpool called Michael Causer was sleeping on a friend's sofa after a party when he was woken up. A witness testified that a group of teenagers yelled, "You little queer faggot!" They said they were going to cut out his body-piercings with a knife, and started burning his legs with a lighter. He was found bleeding to death later, dumped in the road outside, after having his head smashed in with a hardback book.

At the trial, one of the 19-year-olds tried for the murder said he was acting "in self-defence" – against a smaller, seven-and-a-half stone boy with no history of violent behaviour. A witness said that during the attack, he had yelled: "He's a little queer, he deserves it!" Yet the jury found him not guilty.

What can we do to stop this surge? The answer does not lie in new laws; these attacks are already highly illegal. It lies in changing the culture of two core British institutions that are still tolerating anti-gay bigotry – our schools, and our police service.

Almost all the new homophobic attacks have been carried out by teenagers who are in – or just out of – the education system. It is not a coincidence that our schools are the one place where homophobic violence is still absolutely mainstream. Britain's school inspectorate, Ofsted, says that homophobia is "endemic" in our playgrounds and our classrooms. A study by Stonewall found 41 per cent of gay children are beaten up, and 17 per cent have been told they're going to be killed (it's 10 per cent higher still in faith schools). The young people who attacked PC James Parks were simply taking that culture out of the playground and onto the streets.

This doesn't have to happen. Michael Causer's mother, Marie, says: "This generation of infants needs to be educated. You hear youngsters as young as four and five saying 'Go away, you're gay.' It might be a word to them, but their parents need to pull them up and tell them that it's wrong. They need better education to let them know that gay people are no different."

When this is tried, it works. The Stonewall study found that in schools with a consistent policy of punishing homophobic language, gay children were 60 per cent less likely to be attacked. That fall in violence could ripple out from the school gates - but today, only 6 per cent of schools adopt this policy. The Government should immediately make it mandatory.

What about the police? There are some terrific police officers who are appalled by anti-gay crime – I'm related to one – but they remain too few. A major 2005 study for the Home Office found that homophobia and sexism are "all but endemic within the police service". It was "not just in every force we surveyed, but in every part of every force". One of the authors, Professor Tim Newburn of the London School of Economics, said: "It is quite clear that gay and lesbian officers find themselves in a very uncomfortable position in the police service ... Sexist and homophobic language is now largely ignored and even tacitly accepted."

Little seems to have changed since the report. This week, a lesbian police officer called Sergeant Jasmine Stewart is appearing before a tribunal. She says her colleagues called her "a poof" and refused to work shifts alongside her. She gave evidence that a senior officer had said she had caused a "drop in morale" in the station.

If the police are happy to talk about "faggots" when the door is shut, what do they do when one of them walks through the door needing help? In too many cases, they do too little. To pluck one example: in Brighton a few weeks ago, two gay women – aged 18 and 22 – were repeatedly punched in the face by a gang of thugs. They went straight to the police – but it was 12 days before officers appealed for witnesses, long after the trail had gone cold.

Yet the 2005 report contained some good news. Racist language had "all but disappeared" from the police force. Why? "Because officers know it will lead to disciplinary action." Of course some racist attitudes remain, but they have been driven underground by a tough policy of requiring police officers to talk about black and Asian people respectfully. It means there are fewer cases like the Steven Lawrence abomination, and so fewer murderers walking our streets. The same could be done with gay people. All it takes is political will.

Of course, any move to ensure gay people are treated the same as everyone else is immediately labelled "political correctness" and smothered in exaggeration and distortion. The defenders of homophobia can no longer, in polite society, say they think gay people are disgusting and immoral. Too many people have grasped the simple, humane truth that every human society in history has had 3 to 5 per cent of people who were attracted to their own gender, and it does no harm to anyone. So the homophobes have resorted to other tactics. One that has been growing over the past year is to claim that gay people who are trying to stop bullying and intimidation are "the real bullies", trying to "silence" poor embattled homophobes.

The logic of this argument is rarely spelled out. Were Martin Luther King and the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan equally bigoted? The Grand Dragon was intolerant of black people; King was intolerant of racism. When you put it put like this, the bogus nature of this way of framing the debate becomes clear. To one side, there are people who believe an entire group of human beings is inferior and deserve lesser rights, simply because of a naturally occurring and harmless difference. To the other side, there is a group of straight and gay people who say sexual orientation is a trivial subject and we should all be treated the same. Yes, both sides should have the right to speak freely – but nobody should pretend there is a moral equivalence.

There are even people who hint that this violent backlash against equality is evidence that gay people should have stayed in the closet. With faux compassion, they say – well, this is what happens if you "flaunt" your sexuality by behaving like everybody else. Do they realise what they're saying? The great civil rights advances in the 1960s in the US were followed by a sharp rise in anti-black violence. Should black people have stayed out of the polling booths and at the back of the bus to avoid the wrath of racists? The problem is not with the victims; it's with the thugs attacking them.

We have come so far thanks to the decency and compassion of most British people – but we have only reached the half-way point. The battle to change our laws was a crucial stage. Now we need to change our institutions. The people who oppose these humane measures hissing "PC! PC!" – or "it's my religion!" – should know what they are doing. They are ensuring more innocent people like James Parks and Michael Causer – or anyone's son, or sister, or neighbour – will be lynched, simply because they were born gay.

Just click here to watch it on YouTube.

Also, you can see me this Friday on Newsnight Review, 11pm, BBC2...

De recente film van de Britse komiek Sacha Baron Cohen valt niet alleen bij de Al-Aqsabrigades van deze wereld in slechte aarde. Johann Hari: 'Jammer dat sommige homo-organisaties al hun pijlen op Brüno richten, terwijl er overal elders in comedy een écht probleem is met homoseksuele personages.'

Sacha Baron Cohens nieuwe kindje Brüno is een gillende nicht die alle vooroordelen belichaamt waarmee homo's opgezadeld werden: dat we oppervlakkig, onvolwassen en pervers zijn. Hij koopt een zwarte baby in Afrika - de prijs? Een iPod - om Madonna na te apen. Hij aast op hetero's door naakt hun tent binnen te stormen. Hij penetreert zijn pygmeeënvriendje met enorme, door fietsen aangedreven dildo's. O, en het overweldigende succes van de film is een nieuwe stap voorwaarts voor homoseksuele mensen.

Het Brünobashen, dat hoogtij viert, slaat de bal behoorlijk mis. Baron Cohen, een van de grootste satirici van onze tijd, trekt een vooroordeel door tot zijn uiterste consequentie om zo de absurditeit ervan aan te tonen. Zo werkt satire. Toen Jonathan Swift de beste satire uit de geschiedenis schreef - A Modest Proposal uit 1729 - voerde hij aan dat de uitgehongerde Ieren er niet in slaagden initiatief te nemen. Het spreekt voor zich dat ze hun eigen baby's hadden moeten opeten. Vele lezers in die dagen vonden het een zoveelste aanval op de barbaarse Ierse horden.

Tijdens de voorbije presidentsrace in de VS publiceerde de onbesproken, vrijdenkende New Yorker een cartoon op de voorpagina met Barack en Michelle Obama als islamitische terroristen met tulband en machinegeweer. Sommige critici riepen: je versterkt de rechtse demonisering! Terwijl de New Yorker er precies de spot mee dreef. Door de mythen letterlijk te nemen en ze op papier te zetten, zei het blad: dit is wat jij denkt dat de Obama's binnenskamers doen. Echt waar? Kijk er eens naar. Zeg me nu met een uitgestreken gezicht dat je dat gelooft.

Baron Cohen doet hetzelfde. Hier wordt niet gelachen met homo's, maar met kwezels die als ze geconfronteerd worden met zijn creatie denken dat hij echt is en model staat voor alle homo's. Baron Cohen waagde letterlijk zijn leven om dat punt te maken. Hij ging naar sommige van de meest homofobe plekken ter wereld - de vluchtelingenkampen van het Midden-Oosten en het diepe zuiden van de VS - en gedroeg zich als een gedrocht ontsproten aan de onbewuste angsten van homofoben.

Zo nam hij als 'Straight Dave' deel aan een worstelwedstrijd in Arkansas, en kreeg hij een dronken menigte zover dat ze "My asshole is only for shitting!" scandeerde. Toen begon hij aan een schijngevecht. Na wat halfslachtig getast begint hij zijn rivaal te versieren; de menigte wordt woedend en begint flessen en stoelen naar de ring te gooien. Had het iemand verbaasd dat hij was neergeschoten?

Uiteraard zullen sommige mensen alleen de taterende nicht zien, en lachen, maar je kunt een satire niet beoordelen vanuit de reacties van de domste elementen in het publiek. Want als je dat doet, dan was elke satire die ooit werd geschreven een wiegendood gestorven. Veel meer mensen zullen extreem gechoqueerd zijn door de vaststelling dat velen de karikatuur voor echt nemen en zich afvragen: "Had ik dat gedaan? Wat is er mis met mijn veronderstellingen?"

Stereotypering

Het is jammer dat sommige homo-organisaties al hun pijlen op Brüno richten, terwijl er overal elders in comedy een reëel probleem is met homoseksuele personages. Het personage van de aanstellerige nicht is voor het eerst sinds de jaren zeventig opnieuw opgedoken in comedy. Horne & Corden (een Brits komisch duo met een eigen sketchprogramma, nvdr) hebben een homoseksuele oorlogscorrespondent die niets anders doet dan kirren over Dolce & Gabbana. De Britse komiek Al Murray heeft een in het roze geklede homoseksuele nazi die krijst: "Ik vind het heerlijk om undercover te gaan met de jongens, mein Führer!" In de VS is de schurk in de film The Hangover een lispelende Chinese nicht, en 'ewwww-I'm-not-gay'-grappen zijn standaard in het nieuwe genre van de bromances. Waarin verschillen ze van Brüno? Het mikpunt van de grap wordt nooit met een judoworp richting homofoben gekatapulteerd. Ze laten hun opgeblazen karikaturen nooit in interactie treden met echte mensen, die hen zouden kunnen ontmaskeren als absurd. Ze worden rechttoe rechtaan gepresenteerd. De grap viseert de homo: kijk hoe onbeduidend, kijk naar zijn vieze lusten!

Ik ben er zeker van dan die komieken niet bewust homofoob zijn. Gedijend in hun vrijdenkende showbizzbel geloven ze dat de onverdraagzaamheid echt iets van het verleden is, en dat ze vrij zijn een karikatuur van elkaar te maken, zoals we dat met onze vrienden doen. Zoals de schrijver Adam Sternbergh stelt: "Het is een houding die zegt: 'Dingen zoals raciale en seksuele stempels liggen zo ver achter ons dat we naar believen raciale en seksuele stempels kunnen drukken.'" Het ware fantastisch geweest als dat de realiteit was: als met niets de draak gestoken kan worden, dan heeft niemand iets te winnen..

Dit soort stereotypering brengt reële psychologische schade toe, niet alleen omdat het de onverdraagzamen aanmoedigt, maar ook omdat het bepaalt hoe homoseksuelen zichzelf zien. Ik weet nog dat ik een kind was in de jaren tachtig en me langzaam aan begon te realiseren dat ik homo was. Door Mr. Humphries of Larry Grayson of Frankie Howerd op tv te zien - en nooit of te nimmer andere homoseksuele mensen - groeide het besef: dit is wat homo zijn betekent. Het is niet alleen de manier waarop je gestalte geeft aan je eigen gender. Het gaat erom dat je ruggengraatloos en oppervlakkig en leeg bent. Dat was deprimerend, want ik wilde zo niet zijn. Ik wilde naar oorlogsgebied, niet naar de catwalks. Ik wilde over het buitenlandse beleid praten, niet over schoenen. Camp zelf is niet het probleem. Het is de implicatie dat alle homo's camp zijn, en dat de twee onverbrekelijk verbonden zijn. Uiteraard zijn sommige homoseksuele mannen feminien - maar dat geldt ook voor sommige heteromannen. Ze horen wel de absolute vrijheid te hebben om zichzelf te uiten zonder uitgelachen of gepest te worden. Maar ze zijn niet het enige gelaat van ons homo's.

Dat homoseksualiteit en camp tegenwoordig zo met elkaar verweven worden, heeft uitsluitend historische gronden. Voor homoseksuele mensen open konden zijn over hun seksualiteit, moesten ze een heimelijke code ontwikkelen waarmee ze elkaar duidelijk konden maken wie ze waren. Maar camp vertegenwoordigde de waarden van de 19de-eeuwse bewaarkast, opgeslagen in fonkelende aspic. Nu bestaat de bewaarkast niet meer: homoseksuele mensen beginnen steeds meer op alle andere mensen te lijken, en de gedateerde karikatuur is eindelijk klaar voor een eervolle uitvaart. Brüno gaat voorop in de begrafenisstoet, doordat hij mensen die nog altijd geloven in het stereotype belachelijk maakt - en tientallen miljoenen mensen een gelegenheid serveert om hen in het gezicht uit te lachen. Kontwieg maar door Brüno; je laat de homofobie een poepje ruiken.

Lees ook pagina 8

Het Brünobashen, dat hoogtij viert, slaat de bal behoorlijk mis. Baron Cohen, een van de grootste satirici van onze tijd, trekt een vooroordeel door tot zijn uiterste consequentie om zo de absurditeit ervan aan te tonen

Sacha Baron Cohen’s new baby, Bruno, is a shrieking faggot who embodies every prejudice ever thrown at gay people – that we are shallow, callow, and perverted. He buys a black baby from Africa – the price? an i-Pod – to mimic Madonna. He preys on straight men by charging into their tents naked. He penetrates his pygmy boyfriend with massive dildos powered by exercise bikes. Oh, and the staggering success of the film is a stride forward for gay people.

The Bruno-bashing backlash – swelling yet further this week – has profoundly missed the point. Baron Cohen – one of the great satirists of our time – is taking a prejudiced position to its logical conclusion, in order to expose its absurdity. It’s how satire works. When Jonathan Swift wrote the greatest satire in history – ‘A Modest Proposal’, in 1729 – he suggested the starving Irish were failing to show any initiative. Obviously, they should eat their own babies. There were many contemporary readers who took it as another attack on the barbarian Irish hoardes.

During the last US Presidential race, the impeccably liberal New Yorker magazine published a front page cartoon showing Barack and Michelle Obama as Islamist terrorists, fist-bumping amidst turbans and machine guns. Some critics shrieked: you are reinforcing the right’s demonology! But the New Yorker was obviously exposing it. By taking those myths literally and setting them down on paper, they were saying: this is what you think the Obamas do behind closed doors? Really? Look at it. Now tell me with a straight face that you think it’s true.

Baron Cohen is doing the same. The joke isn’t on gay people; it’s on the bigots who, when confronted with this creation, believe he is real, and typical of gays. Baron Cohen literally risked his life to make the point. He went to some of the most homophobic places on earth – the refugee camps of the Middle East, and the Deep South of the US – and behaved as a gargoyle drawn from the subconscious fears of homophobes.

For example, in the middle of a bare-knuckle wrestling ring in Arkansas, he appeared as “Straight Dave” and incited a drunken mob to chant “My asshole is only for shitting!”. Then he started a fake fight - and after some half-hearted grappling, he starts to make out with his rival, while the mob rages and begins throwing bottles and chairs into the ring. Would anybody be surprised if he had been shot?

Of course some people will simply see the babbling fag and chuckle, but you can’t judge a satire by the reactions of the stupidest members of the audience. If you did, every satire ever written would die a cot-death. Many more will be subliminally shocked to see people take the caricature as real and ask – would I have done that? What’s wrong with my assumptions?

It’s a shame that some gay organizations are focusing their fire on Bruno, when there is a real problem with gay characters in comedy elsewhere. The character of the mincing fag has returned to mainstream comedy for the first time since the 1970s, without Bruno’s reflexivity. Horne and Corden have a gay war correspondent who spends his time shrieking about Dolce and Giabbana. Al Murray has a pink-clad gay Nazi who squeals: “I love to go undercover with the boys, Mein Fuehrer!” Similarly, in the US, the film ‘The Hangover’ has a lisping Chinese pansy as its villain, and ewwww-I’m-not-gay gags are the stock gag of the new genre of bromances.

How are they different to Bruno? The judo throw of shifting the butt of the joke onto the homophobes never happens. They never make their gross caricatures interact with real people, where they can be exposed as absurd. They are presented – if you’ll excuse the pun – straight. The joke really is, here, on the gay guy: Look at his triviality! Look at his dirty lusts!

I am sure these comedians aren’t consciously homophobic. Living in their liberal showbiz bubbles, they believe we’re so beyond bigotry that we can safely caricature each other, the way we all tease our friends. As the writer Adam Sternbergh puts it: “It’s a pose that says, ‘We’re so past things like racial and sexual epithets that we can use racial and sexual epiphets at will.”” It would be great if this was true: universal po-facedness isn’t a victory for anyone. But we don’t live in that world: gay kids are still six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight siblings.

This kind of stereotyping does real psychological harm – not just in encouraging bigots, but in shaping how gay people see themselves. I remember when I was a kid in the 1980s and slowly realizing I was gay, seeing Mr Humphries or Larry Grayson or Frankie Howard on TV – and no other gay people, ever – and becoming convinced this is what being gay meant. It’s not just about fancying your own gender; it’s about being effete and shallow and empty. It was depressing, because I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted to go to warzones, not catwalks; I wanted to talk foreign policy, not shoes.

The problem isn’t camp itself. It’s the implication that all gay people are camp, and that the two are inextricably entwined. Of course some gay men are naturally effeminate – but so are some straight men. They absolutely should be free to express themselves without being jeered at or bullied; but they’re not our only face.

The ongoing association of camp with homosexuality is only due to a historic accident. Before gay people could be open about their sexualities, they had to develop an arch style to signal to each other who they were. This style expressed the values of the group at that time – aristocratic disdain for the straight world they were shut out of, a fetishization of the artifice they were forced to practice every day, and so on.

It had an important role then. But camp represents the values of the nineteenth century closet, preserved in glittery aspic. Now the closet is gone, gay people are increasingly like everyone else, and the out-dated caricature can at last be given an honourable burial.

Bruno has started to lead the funeral cortege, by making the people who still believe in the stereotype look like fools – and getting tens of millions of people to laugh in their faces. Mince on, Bruno – you are mincing homophobia.

The National Portrait Gallery – the stern heart of the art world, filled with pictures of dead monarchs – has decided to go gay. For the first time in its history, it has dedicated an exhibition not to Queens but to queens. It’s a final official seal of approval – yet it has been handled nervously, and weirdly bodged.

An exhibition dedicated to the evolution of gay icons should be fascinating. An icon is a mirror: it tells you how a group sees itself, distilled into a single personality. Fifty years ago, the gay world was Judy Garland writ large: the tragic Dorothy dreaming of a better world somewhere over the rainbow, but reaching for the bottle or the needle until it came. Gradually, as homophobia was beaten back, gay icons became perkier and happier, until they ended with Kylie, a perky upbeat nymph singing about boys. The journey from Judy to Kylie has been long and sinuous, and it deserves an exhibition.

But the National Portrait Gallery seems to have panicked over the subject matter and out-sourced its judgement to a cabal of celebrities – some admirable, some brain-dead. Instead of properly curating it, they commissioned ten gay celebrities to each choose six people who inspired them personally, and cobbled an exhibition from the answers. The celebs were told they didn’t have to choose gay people, or those who have inspired gay people. Be “personal.”

So the exhibition is clogged with a bizarre hodge-podge of people who have nothing to do with the gay world at all. Elton John has chosen Graham Taylor, the football manager, because he helped Elton’s team, Watford FC, to do well. Billie Jean King has chosen her mum and dad and brother, and her friend Christiane Ammanpour from CNN.

You can see what they’re trying to say: gay people aren’t defined by our sexuality alone; we contain multitudes. We can love football or our mums or random people off the telly. But gay icons – the supposed subject of the exhibition – are not “purely personal”, as the exhibition claims. They are people who gay people, as a group, have exhalted, because they see something of their collective identity in them. It’s a crucial conceptual difference.

True, some of the great-and-good guest curators have defied the foolish advice of the Gallery and made choices that do illuminate the experience of gay people over the past fifty years. The novelists Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst have carefully chosen some remarkable neglected gay writers; heroic political activists like Peter Tatchell and Angela Mason manage to nudge their way in.

But mostly, we are left with the generic inspirational figures of the twentieth century, described in idiotic Hallmark-card clichés. Yes, here is Nelson Mandela, with a caption reading: “One man. One heart. One mind.” This is the margarine of the gay world – a blanded-out hollowness where there should be a beating heart.

Only a few interesting portraits seem to have sneaked in through the misunderstandings. There’s a photograph of Daphne Du Maurier, the novelist so torn about her sexuality she thought she had a split personality. She looks like the first Mrs DeWinter, grown old and cold, trapped as her own repressed creation.

Then there’s Quentin Crisp on an icy day in New York City, his clothing effeminate and fey, his eyes tough and utterly defiant. There’s more of the story of struggle of his generation of gay men buried in his stare than in the rest of this gallery combined.

Why were the other deserving – or revealing – gay icons elbowed aside for so many narcissistic choices? How did an exhibition billed as ‘Gay Icons’ end up as a Facebook gallery of strangers?

Welcome to the Gayby Boom, baby. Throughout the Noughties, there has been a surge of gay and lesbian couples deciding to settle down in the suburbs and have kids. En masse, gay people are slowly trading the Shadow Lounge for a baby-vomit-and-puke-filled lounge of their own.

This quiet trend has finally poked its way to public attention with the sight of Bruno – the crazed Austrian fashionista played by Sasha Baron Cohen – sitting with a little African baby on his lap, bragging that ever since Madonna went to Malawi, it’s the essential fashion accessory, dah-ling.

Of course, there have always been gay parents, but in the past, they were trapped in the loveless marriages of the closet. Now they are out in the open, and increasing. Many of my gay friends are going the same way as my straight friends as we all sag into our thirties. Gay celebs are just part of this trend: John Barrowman is planning to adopt, for one. I was recently sounded out by a lesbian couple I know and love as a possible gay daddy, and I was broodily tempted.

This is all part of a slow shift that is transforming gay culture. During the twentieth century, our battle was to find a place of our own where we could be safely different, and recover some shreds of self-esteem. After millennia of being told our difference was a sickness, we needed a moment to celebrate that difference.

But after that was achieved, our goal changed. We started to realise – once we had the space – that we are actually very similar to our straight siblings. We have the same desire for stability and home-building as everyone else. Our tune changed from “I Am What I Am” to “I Am What You Are.” We wanted enough basic equality to have everything straight people have. It started with demands for marriage – and the logical next step is children. We want the chance to show we are as dull and suburban as everybody else.

It used to be that whenever you came out, your mother would give you a hug, say she loved you, and offer a sad aside to her friends that she would never have grandchildren. That’s not the case any more. When I was a kid realising I was gay in the 1980s, it never occurred to me that I would grow up to create a family of my own; it was a bleak and alienating thought. But in the 1990s, when I saw so many gay people doing just that, I felt like I had the option to be part of the great human slipstream of procreation.

The children of gay couples are desperately and passionately wanted. They are, by definition, planned, with parents who have to go to a great deal of hassle and heart-searching before they are created. Compare that the number of kids idly conceived in a five-minute shag at a bus stop.

But obviously, every parent wants the best for their child – and many gay parents were inhibited by the idea that their child would be somehow disadvantaged. Would my son be picked on? Would my daughter be confused by having gay parents? It would not be worth repairing our self-esteem at the expense of damaging our children’s.

Now the evidence is in. There have been over a hundred scientific studies of the grown-up children of gay parents – and they overwhelmingly find the same thing. Professor Ellen C. Perrin, MD of Tufts University School of Medicine explains: "The vast consensus of all the studies shows that children of same-sex parents do as well as children whose parents are heterosexual in every way.”

Some 90 percent of them grow up to be straight – just like in every family. They are no more or less like to be abused, depressed, or confused. And they love their parents, like we all do. “What is striking is that there are very consistent findings in these studies," Perrin says.

Under the sheer concrete weight of this scientific evidence, anybody who continues to oppose gay parents is letting their prejudice cloud their judgement. When the Vatican calls gay parents “gravely immoral”, they condemn only themselves.

There is a new gay anthem in town (with apologies to the Shirelles): Gayby, It’s You.

It is now forty years since the start of a riot for freedom in a small tavern in New York City – and the riot has never stopped. It is spreading slowly across the world, to every continent, to Mumbai and Shanghai and Dubai. Everywhere it goes, it wins, in time. Yet on June 28th 1969, it seemed only like another sixties ruck in the muck against corrupt cops.

The Stonewall Tavern was a bar in Greenwich Village where gay people huddled together to find friends and lovers in a hostile country on a hostile planet. It was a hang-out for everyone from macho bikers to drag queens making the pilgrimage from Ohio and Iowa and Kansas. One of the regulars said that until he discovered the bar, “I felt like I was the only one… I only knew enough to hide.” The regulars were harming nobody; they were only enjoying themselves. But the local police force was fond of busting the bar, and beating and imprisoning the clientele. They only allowed the bar to stay open at all because they were being bribed by local gay gangsters.

But one day, gay people decided they had had enough of cowering and hiding and being told they were sick. On the day of Judy Garland’s funeral, the police smashed their way into the Stonewall. The historian Martin Duberman distils what happened next into a single image: “A leg, poured into nylons and sporting a high heel, shot out of a paddy wagon into the chest of a cop, throwing him backwards.” The drag queen yelled: “Nobody’s gonna fuck with me no more!” And the global riot began.

It was the turning point in the fight for equality for gay people. Within four decades, goals that would have seemed impossible to those fighters that night were achieved: openly gay Prime Ministers, gay marriage in Europe and parts of the US, legal bans on discrimination. The gay rights movement was a cry for the right to love in the darkness. It is a model of democratic pressure: a minority peacefully appealing to the decency of the majority, and prevailing. It’s the strongest antidote to cynicism that I know.

The conversation about gay people has been so soaked in theology for so long that it’s important to state some hard empirical facts. Homosexuality is a naturally occurring phenomenon that happens in every human society. Everywhere, around 2-5 percent of human beings prefer to have sex with their own gender. It occurs at the heart of nature: only last week, a major study by Professors Nathan Bailey and Marlene Zuk of the University of California found: “The variety and ubiquity of same-sex sexual behaviour in animals is impressive - many thousands of instances of same-sex courtship, pair bonding and copulation have been observed in a wide range of species, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, molluscs and nematodes.”

Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. It doesn’t mean anything. It is a harmless genetic quirk. It has always happened, and it always will. The only question is: do you want to be spiteful to gay people, or let them express their most natural urges peacefully?

In the US and Europe, steadily and remarkably quickly, the civilising voices are winning. There is still a lot to do – gay teenagers are six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight siblings – but the trajectory is ever-upwards. In much of the developing world, gay equality is inching forward too. After extraordinarily brave men and women fought back, India is poised to decriminalize homosexuality this year, and China has just seen its first ever Gay Pride parade.

But there are three great swathes of humanity still untouched by the spirit of Stonewall – and terrified, terrorized gay people there are screaming for help. In the Caribbean, majority-Muslim countries, and most of Africa, being gay is a death sentence – yet many people who should be showing solidarity choose not to see it.

Jamaica is Taliban Afghanistan for gay people. If caught, gays and lesbians face ten years’ hard labour – but they are more likely to be lynched. The cases documented by Dr Robert Carr of the University of the West Indies fill whole books. Here’s two from a single week. A father found a picture of a naked man in his 16 year old son’s rucksack, so he produced it in the playground and called on his classmates to encouraged them to beat him to death – which they promptly did. Nobody was ever charged. In Montego Bay, a man was caught checking out another man – so the crowd lynched him. When the police arrived, they joined in. Hospitals routinely refuse to treat the victims of gay bashings, leaving them to die.

There is a Matthew Sheppard there every day, but people who wouldn’t have dreamed of holidaying in Apartheid South Africa flock to Jamaica’s beaches. A heroic Jamaican called Brian Williamson set up an organization called J-FLAG to campaign for the rights of gay Jamaicans. His body was found stabbed and slashed over seventy times. The police did nothing. The most popular song in Jamaica in recent years – by Beenie Man – choruses: “I’m dreaming of a new Jamaica, come to execute all the gays… Take dem by surprise/ Get dem in the head.”

Throughout Muslim countries, gay people are routinely jailed, tortured and hanged. Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh denies there are any gay people in Iran, but is happy to have them executed in public squares. In post-invasion Iraq, there has been a homo-cidal pogrom of gay people being led by private Islamist “morality squads”. In the past two months, over 25 corpses of gay men have been found in one slum, Sadr City, alone, mutilated, with notes saying “pervert” pinned to their chests. Ayatollah Ali-Al Sistani, the country’s leading religious cleric, says gays should be killed “in the worst way possible” – and they are obeying. Men are now being killed by having their anuses glued shut.

In Africa, one country has been a beacon for gay rights: post-Apartheid South Africa even gay equality written into its constitution. Yet even it is now headed by a man, Jacob Zuma, who brags about beating up gay men in his youth.

The gay people cowering in these countries are asking for our support – by funding their underground organizations, by putting gay rights on the diplomatic agenda, and by consistently granting asylum to the victims of homophobic persecution. Today, some gay people seeking safety are given the right to remain, while others are told to go back and hide their sexuality.

But too many people avert their gaze from the murderous homophobic persecution happening now – and, even more shockingly, some condemn the people who are trying to stop it. Peter Tatchell, one of the great figures of the fight for gay equality, has for years been organizing practical support for gay Jamaicans, Muslims, and Africans. They have been incredibly grateful – but he has been pilloried by people who pretend to be left-wingers here as “racist” and “imperialist”.

How is it “racist” to side with black and Muslim people who are being hunted down and murdered by other black and Muslim people? How is it “imperialist” to peacefully support their struggle, as they are begging us to? Should we say to the successors of Brian Williamson – sorry, but we can’t help you today, because the descendants of your torturers and murderers were subject to British imperial rape a century ago?

That would be real racism: to cheer a Stonewall for white people on the streets of New York City, but to ignore it on the streets of Kingston or Cairo or Kinshasa, just because the homophobic cops there happen to be black or Arab.

Homosexuality happens everywhere, so gay people fight for the freedom to be themselves everywhere. The Stonewall riot – and its high-heeled kick – isn’t over. In many places, it’s only just begun.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

Imagine if, at the age of eleven, your class had been sat down and told a few dry and rather uninteresting truths about homosexuality. Yes, in every human society, about four percent of people are attracted to the same sex. Yes, they do have sex with each other. No, it’s not unnatural: animals do it too. Do you think that if this had been explained to you, you would be gay today?

That is what the foaming conservative press is claiming. With an innuendo here and a nudge there, they are saying that government plans to teach eleven year olds these few simple facts about homosexuality will “corrupt” our kids. I once asked Michael Howard – the author of Section 28 – if he would be homosexual if these evil teachers had got him at the right age. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, before conceding: “No.”

Nor would anyone else. There is overwhelming scientific evidence showing that homosexuality cannot be “taught”. I was taught only about heterosexuality, and I still ended up gay.

Here’s the real reason why the government wants to teach kids about gay people. Last year, Jonathan Reynolds finally broke down. This 15-year-old boy from Bridgend, South Wales had been threatened as a "faggot" and a "poof" until he couldn't take it any more. So one day last year, after he sat a GCSE exam for which he earned an A*, he went to some train tracks and lay across them. He texted his sister: "Tell everyone that this is for anybody who eva said anything bad about me, see I do have feelings too. Blame the people who were horrible and injust 2 me. This is because of them, I am human just like them. None of you blame yourself, mum, dad, Sam and the rest of the family. This is not because of you." Then a train sliced him in half.

Jonathan was alone in his pain, but not in his persecution. Today, a gay child is six times more likely to self-harm or commit suicide than his straight sibling. There is an epidemic of gay teenage suicides. Why? A Stonewall study found that some 41 percent of gay children are beaten up, and 17 percent are told they will be killed.

What do the people railing against these lessons suggest we should do about it, if they don’t want schools to even mention gay people? I hope as they rant so self-righteously they remember Jonathan’s final thought – that “I am human just like them”.

To read more of my articles about gay issues, click here.

I have always been slightly bemused by homophobia. Why would two adults (or ten) having consensual sex upset you? What's it to you? A new expose of one of the West's most rancidly anti-gay subcultures -- hip-hop -- offers the beginnings of an answer. Hip hop has long been the ultimate in fag-bashing, gay-trashing hate music. Listen to any album and a list of homophobic howls will hit you: Eminem squeaking "Hate fags? The answer's yes!", or Masse saying "I be wastin' em. That's what you faggots get!" The music's mood was summarised in a 1992 Ice Cube hit: "True niggaz ain't gay."

This boom-boom-boom of homo-cidal hate has a crushing effect on gay kids. It sends out the message: you are so repulsive you should be killed. It's one of several reasons why gay teenagers are still -- after all the amazing progress we have made -- six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight siblings.

Why do they do it? Why do hip-hop artists -- often the victims of bigotry themselves -- incite this hatred? For ten years, Terrence Dean was at the heart of the hip-hop scene as a producer at MTV and Warner Brothers. His life is as ghetto as any of the big name artists. His mother was a heroin-addicted, AIDS-infected prostitute whose 'clients' held Terrence hostage at gunpoint. His drunken grandmother raised him in the slums of Detroit, and he eventually ended up in prison. When he was released, he headed for Hollywood - and he was amazed to stumble into a gay underworld stocked with some of the biggest names in hip-hop.

I recently interviewed Dean for Attitude, Britain's best-selling gay magazine. He told me about a man -- I don't believe in outing, so I won't give his name -- who "has been named in the past as one of the biggest rappers of all time by MTV. He's always trashing gay men in his lyrics. But he is surrounded by a posse of transvestites," who he has sex with. Dean then runs through a list of hip-hop gays, each more famous and closeted than the last.

He explains: "When the rappers rap about the hatred they have of homosexuals, I know it's because many of them are struggling with their own sexuality. They hate what they are and in turn they spew their hatred toward men who are reflections of themselves."

Terence tried to live their life. He explains: "They had to see me with women. I talked the talk -- cars, sports, women. One misstep would have been the end of my career. Hell, it would have been the end of my life." But it was a miserable, bitter existence, based on violent emotional repression. These homie-sexuals even convinced themselves they could have sex with men without being "gay" -- a term they see as synonymous with being weak and womanly.

Dean's autobiography, Hiding in Hip-Hop: On the Down-Low in the Entertainment Industry - From Music to Hollywood. Its claims have been taken seriously enough to rattle the whole industry: Young Berg, said he could "destroy a good family" by making wives suspect their husbands.

There is some scientific evidence suggesting Dean is right -- and that his arguments apply much more widely, to homophobes in politics, religion and the wider world. Professor Henry Adams at the University of Georgia conducted a major study in the 1990s, where he took several groups of men who identified as heterosexual and expressed hostility to gays, and wired them up so the blood flow to their penises could be monitored. He then showed them gay porn -- and some 80 percent became aroused. He concluded that since "most homophobes demonstrate significant sexual arousal to homosexual erotic stimuli", anti-gay hatred is probably "a form of latent homosexuality."

Of course, not all of these hate-mongers are secretly gay. But we know from decades of sexual research that almost everyone -- especially as a teenager -- has a period when they have omnivorous sexual urges, with attraction to the 'wrong' gender cropping up for a while. (Like most gay boys, I had a burst of heterosexual experiences when I was 15 and 16.) The question is: how do you deal with them? If you see this as an interesting, natural part of human experience, they will soon fade from your mind. If you see them as shameful or immoral, they will fester -- and you will subconsciously project them outwards, onto the demonic, disgusting fags, who should be punished for tempting you.

How do we break through this? It has to start with honesty. Homosexuality is not some unnatural intrusion, wrought by demonic perverts, as the pre-modern religious texts so absurdly assert. It is an inevitable part of nature -- birds do it, bees do it -- and it is, fleetingly, part of the sexual development of most teenagers. If you are full of hate for homosexuals, the evidence suggests you have a psychological problem, based on denying part of yourself.

In short: homophobia? It's so gay.

Hip hop has long branded itself as the ultimate in fag-bashing, gay-trashing hate music. Listen to any album and a list of homophobic howls will hit you: DMX shrieking “Fuck you faggot, I shoot at you!”, Eminem squeaking “Hate fags? The answer’s yes!”, Masse singing “I be wastin’ em. That’s what you faggots get”, or Busta Rhymes yelling “I hate fucking faggots man!” The music’s mood was summarised in a 1992 Ice Cube hit: “True niggaz ain’t gay.” Why are these men so worked up about harmless homosexuality? What’s it to them? This year, a taboo-busting new expose from deep inside the hip hop industry has suggested an answer: hip-hop is so furious about “fags” because it is filled with men furiously suppressing their own homosexuality.

For ten years, Terrence Dean was at the heart of the hip-hop scene as a producer at MTV and Warner Brothers. His life is as ghetto as any of the big name artists; it is as 8 Mile as Eminem. His mother was a heroin-addicted, AIDS-infected prostitute whose ‘clients’ held Terrence hostage at gunpoint when he was just five. His drunken grandmother raised him in the slums of Detroit, and he eventually ended up in prison for stealing cars. But when he was 28 and released, he headed for Hollywood – and worked his way up.

Terrence soon snuffled out other ‘down low’ black men: the closet-addicts who would gather to fuck other gay men, without admitting – to themselves or anyone else – that they were gay. He was amazed to stumble into a gay underworld stocked with some of the biggest names in hip-hop.

Speaking to Attitude, he describes his first ‘down low’ house party in LA, where he was invited by a friend: “The moonlight crept inside the windows, providing enough light for me to see. In the middle of the room was a very attractive brother who was bent over with his pants at his ankles while another brother fucked him from behind. He wasn’t taking gentle strokes, either, but pounding him while the guy on the receiving end was practically screaming in pain. There were three other men who were putting condoms on their dicks, waiting for their turn. The attractive producer getting fucked had been featured in Hip Hop magazines and produced music for rap’s elite.”

Then he describes the big names he discovered were secretly gay. “This guy I’ll call Mario – because I don’t believe in outing – has been named as one of the biggest rappers of all time by MTV. He’s always trashing gay men in his lyrics. But he is surrounded by a posse of transvestites – chicks with dicks.” He runs through a list of hip-hop gays: “Corey”, who has opened for Jay-Z but blows his record-label boss, “Zach” – one half of a hit R&B duo, and more.

Terence tried to live their life. He explains: “I had to make sure people saw me as a heterosexual man; they had to see me with women. I talked the talk – cars, sports, women. When I walked, I made sure there was an extra something in my step – that swagger, that slight pimp most black men have. One misstep would have been the end of my career. Hell, it would have been the end of my life.”

But it was a miserable, bitter existence. “It’s a lonely life because we never get to fully love just one person. Our emotions are all over the place. I mentally checked out when I was with men. I had to force myself not to let my emotions get involved because when dealing with another down low man I knew I could never have a relationship.” Is this the source of so much of the rage directed at us? Dean believes so: “When the rappers rap about the hatred they have of homosexuals, I know it’s because many of them are struggling with their own sexuality. They hate what they are and in turn they spew their hatred toward men who are reflections of themselves.”

Most of the men genuinely appear to believe they aren’t gay. One lover told Dean: “Just because you are fucking me doesn’t mean I’m a bitch. I ain’t no bitch. I’m still a man.” Dean adds: “He, like so many other down low men, considers the sexual act of penetration to be the determining factor of their down-low status. If a man is a giver in the act, he doesn’t consider himself gay.” But is it really possible to have sex with men privately and savage gay people publicly without – at some level – seeing the contradiction? Terrence, at least, couldn’t live with this for long. He says: “Even as I chilled with other down-low men in the house listening to rap music, nodding our heads and rhyming the words, we knew we could never stand up and be who we truly were. None of us could. We were what rappers hated – faggots, booty bandits, homos. How could we recite their hate-filled lyrics knowing they were talking about us? But it takes a lot to get to the stage of being a gay man. You have to love and accept yourself.”

He was trapped in a sweat-drenched culture of hyper-masculinity, where being gay was seen as weak and womanly – the worst insult of all. “We developed that culture for a lot of historical reasons,” Dean says. “Slavery meant we had to be incredibly tough just to survive. And on top of that we had Christianity and fundamentalism. These things pass down the generations. If a group of people is oppressed, they generally take out their anger, frustration, hatred and oppression on another group of people, and in Hip Hop, it just happens to be the gay community and women who get the brunt of it.”

In order to hide their sexuality, hip-hops artists have developed all sorts of tricks. “Many down-low artists have their lovers in their entourage,” Deans says. “We blend in well with everyone. We never display signs of public affection. We may make eye contact and share a smile, but nothing further. We befriend the girlfriend. The entertainment industry is all about illusions. You keep your discretions discreet.”

But Terrence reached a turning point three years ago – when one of his closest down-low friends died of AIDS. He became suicidal under the deadening weight of the closet door. “Things started to change for me after that,” he says. “I looked at everything differently. I wanted and needed to find some sense of purpose for my life.” At first it was tough. “I searched to find gay men who looked and acted like I did. The images we generally see of gay men are flamboyant, over-the-top, finger-snapping men who I could not identify with.” When he first went to a gay club, “I would have anxiety attacks, and still do. My heart races, palms get sweaty, mouth becomes dry, and I feel heavy and can’t walk.”

He decided he had to speak out – and reveal that hip-hop hate was built on hip-hop repression. His autobiography ‘Hiding in Hip-Hop: One the Down-low in the Entertainment Industry – From Music to Hollywood’ has become a best-seller – and let some air blow into the closet. He hasn’t outed anyone, but nonetheless he has been attacked by rappers like Young Berg, who said he could “destroy a good family” by making wives wonder if their husbands are gay. “But I think the effect of the book has been positive,” he says. “Some day a major rapper is going to come out. To date, there has not been one black man in any area of entertainment who has come forward and admitted to being gay. I think that’s going to change soon.”

There is some scientific evidence that the most vehement homophobes are repressing homosexual feelings. Professor Henry Adams at the University of Georgia conducted a major study in the 1990s. He took several groups of ‘straight’ homophobic men and wired them up so the blood flow to their penises could be monitored. He then showed them gay porn. Some 80 percent started to get errections. He concluded that since “most homophobes demonstrate significant sexual arousal to homosexual erotic stimuli”, anti-gay hatred is probably “a form of latent homosexuality.” It makes intuitive sense. Why would they get so worked up about it otherwise? What possible harm do we do?

But a movement of young men and women has swelled up to smash through this wall of repression-hate – by declaring themselves the first wave of “homo hop”. This small battalion of openly gay hip hop artists have – in the past five years – produced some slap-in-the-face tracks that defy the closeted hip-hop stars to face the truth. The homo-hop artist Scott Free raps: “When queers become rock stars they turn straight they spit in our face and we take it/ Their agents and managers say what they can and they can’t do/ They tell them their candour will hinder their chances, they’ll lose all their fans, so they stand back and rake in the cash ‘till they get caught in a bathroom.”

Others are even more blatant: soce (pronounced so-say) raps: “I am a homo. That’s what I do/ I’m feeling kind of hot. What’s up with you?/ You wanna suck my dick? You wanna ass fuck?/ But never sixty-nine. That number is bad luck. I really am so gay… I really am… I really am… I really am so gay.” They are well outside hip hop’s mainstream. But the gay artist Deadlee says: “If openly gay rappers aren’t invited, then we’re kicking down the door and inviting ourselves. It’s our turn, and about time.”

In Britain, Marcos Brito – known as Q Boy – has become Europe’s biggest gay hip hop act. He declares on one track: “I’m the crest of this gay hip-hop wave media hype/ You can say “fuck fags!” and you can screw me too/ I think it’s wonderful to be me, the Supa-Boy Q.” He perches on his settee in South London – white and slim in tracksuit bottoms and a green t-shirt – and explains to me when he first started listening to hip-hop. “I was eleven, and the first wave of mainstream accessible hip-hop was in the charts. All the boys in my school listened to it; it was totally normal to. And I liked the poetry of it, I had always written poetry as a kid.” He was being bullied for being gay – “being spat on and intimidated, so I just didn’t want to go to school” – and it provided a release-valve. “I listened mostly to female hip-hop artists. My Madonna was Lil’ Kim. I wasn’t drawn to the macho bravado of the male rappers. I didn’t naturally empathize with a big black guy with a gun. But I really liked the female rappers, and especially their sexual lyrics.”

But Marcos didn’t think he could become a rapper: “It didn’t even occur to me at that time. But I was obsessed with Salt N Pepper and I would write lyrics in their style, as extra verses for their sons at first.” In 2000, he graduated from De Montford University and moved to London. He was keen to find a gay club that played hip hop “but there was virtually none. So I started googling gay hip hop, and I found a website called gayhiphop.com. It was mostly message boards where gay people – in America mainly – posted their rhymes. I thought – my god, other gay people into hip-hop! I was so happy.” He e-mailed the site’s owner, Mr Marker, assuming he would be in the US – but it turned out he lived near London. They met up, went to a rare gay hip hop night – and before he knew it, Marcos was the website’s on-line manager.

“It was great because the first wave of gay hip-hop was emerging in the States, and I got to know them all,” he says now. “And Mr marker said – well, you have to be the British equivalent. I had only ever rapped before imitating the people I liked. I had just used an American accent. I didn’t even know what rapping in a British accent would sound like. So I adopted a sort of cockney accent. I was like – I’m from Essex, there’s plenty of commonness in me. I used that. It took a while to relax into my own voice, but I found it.” He got together with a group in Brighton called PacMan and they became Britain’s first homo hop collective – and splashed onto the cover of the Pink Paper.

“That’s when it really took off,” he says. “We got booked for Pride events and all sorts of places.” The reaction from the hip hop world was limited, beyond a few producers congratulating him on his ability to garner publicity. But Marcos expected that; he was more shocked by the reaction of other people in the gay community. “It was quite negative. We still buy into a stereotype of what being gay is – if you’re not a clone, you don’t belong, you’re not part of our community. But I’m not covered in glitter or off my face on K; I wear baseball caps and act different. I had people coming up to me quite angrily and saying ‘Why are you dressed like that?’ It was like me being different was a challenge to their sexuality.”

He couldn’t get booked by any gay clubs at first. If they had music acts, it would either be drag, cabaret or a big diva; hip hop seemed like something from another world. “I had to break a lot of walls down in the gay community,” he says, “and it was hard. It’s changing massively in London now. But then hip-hop is much more mainstream anyway – Missy Elliot and Jay-Z are considered pop music now.” But it’s clear he is still stung by that initial response: “I don’t live in the hip-hop community; I don’t live in the housing projects in Compton, so what they think about me doesn’t matter very much. I live in the gay community, so their reaction mattered a lot. And it hurt.”

When I ask Marcos how he feels when he hears hate-lyrics in hip hop, his answer is nuanced. “It depends who’s doing it,” he says. “If it’s 50 Cent – he’s not very intelligent, so I don’t really expect any better from him. I can appreciate gangsta hip-hop to a degree but it’s quite shallow. Its value is in your ability to dance to it, not its insights. But I do get upset when I hear somebody like Lil Kim – who should know better – using the word ‘faggot’. She has a lot of gay fans, and she blatantly has a lot of gay men working for her. I know she’d say ‘faggot’ is just a general insult. But it’s not. It’s obviously homophobic.”

Why is there so much anti-gay bile in hip hop? “It’s partly to do with slavery,” he says. “That’s why no black man ever wants to be seen as weak or subservient. They had to be strong. It was essential. And it’s also really connected to the sexism and hatred of women in hip-hop. Women are seen as less than men, the people you define yourselves against. And gay men are seen as like women: effeminate and prissy. So to act like a woman is to be beneath yourself, to not really be a man, to be a girl.”

But he believes there are other reasons. “Since the mid-1990s, all the independent studios have been swallowed up by the big labels. So the creative progressive hip hop you used to hear – like Arrested Development, who I loved as a kid – are gone. It’s no coincidence it’s a bunch of rich white men encouraging this idea that all rappers are shallow warped gangstas. They want the worst perspective on black people to be pushed forward.” And he agrees with Terrence Dean’s core thesis – that lots of them are gay. He names a list of rappers who dress in absurdly camp styles while saying gay men should be burned alive. “What’s going on there? Some of them are obviously gay. They’re really self-hating. It’s sad.” He is sick of the obsession with ‘being a man. “To be a man, all you need is a penis,” he says. “It’s not complicated.”

But despite that, he insists it is “repulsive” to out gay hip hop artists. Even if they are calling for gay people to be shot? “Even then. If you want to take on their homophobia, then do it by all means – but take on the issue. You don’t know why people don’t come out. Some of them have very religious parents, or they’re scared. It’s just not right. I have black friends who tried to tell their family they were gay and were beaten up for it.”

In the past, Marcos has admitted he would be “too scared” to perform in a straight hip hop venue. But – a little defensively – he says now: “I wouldn’t feel safe in any club that was straight. I’m from Basildon, which is rough as fuck. I’m scared in any situation where I’m with people I can’t reason with. You can’t reason with a lion, it’ll just eat you. Of course there are really good straight people too, but you can’t rely on them being the people in the club that night.”

It seemed like a bleak place to end my journey into the world of the homie-sexuals. True, there have been a few flickers of progress lately. The mega-star Kayne West recently called for hip hop homophobia to be stamped out, after his cousin came out, and he was forced to look again at his own gay-bashing lyrics. He said on MTV: “It was kind of like a turning point when I was like, ‘Yo, this is my cousin. I love him and I’ve been discriminating against gays.” But when it comes to mainstream hip-hop, he has been a voice in the void. In a genre that constantly brags about Keeping It Real, it looks like gay people are still too real for hip-hop.

There’s something strangely soothing about this year’s ‘I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!’ If the credit crunch gets much worse we’ll all be living on kangaroo testicles with a side-dish of maggots, so it is pleasing to see Robert Kilroy-Silk go through it first, in a cage, on live television, with Timmy Mallet cackling in his face. But there’s something even richer and sweeter about this series: the Zen-like poise of Martina Navratilova as she wades through slime and Wags. The tennis genius has an inherent dignity that even Ant and Dec cannot dent. If – when – she is voted Queen of the Jungle by the British public, it will be another small symbolic step in the struggle for equality for lesbians.

Gay women face a different kind of prejudice to gay men, and in many ways they are trailing twenty years behind. It is only now that major public figures are finally coming out, and if you look at the crude abuse Navratoliva was pepper-sprayed with for decades, it’s not hard to see why. Her biography is remarkable. She became a refugee from Czech Communist tyranny at the age of 18, swiftly thwacked her way to the top of women’s tennis, and stayed there for 25 years. Yet from the moment she began to speak about her sexuality, she was portrayed as a robotic muscle-dyke cruelly pounding her wholesome blonde all-American rival Chrissy Evert. She lost her lucrative sponsorship deals. She was booed in the stands.

But the lesbian writer Julie Bindel tells me: “Seeing her walk out onto the court at Wimbledon was the best feeling in the world. She was the first role model for my generation of lesbians. You suddenly had this woman who was immensely talented, a feminist of sorts, and even won the respect of the men in the sport. You thought – if she can do it after all she’s been through, you can too.”

Yet you can see on the show how much more comfortable we are with gay men than lesbians. The contestants have a vocabulary to talk affectionately about sexuality to the gay men there: they make joshing camp asides, and everyone laughs. But when it comes to Martina’s lesbianism, they are silent, or bemused. Kilroy asked her: “Do you look at girls and fancy them?” Yes, Robert, lesbians fancy women.

This ripple of bemusement – tinged with hostility – runs through our culture. (As a gay man, I’m embarrassed to say that even gay culture is littered with anti-lesbian jokes.) Last year, it was ruled that lesbians could be denied IVF treatment and there was very little protest. This weekend, a smear-piece in a right-wing newspaper said Navratilova “broke up a family” by snatching away “a devoted home-maker.” The dykes want your wives! Run!

Prejudice against gay men has receded more quickly; it’s rarely expressed as blatantly as this in public. Why? Perhaps the most obvious explanation lies with sexism. Lesbians reject men sexually – and that shocks us. A woman who doesn’t want to please men? Wha-at? Our culture is – in its very bone marrow – built around pleasing men: little girls are taught it as an automatic assumption. So the only way we can assimilate lesbians is to turn them into porn. Then they are useful to men once more.

But the reasons also lie in the crooked timber of history. In most cultures at most points in history, gay men have found small cultural niches where they could meet, but gay women have been denied even that. Women were dependent on men for money and they were largely confined to the home. We know sometimes they found each other. The recently-discovered diaries of an early nineteenth-century Yorkshire woman called Ann Lister show how she sought out affairs with women by asking if they had read Sappho – but these opportunities were fleeting.

So for millennia, lesbians weren’t even demonised as gay men were; the world simply said they didn’t exist. Whenever proof emerged that women could lust after women, it was swiftly burned: the amazing poetry of Sappho was incinerated in era after era by Popes and Crusaders. In more subtle ways, this denial persists. When Pam St. Clement was on This Is Your Life, her female partner was nowhere to be seen; the role of spouse was taken by the actor who played her husband on Eastenders. When Susan Sontag died recently, most obituaries didn’t mention her sexuality, or her partner, Annie Leibowitz, as if they were holes in the air.

Lesbians have had to swing from invisible to mainstream in just a century – and to do it while climbing up the sheer face of sexism. The coming out of the Hollywood star Lyndsay Lohan was an achievement, but buried in her story was also a sign of how far we all still have to go. Several gossip-sheets gleefully showed close-ups of the scars on her arms. If Lohan does cut herself, it wouldn’t be surprising: gay teenagers are seven times more likely to self-harm or commit suicide than their straight siblings.

Laura Rhodes – a witty, loud Welsh girl – is just another recent case showing why this long, long story has to end. She told her best friend she thought she might be gay when she was twelve, and she soon began to be attacked and beaten as “the school dyke.” She turned to her school for help – but they said she was the problem. Cefn Saesoon School’s education welfare officer, Helen Langford, said Laura’s “verbal indiscretion” – talking openly about her sexuality – was the cause of her bullying, and wrote: “Laura fully realises and appreciates she must accept the blame for the current situation.” In the end, the school decided the solution was expulsion – of Laura. She took an overdose of prescription pills and died in hospital.

The story of the denial of a basic human sexuality ends here, like this. But if they could watch Martina Navraliova – a wise, cool lesbian – win a national popularity contest, what would Laura Rhodes or Ann Taylor or Sappho say? I think they would feel a small sense of satisfaction – and then, with a warmed heart, they would vote for Kilroy to be force-fed more maggots.

When I was a student, I went along with a group of my friends to give blood, clutching my arm nervously. All summer, increasingly desperate adverts had been warning that NHS blood banks were on the brink of drying up, and I felt I had a debt to repay: a few months before, my grandmother had been hit by a car, and quarts of blood from anonymous donors saved her life.

The posters said: "Anyone with a heart can give blood." As we waited for the jab, we all filled in a questionnaire. My friends were led in one-by-one to donate – but I was taken aside and told: we don't want your blood. You're gay. The rules state: "You should never give blood if you are a man who has had sex with another man, even 'safe sex' using a condom."

If you have ever had gay sex, the NHS considers your blood contaminated for life. But a court case unfolding in Australia has exposed the bad science behind this ban – and shown that it endangers all of us, gay and straight.

The defenders of the ban have a superficially plausible case. All donated blood is obviously tested carefully – but it can take a few months for the HIV virus to show up. So if you only recently contracted HIV and you then give blood, you can unwittingly inject the virus into the blood bank. Gay men are seven times more likely to contract HIV than straight men. So it has been judged that the risk is simply too great.

They are right about one thing: safety is the first, second and third priority of blood donation. The whole point of giving blood is to save life, not endanger it. If gay donations really did endanger people, that would trump any commitment to anti-discrimination. Giving people Aids obviously would not be a price worth paying for equality.

But in reality, that dilemma doesn't occur. Earlier this year, a 21-year-old gay electronics technician called Michael Cain launched a court case against the Australian Red Cross after they refused to take his blood. He wants gay men who exclusively practice safe sex – like him – to be allowed to donate like everyone else. The scientists testifying at the trial included the doctor who first created the blood ban – who came to apologise. They explained that blood banks now have to choose between two competing risks. On one side is the high risk of people dying because they are given old, stale blood due to a lack of donors. On the other side is the infinitesimally small risk of people dying because they have been given blood by condom-wearing gay men.

The US epidemiologist and bio-ethicist Dr Scott Halpern crunched the figures for the court. Some 1 in 100 people who are infused with blood older than 14 days will die – and 13 per cent of infused blood offered by the Red Cross is older than that. This, he explained, poses a risk "thousands of times greater" than "the very worst predictions of HIV infection" if you let latex-loving gay men donate. Why? Because if the ban is lifted and gay men who practice safe sex are allowed to donate, a single HIV-positive blood donation will slip through clinical screening once every 5,769 years. That's one time between now and the year 7777 – or equivalent to it happening once since 3761 BC, when cities had not yet been invented.

So the facts are in: the ban kills far more people. Even Dr John Kaldor – the Red Cross's chief medical adviser – admitted the rules were "out of date." A country as institutionally and viciously homophobic as Russia has lifted the ban – yet in Britain it persists. In 2001, the head of our National Blood Authority, Mike Fogden, even dubbed gay men like me "evil" and said we are "prepared to put at risk the innocent life of an innocent patient (even a newborn child) to satisfy [our] own selfish prejudice."

But why? As Russell Hirst, a young gay British man, puts it: "I was very shocked that, when my sister got ill and needed a lot of blood, I wasn't allowed to donate it. I just want to be equal. Everybody should be judged on their personal activities. If a gay man says that he's had unprotected sex with a man, then he should not give blood for 18 months – but I don't see why it should be a lifetime ban." He's right. Our blood banks are running low, and we are locking three million donors out. Isn't it time to end this bloody homophobia – for all our sakes?

When Laura Rhodes – a witty, loud Welsh girl – was twelve, she told her best friend she thought she might be gay. Her friend blabbed, and within a week everybody at their school knew. That’s when Laura was branded “the school dyke” – and the persecution began.

In the corridors, Laura was kicked, her books were punched out of her hands, chairs were hurled in her direction – and vicious laughter always echoed as she walked. Stressed and depressed, she began to comfort-eat, and started piling on weight. In a letter, she described a typical day at school: “There we were, outside the school, people looking at this fat lump which is myself. I did not want to leave the car, I wanted to die. I walked to the doors, down the corridor, here are boys just before the stairs, waiting to trip me up, how wonderful… Why were they doing this? Why me? I saw some boys laughing at the fact I was still fact and possibly a ‘dyke’. [I am] still a person.”

When she finally got home, Laura wrote she would go “into the box room, [and take] out scissors, I knew what I was doing. Maybe this would show them what they are doing. I dragged it over my wrists a few times, the next few times pressing harder, it felt really good. It hurt, but I pressed harder.”

Laura turned to her school for help – but they said she was the problem. Cefn Saesoon School’s education welfare officer, Helen Langford, said Laura’s “verbal indiscretion” – talking openly about her sexuality – was the cause of her bullying, and noted in writing: “Laura fully realises and appreciates she must accept the blame for the current situation.” One lunchtime she was taken into a crowded dining room and told to point out, in front of everyone, who had been bullying her. Another time she was forced to take part in a “circle exercise” with her bullies, in which she had to describe how bad she felt, traumatising her even further. In the end, the school decided the solution was explusion – of Laura. She was packed off to a Pupil Referral Unit, where she was given just three hours of teaching a day.

But then there was a flicker of joy in Laura’s life. Online, she met another girl – a 14 year old in Birmingham – and it seems they fell in love. They talked and texted all the time, and eventually the other girl – Rachael – went on holiday to Crete with Laura and her family. The day after they got back to Wales, Laura and Rachael couldn’t stand the thought of being separated. They decided to run away together, and headed to Bath, where they were soon tracked down by the police. Rather than going back to their separate, bullied lives, they decided to be “together in the afterlife”. They both took a huge overdose of prescription pills. Rachael woke up and called for help. It was too late for Laura. She died in hospital a few days later.

At the inquest, Laura’s diary was read out. She said about her bullying: “No one believed me while I got fatter and fatter and sadder and sadder. Everyone got meaner and meaner.” Her school insisted they had done nothing wrong. The headteacher, Alun Griffiths, declared, “We have searched our consciences and have to say our consciences are clear.”

Laura’s story is being played out in playgrounds across Britain every day. A study by the Schools Health Education Unit found that in Britain’s schools, 41 percent of gay people are beaten up, and 17 percent receive death-threats. A majority of Britain's gay kids feel so unsafe that they skive off school to avoid abuse. Another three-year study found that more than half consider self-harm or suicide. In every area of British life, gay people have made vast advances – except the schoolyard.

Andrew Morris is a 30 year-old gay man who has been teaching English at a mixed private school for the past three years. He says, “There has not been a single day as a teacher when I have not heard the pupils hurling homophobic insults at each other. ‘Gay’ or ‘battyboy’ is the worst insult in their repertoire. Some of it is really extreme. A fourteen year old boy – who has no idea I’m gay – told me he though gay people have a responsibility to commit suicide. The pupils were amazed if you challenged them on it.”

This homophobia wasn’t confined to the pupils, either. Morris explains: “Whenever I tried to reprimand the kids for homophobic language, they’d say, ‘Well, our P.E. teacher or our music teacher uses that word all the time.’ And it was true. In R.E. debates, one of my colleagues said he thought being gay was “a sin.” One time I was standing with the art teacher outside the school disco and he said to a boy, ‘Why are you wearing those shoes? They make you look like a poofter.’ It was considered totally normal. Whenever I raised the idea of punishing homophobia with the staff, they looked at me like I was mad.”

OFSTED – the Schools Inspectorate – says this is not unusual, with homophobia being “endemic” in our schools system, and 20 percent of pupils saying they have heard teachers make homophobic comments in the past few months. As I wrote this article, my own memories of homophobic bullying started flickering though my mind again.. I remember being shut in a classroom when I was about thirteen with three lads who were in my school’s sixth-form. “I
fucking hate queers,” one of them said as he smacked me against the locker. They wouldn’t let me leave; after five minutes of trying to sound tough, I just sat down and cried. For a few years afterwards, there was a rash of name-calling. It wasn’t severe, by Laura’s standards, but it was depressing, and upsetting, and enraging. I still remember feeling sick after a teacher called me a “faggot” in front of the class, and chuckled.

Phillip James is a 17 year-old studying at the sixth-form of a comprehensive school in Leeds. He says homophobia is “constant” in his school. “No teacher in their right mind tries to stand up to homophobia at my school,” he says. “Where would you start?” He says the word “gay” is “an all-purpose insult. You use it to mean ‘bad’ or ‘shit’ or ‘rubbish.’ Then there’s the more extreme words – ‘faggot’, ‘bender’. I get that a lot. You just grow up with a sense that being gay is this terrible thing. I think I internalized it a lot. I remember when I first said the words to myself, in my room on my own, ‘I’m gay’, I burst into tears. I felt so sick with myself. It just seemed such an awful thing to be.”

When Phillip first revealed he was gay to his friends, he was 16. Lots of fellow pupils were supportive – most of them girls, but also some straight boys. “My best mate, who is straight, totally stood by me, even though some people started calling him gay too.” But others reacted with violence: “A group of lads in my year said they were going to batter me. They said they were going to cut me up, to teach me that being a ‘faggot’ is disgusting. I told the school, and they called us all together in a room and told us to stop ‘causing trouble.’ They acted as if I was as bad as them, and when I protested, they told me I was ‘whining.’” Philip wrote an article for his school newspaper talking about the culture of homophobia – and the headmaster refused to let it run. He was told it was “inappropriate”, and “not suitable for discussion among children.”

Eventually, the gang caught up with him. “I was walking home and they dragged me into an alley and beat the shit out of me basically. They got me on the floor and kicked me a lot.” After the humiliation of last time, he didn’t tell the school. While some members of staff smuggled softly pro-gay messages into their lessons, others actively encouraged homophobia. “If you didn’t run fast enough, the P.E. teacher would yell ‘you’re running like a poofter!’ at you. After I came out, not long before my GCSEs, I said to him, ‘Don’t say that. I’m gay and I find it offensive.’ Loads of the lads in the class laughed but I tried to stand by it and not get upset. The teacher looked at the lads who were sniggering and laughed with them. He said, ‘If you’re a poofter why don’t you like being called one?’ and these lads were just pissing themselves laughing. I walked out of the lesson. He never reported it, and I noticed after that he didn’t call anyone a poofter – not in my lessons, anyway.”

There is nothing inevitable about homophobia in Britain’s schools. How do we know?
A generation ago, racist bullying was standard practice in the playground. Today, when it happens, it is almost invariably punished. All state schools automatically discipline pupils for using racist language, and they expel pupils for racist attacks. If a teacher is openly racist, he doesn’t work again. We need now to begin the slow, steady work of making homophobia equally anathemized. Stonewall’s recent study found that while 97 percent of pupils have been told racist bullying is wrong, only 23 percent of pupils today have ever been told by teachers that homophobic bullying is unacceptable.

But there was good news in the Stonewall study too: where there is a clear policy of punishing homophobia, it works. Pupils in schools with a clear policy of punishing homophobic language and intimidation are 60 percent less likely to be bullied, and 70 percent more likely to feel safe. Teenagers might be insecure group-formers, desperate to punish difference, but there is no reason they should fixate on sexuality as the marker of that difference. There have been some excellent pilot schemes proving this. George Green's School, near where I live in East London, has a tough anti-homophobia policy in an area mostly populated by recent immigrants with uber-conservative views. Head-teacher Kenny Frederick has faced down homophobic parents and insisted on equality for all her students. If a pupil uses the word “gay” as an insult, they are automatically punished as if they had used the word “Paki” or “nigger”; if they bully gay kids, they are chucked out. If she can do it, any headteacher can.

But we are starting from way behind. While a whopping 82% of teachers are aware of gay name-calling at their schools and 26% are aware of anti-gay violence on school property, according to a University of London study, how many schools do you think have a policy to deal with homophobic bullying? Just a pitiful 6 percent. The solution isn’t rocket science. You have mandatory classes in which you explain everywhere in the world, throughout history, around 4-10 percent are attracted to the same sex. There’s nothing unusual about it, and it’s not “immoral” for two consenting adults to give each other sexual pleasure. You punish the pupils who use bigoted slurs. As the Stonewall slogan says: Some people are gay – get over it.

But there is one group of schools that most aggressively refuses to spread this message: faith schools. While there are a few honourable exceptions, pupils there are more than 10 percent more likely to be subjected to anti-gay bullying, and 23 percent less likely to feel they can tell anyone about their sexuality. It’s hardly surprising: they are set up to teach religious texts that demand the most barbaric punishments for gay people in plain language. After writing about anti-gay bullying for the Independent, I was e-mailed by a 17-year old gay boy at a Muslim school who was told by one of his teachers in a lesson that "sodomites should be killed". In the Stonewall study, an 18-year old boy called Matthew said: "It's a Catholic school... and we are told 'gay people will go to hell because the Bible condemns it'... It's horrid, you just want to go and cry at come of the remarks made by the teachers."

The government – backed by all three major political parties – is currently embarked on an expansion of these faith schools. There is a danger that after abolishing Section 28 by the front door, the growth of faith schools unwittingly reintroduces it by the back door. It also risks undercutting the promises by the Labour government to make schools crack down harder on homophobia. The Children's Minister, Kevin Brennan, recently told a gay equality conference: "Just as it took several years for racial equality laws to feed into real cultural change where racist language became unacceptable, we need to achieve the same with homophobic language." This will be hard enough in the normal schools system. But can it be done at all if we make our schools more and more religious?

When Laura Rhodes swallowed her final fistful of pills, the homophobic sneers and jeers of her bullies won. We let them win too many times. Laura deserved better – and so do all the other gay children of Britain. If we begin now the work of driving this bigotry out of our schools, Laura’s can be the last corpse the anti-gay bullies ever get to chuckle over.

What made you gay? Was it a gay gene buried in your brain, an overbearing mother, or watching Jason Donovan on Neighbours at a formative age? The debate about the causes of homosexuality is one of the great detective stories of our time. Today, hundreds of scientific Poirots and Miss Marples are working in laboratories across the world, scouring over the strangest of clues: gay sheep, boys born with tiny penises, the shape of straight men’s fingers, and the sweet symmetry of your brain. It seems we could be on the brink of an answer – and there is a dark possibility we will end up wishing we hadn’t asked the question in the first place.

But before we plunge into this argument, I have to offer a health warning. Too often, this debate proceeds on the assumption that if we find out homosexuality is innate or genetic, it is morally acceptable – but if we find out it is the product of social factors, it is a “choice” and therefore immoral. This skews the scientific discussion from the start, with gay people cheering on the scientists who say it’s all innate, and the homophobes cheering on the scientists who say it might not be.

The truth is: there’s nothing wrong with being gay, whatever the cause. Gay people need to base our claim to acceptance on one claim and one claim only: consensual sex is harmless (and usually fun). Adults can shag whoever they like. End of story. The debate about what makes us gay is fascinating – but it isn’t a debate about whether we have a right to live our lives freely. That debate is over among all decent people. We do not have to reopen it by gambling our claim for tolerance on a scientific debate that hasn’t ended yet. This is an article about the science – the morality has been settled.

So – what does the science say, and where could it take us? For most of the twentieth century, it worked on the assumption that homosexuality was caused by your upbringing. It took its cue from Sigmund Freud, pappy of psychoanalysis, who announced being gay was a result of having an overbearing bitch-mother who forced you to keep identifying with her. This meant you couldn’t go through the healthy process of transferring your allegiance to your father like all post-Oedipal straight boys should.

There was never any evidence for this theory, just Freud’s beautiful prose-poetry and a few ambiguous “case studies.” But variations of your-mama-did-it lingered on through the decades, dominating the way many people thought about being gay.

Then, in 1991, there was a bomb-blast. The neuroscientist Simon LeVay announced he had found a physical difference between the brains of gay men and straight men. By studying the brains of corpses, he said he had discovered that a bundle of neurons called the anterior hypothalamus is bigger in straight men than in gays. Size does matter.

Then, in 1993, the geneticist Dean Hamer went further and announced he had discovered a “gay gene.” He said a little clump on the X chromosome called Xq28 was the key to human sexuality; if it’s turned on, you have a gay; if it’s turned off, you have a straight.

Gay people across the world started to celebrate; homophobes started to grumble. But the scientific evidence soon started to fall apart. For gay brains, LeVay had been using the corpses of AIDS victims – and some scientists thought it could be the AIDS that shrunk their anterior hypothalamus. Meanwhile, geneticists said any claim to a gay gene was wildly overblown. When scientists repeated the ‘gay gene’ studies, they couldn’t find much correlation with sexuality.

So were we back to square one? Not quite. There was a renewed interest in the physical causes (if any) of homosexuality – and a cascade of studies has tumbled out since.

One of the most striking discoveries is that gay people have differently-shaped brains. Straight women have symmetrical brains, with two halves roughly the same size, while straight men have a slightly larger right hemisphere. So where do we fit in? Last year, researchers in Sweden found that men’s brains match the neat symmetry of straight women, while lesbians’ brains have the same swollen right hemisphere as straight men.

But this isn’t the open-and-shut proof that we are born different that it first seems. Brains are not unchangeable and fixed from birth; they develop differently according to how you use them. If you go blind as an adult and then learn Braille, the part of your brain that governs your right index finger will get much bigger. If you are a Buddhist monk and meditate all day, the part of your brain that controls deep concentration will become buffed up. It could be being gay that changes our brains, instead of the other way round.

Hmmmm. The best evidence suggesting there is some as-yet-unknown genetic component to being gay came elsewhere, when scientists studied gay twins. (No, not the way you study gay twins…) Professors Richard Pillard and J. Michael Bailey found that if one identical twin is gay, the other has a 50 percent chance of being gay too. But among fraternal twins – who grew up in the same womb and the same home but aren’t genetically identical – the rate is just 20 percent. (Among the population at large, it’s 4 percent.)

But how does the difference occur? Scientists were still looking, bemused, for clues. There was a series of dispersed facts, but little coherence.

We know for sure that being gay runs in families: around 12 percent of brothers of gay men are themselves gay. But how could there be an evolutionary advantage to a sexuality that makes you far less likely to have kids? Wouldn’t it just die out? Italian scientists cracked this question last year when they stumbled across proof the female relatives of gay men are more fertile than other women. So it seems although these genes are evolutionarily useless if passed on to a man, they are a real evolutionary advantage if passed on to a woman – hence their survival generation after generation.

But the biggest advances in understanding what makes people gay haven’t come from genetics at all. Instead, they have come from looking at what happens to a foetus as it develops in the womb. It is in the nine months of baking that the biggest factors determining sexuality seem now to lie. It ain’t your genes that count; it’s what they are marinated in before you’re born.

All foetuses develop as females at first, whatever their tiny XX or XY chromosomes suggest. You only start to become male when, at a certain point in pregnancy, the foetus’ brain is masculinized by a flood of sex hormones. Most scientists now believe among gay people, this flood of hormones seems to have worked differently. Gay men seem to have been whacked with a great tide of prenatal androgens; lesbians seem to have been gasping for them.

How do we know? There is an accumulation of scattered evidence, rather than a single magic bullet. The first hint this is true comes with a strange phenomenon called the Big Brother effect. It’s simple: each older brother you have makes you more and more likely to be gay. A fourth son has a ten percent chance of being gay, compared to a four percent chance for a first son. At first, it was thought this might be to do with socialization. Are younger brothers maybe more coddled by their mothers, or more shunned by their fathers? But it turns out adopted brothers don’t have any effect on your sexuality at all. It is something that happens in your mother’s womb.

But what? A study from Brock University in Canada argued that a woman’s body sees a male foetus as “foreign”, and has an immune reaction against it. The womb remembers this weird assault, so the next time a male foetus comes along, it responds more efficiently, with a quicker or heavier dose of androgens.

The second hint is very different. At the University of Oklahoma, Professor William Reiner was studying boys born with severely small or no penises. Almost always, they have been castrated, given a rudimentary vagina, and raised as girls, despite their male chromosomes. But the trouble is – when they grow up, they almost invariably fancy women. Why does this matter? It shows, Reiner says, that “exposure to male hormones in utero dramatically increases the chances of being sexually attracted to females.” And so “we can infer that the absence of male hormone exposure [in the womb] may have something to do with attraction to males as well.”

The third hint comes if you look at your fingers. Women tend to have an index finger that is the same length as their ring finger. Men, by contrast, tend to have an index finger that is shorter than his ring finger. This kicks in early, so we know it is partly due to prenatal factors. A recent study found that lesbians have the same finger-ratio as straight men – but, confusingly, so do gay men. So what does this suggest? The study dug deeper, and found that the more older brothers you have, the more likely you are not just to be gay, but to have a finger-ratio that is like a woman’s. This suggests they have exposed to more prenatal androgen. If it explains why these men’s fingers are more female, couldn’t it explain why their sexuality is more female too?

And there the evidence, for now, peters out. It seems to tell us there is something of a genetic component to being gay, but a stronger component still determined by your life in the womb. Both ‘make’ you gay before you were born. But at the very moment when gay people claim their vindication for this, could we be facing a disaster?

The gay writer William Saletan warns: “The gay cultural war is about to turn chemical.” He says if a genetic/womb-juice explanation turns out to be true, it will be easier and easier to abort gay foetuses. “If the idea of chemically suppressing homosexuality in the womb horrifies you, I have bad news: You won't be in the room when it happens,” he says. “Parents control medical decisions, and surveys indicate that the vast majority of them would be upset to learn that their child was gay. Already, millions are screening embryos and fetuses to eliminate those of the "wrong" sex. Do you think they won't screen for the "wrong" sexual orientation, too? The reduction of homosexuality to neurobiology doesn't mean your sexual orientation can't be controlled. It just means the person controlling it won't be you.”

A series of experiments carried out in the US for the past five years seems to have played to these fears. A team of researchers at Orgeon State University has been investigating the sexuality of sheep, and early on, they proved what every sheep farmer knows: some 8 per cent of rams are gay. When it comes to sex, these woolly homosexuals shun ewes and engage exclusively in ram-on-ram action. They will swiftly pounce on any ram stuck in a fence - the sheep equivalent of the prison showers. The gay lovin' on Brokeback Mountain, it turns out, wasn't confined to Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.

And it gets more intriguing. When the team studied the brains of these gay sheep, they invariably discovered they have a substantially smaller hypothalamus than their straight male siblings. (Echoes of Simon LeVay after all.) This is the first hard scientific evidence of biological differences between gay and straight mammals - and they found these brain differences are already in place in the third trimester of pregnancy. Sheep, at least, are born gay or straight.

But it turns out this epidemic of gay sheep is a serious problem for the agricultural industry. This 8 per cent of rams are not breeding, and a further 8 per cent seem to be asexual. (Many of these might be lesbians who can't express their sexuality. Female sheep always express a desire for sex by just standing still. The world's fields may be littered with millions of lesbian sheep lying still, wondering why their dream-ewe never comes). If 16 per cent of your flock is cruising or day-dreaming, that's a lot of lost money.
That's why the experimenters began to try to something new: making the gay sheep straight. They altered the hormonal levels in their brains and monitored their behaviour. And the result? Many of the gay rams decided a bit of ewe wasn't so bad after all. They began to have heterosexual sex.

This experiment threw up difficulties for all sides of the millennia-long debate about homosexuality. It gives the forces of homophobia plenty to fume against by annihilating their most hoary argument: that gay sex is "unnatural". In reality, we live in - as the scientist Bruce Bagemihl puts it - "a polysexual, polygendered world", where species from beetles to shrews to chimpanzees have a consistent minority who prefer their own sex.

It's everywhere: cow elephants often masturbate each other with their trunks (why has Sir David Attenborough never shown it to us?) and in the Bronx Zoo there is a famous pair of gay penguins called Wendell and Cass who sit on a little rock they believe is their egg. Human homosexuality is just another example of a universal phenomenon.

But the Oregon studies also pose a serious challenge for the supporters of gay rights, like Martina and myself. At the very moment the world is being forced to admit homosexuality is not a choice, this experiment raises the distant prospect that it might become one after all. Gay tennis player Martina Navratilova sees it as a Mengele moment, raising the spectre of altering the brains of gay people to "cure" them of their "disease". The Oregon scientists can now detect gay sheep in the womb. She fears it is not a great leap to detecting gay foetuses in human wombs, and making possible mass homo-cidal abortions.

There is indeed a horrific history of attempts to "cure" gay people. Alan Turing was perhaps the greatest English genius of the 20th century, breaking the Nazis' codes at Bletchley Park and laying the groundwork for the invention of the personal computer. But when his consensual, loving relationship with another man was discovered, he was given an option: go to prison, or take "hormone therapy". He took the "therapy". He became impotent and grew breasts. After a year, he killed himself.
It's not hard to see how a range of violently homophobic rulers from Robert Mugabe to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would not be sheepish about misusing the idea that hormone injections into the brain can alter sexuality, or imploring parents to abort their wicked gay babies. Even though it's a huge leap from sheep to human sexuality, it could unleash another wave of hellish abuse of gay people.

Of course we shouldn’t go too far with the apocalyptic scenarios. The scientific evidence is much more tentative than William Saletan suggests, and identifying gay foetuses isn’t on the immediate horizon – or perhaps any horizon. If we could figure out how to ‘make’ a foetus straight, gay couples could equally figure out how to ‘make’ their children gay; we wouldn’t vanish from the earth.

And Charles Roselli, the Oregon project manager, argues his research could lead to cures for a range of medical conditions that stem from differences in sexual development. Some black and Asian groups understandably objected to research into the genetic differences between ethnic groups, but they have led to breakthroughs in the investigation of diseases that afflict mainly them, such sickle cell anaemia. The path of scientific progress is jagged; this may well produce advances as well as dangers for gay people.

So, what did make you gay, after all that? A dash of genes; a slathering of foetal hormones; and probably a side-dish of your environment too. But we must never add to this menu the red herring of morality. The morality of being gay has nothing to do with this science – and everything to do with the fact that gay sex harms no-one.

Should consensual sexual acts carried out in a private flat ever be punished with public humiliation or prison? I thought we had answered this question with a none-of-my-business-guv shrug long ago. But Max Mosley’s court case has given Britain a sharp crack across the buttocks, reminding us that harmless acts engaged in by 12 percent of the population remain a crime.

The footage secretly shot by the News of the Screws looks like a soft-porn remake of ‘Allo ‘Allo, with silly German accents and high camp. The women involved are clearly enjoying themselves: one was a PhD student who told the court it “helped her to relax”, another joked she enjoyed it so much she should have paid Mosley.

But the News of the World’s QC Mark Warby defended the newspaper’s spying by pointing out this behaviour remains illegal. The cane used on Mosley drew blood – and this is, under the current law, an assault. Warby told the court: “The law draws a line, and the reason is that sadomasochistic cruelty is contrary to civilised values and is corrupting of those involved.”

This isn’t a theoretical crime. In the early 1990s, sixteen gay men filmed themselves engaging in consensual sadomasochism. The police spent £4 million of your money investigating them, and the men went to prison. Since then, there have been at least four prosecutions along similar lines, including of a married couple.

This is an unjustifiable assault on your liberty. John Stuart Mill said: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good is not sufficient.” If you are sane and you want to harm yourself – with booze or fags or whips – it’s up to you.

And sadomasochists are as sane as the rest of us. The psychologist Stephenson Connoley found they were no more likely to be depressed or insane than you or me. It doesn’t appeal to me, but it seems to be a way some people leech out their anger or lack of control. Fine. Let them.

There is an easy solution. In Britain, you are currently allowed to consent to injury in four specific situations: sport, surgery, piercing, and circus performing. Why not add sadomasochistic sex?

Mosley’s eloquent defence of himself from the witness box should never have to be offered again. This case should be the Wilde trial for sadomasochists, a moment to say – enough. I never thought I’d type these words, but, for today, Max Mosley is a freedom fighter.

To comment on this article, or read the comments of others, click here.

This article was also accompanied by some boxes where I comment more briefly on a few bits and pieces:

BOX I:

At last – I have found a solution to the most grating problem in London. What should you do if you find yourself trapped on the tube with somebody playing thud-thud-thud music on their mobile at full-blast? What I really want to do is whip out a massive ghetto blaster blaring: “Wake up Maggie I think I got something to say to you!” and shove it in their face. However, this is not always practical. So instead, learn forward and say sympathetically, “Can’t you afford headphones? You can buy them for £1 from Liddle.” Every time, the music-exhibitionist will yell “I can! See!” and wave his headphones. Victory!

Box II

If you want to hear a taboo being crow-barred open, to cheers and tears and cries of “Amen, sister!”, head to the Arcola Theatre. Every minority has its secrets – and for the black community is black-on-black racism. The play ‘Torn’ (pictured above) by Femi Oguns is the story of a Jamaican boy who starts going out with a Nigerian girl – only for their families to erupt in prejudice. “That Jammo piece of crap!” yell the Nigerians. “These Kunta Kintes!” cry the Jamaicans.

There is a surging synergy between the play and the young black audience, who roar with recognition. But ‘Torn’ also dissects how the categories we use – ‘black’, ‘white’ – are cobbled-together fictions, containing multitudes. One character says in despair: “You are black, that’s all these people see.” It comes at the climax of a play we all should see.

Box III:

It’s easy for the government to offer windy condemnations of the psycho-ocracy trashing Zimbabwe and the holocaust I’ve witnessed in Darfur. But when thousands of the victims wash up here in London, we tell them to go back, or plunge them into penury.

Some 11,000 Zimbabwean refugees have been cut off from benefits in an attempt to force them to go home. With Darfur, forced deportations are being resumed. I hope the pig-ignorant pundits who have been claiming for years that we “coddle” and “spoil” refugees – by giving them less than £50 a week – are happy to see the government acting “tough” now.

Twenty years and an eternity ago, the final official piece of anti-gay prejudice was signed into British law. Its name was Section 28, and it ruled that local councils – including their schools, libraries and social services – could not “promote” homosexuality. Councils were forbidden from saying that we were “normal”, and from approving of our “pretended family relationships.” The consequences scarred and infected the lives of a generation of gay men and lesbians in this country – and even though its corpse has now been tossed onto the bonfire of history, the stench still hangs over Britain’s playgrounds today.

The strange story of Section 28 begins in the 1980s, when a young new wave of left-wing Labour councilors began to emerge in London. They were the first to ever come of age in a country where you could be openly gay and not be sent to prison. They looked out over the city – teeming with out gay people who flocked here from all over the world – and saw that there was still a spiked chain holding us back. A gay teenager was six times more likely to self-harm than his heterosexual twin brother. And worse still, a new sexually transmitted disease, AIDS, was beginning to rip through the gay community – but homosexuality wasn’t even mentioned in the sex education lessons at 82 percent of our schools.

That’s why a few councils decided it was immoral to stand inert while gay kids killed themselves and more and more young men contracted HIV out of ignorance. So they began to distribute bland, cosy literature explaining to children that gay people exist and they aren’t anything to be frightened of. A typical example was called ‘Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin’, which showed a four year old girl living with two daddies. She ate breakfast with them, she made cakes with them – wild stuff. And for older teenagers, there were leaflets explaining safe sex, and helplines where they could receive counseling.

A sudden tsunami of bile smashed into the councils responsible. They were savaged by the tabloid press as the “loony left” and “militant perverts.” The Sun newspaper announced that “benders” and “poofs” were trying to “recruit children” by “distributing filth.” The stories inverted reality, claiming that the people trying to prevent homophobic bullying and protect children from violence were “gay bullies” and “homosexual fascists” from whom children needed “urgent protection.” In a typical article, the Daily Mail’s Gerald Warner warned against “the paedophile aggression of loony-left London boroughs” who were pumping out “the propagandist machinations of a homosexual underclass.” He said that gay people’s “invert psychopathology seeks to subvert society in favour of their recently decriminalized subculture” and he concluded that if the uppity gays didn’t shut up, “the normal 95 percent of the nation” should begin to call for “the recriminalization of homosexual activity.”

The Conservative Party piled in behind them. Rhodes Boyson MP demanded action against the councils, saying: “It is wrong biblically, is homosexuality. It is unnatural. Aids is part of the fruits of the permissive society. The regular one-man, one-woman marriage would not put us at risk in this way. If we could wipe out homosexual practices, then Aids would die out.” Nicholas Fairbairn MP said in parliament that homosexuality was “a psychopathological perversion” based on “inserting your penis into another man’s arsehole.” At the height of the backlash, a London newspaper called Capital Gay had its offices burned down by anti-gay arsonists – and a Conservative backbencher said the arsonists were right. In parliament Elaine Kellett Bowman said of the attack: “There should be intolerance of evil!” A few months later, Margaret Thatcher made her a Dame.

So a few peers in the House of Lords decided to take a stand. In 1986, the independent peer Lord Halsbury introduced a Private Member’s Bill to bring these councils to heel. He said that “sick” homosexuals – who are “reservoirs” of disease – needed to be stopped. The proposal failed, as almost all Private Member’s Bills do, but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher thought it was such a good idea she picked it up and made her government push it through. In her 1987 conference she expressed her outrage that children “are being taught they have an inalienable right to be gay.” Instead, she said, they should be instilling “traditional moral values.” And so Section 28 was born – a hard, go-to-prison ban on “promoting” homosexuality.

What did this mean for ordinary gay kids across Britain? Adam Powell, 49, is a heterosexual English and PE teacher who taught in a comprehensive school in Ealing at the time. He explains how Section 28 made him unable to protect gay children. “You would hear kids calling each other ‘poofter’ or ‘queer’ all the time, but you felt your job was on the line if you challenged it,” he says. “There’s one kid I still think about because I feel so ashamed that I didn’t do more. He was a quite effeminate boy, and very clever. The other kids would pick on him. Obviously if they attacked him – which they did pretty often – I would intervene and punish them. But the name-calling, the isolation… I didn’t do anything about that. I wanted to intervene and say – if he is gay, so what? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, it’s a fact of life, get over it. I would challenge racist kids if they called somebody a ‘Paki’ or whatever, and it worked. They would stop. I could have stopped that homophobic abuse, and I didn’t.”

After attacking one of his bullies with a pen-knife and then trying to cut his own wrists, the boy was expelled from the school. Powell doesn’t know what happened to him. This was far from an isolated incident. A Stonewall study in 2000 found that 56 percent of teachers said they had difficulties in addressing the needs of gay and lesbian students as a direct result of the legislation.

The gay journalist Alex Bryce remembers what it meant for him. “I was in the throes of puberty, with my hormones in overdrive and I was starting to develop an awareness of my sexuality,” he says. “As my own feeling were not explained or even mentioned in the sex education lessons, for the first time in my life, I began to feel different. After one particular PSE lesson I plucked up the courage to stay behind after class to talk to my teacher. I remember packing away my things slowly and carefully choosing my words. ‘Miss, what do men who are attracted to men do in bed?’ I asked. The teacher looked slightly concerned by my question. ‘I would really like to talk to you about this, but I’m legally obliged not to,’ she said with genuine regret. This was my personal encounter with Section 28. What could have been a turning point for me, allowing me to feel acceptable and ‘normal’, left me isolated and confused at a time when I was particularly vulnerable.”

And so a generation of gay children were left to be bullied, and in ignorance of the terrible threat of STDs. We will never know how many people contracted HIV as a result – but we know there are some. The UK Gay Men’s Sex Survey in 2003 – commissioned by the Terrence Higgins Trust – found that one third of 20 year-old gay men, the children of Section 28, did not even know the most basic facts about HIV transmission. Some 51 percent didn’t know that HIV is more likely to be passed on if he or his partner has another STD; 31 percent did not know that water-based lubricant reduces condom failure; and, incredibly, 14 percent did not know that HIV is more likely to be passed on if a man ejaculates inside his partner. Several AIDS charities believe there is a trail of infected blood that runs right back to Margaret Thatcher.

Whenever Section 28 and its hateful backers dominated the news, the rate of gay-bashings was ramped up – but the gay fight-back was as brave as the assaults were cowardly. Gay activism became bolder and bigger than at any time in British history. Thirty thousand people marched on Westminster. Ian McKellen – one of Britain’s most famous actors – was so horrified he felt he could no longer remain in the closet; he was followed out by Eastenders star Michael Cashman, and a battery of others, declaring that in the age of Section 28 everyone had to stand and be counted. A group of lesbian protestors abseiled into the chamber of the House of Commons to disrupt the parliamentary debate of the Clause, and they later burst into the live broadcast of the six o’clock news. Thousands of people banded together to form Stonewall, still the most high-profile and high-impact gay lobbying group in Britain. The gay community’s most successful weekly gay newspaper, the Pink Paper, was set up to report on the savage backlash against gays.

The legislation always seemed to reveal a strange insecurity on the part of its fans about their own sexuality. Did they really think children could be ‘taught’ to be gay, like they are taught the ten times table? In 2005, I asked Michael Howard – who piloted it into law as the Local Government Minister – if he thought he would be gay today if his teachers had “promoted” it to him. He said, “Well I think that there are some people who could be influenced. Who could go either way. I think there is a question about the extent to which people can be influenced…” He trailed off, with a little shrug of embarrassment.

At first, the Labour Party supported Section 28 out of fear of being tarred with the “loony left” brush. But it soon regained its moral compass and began to call for its repeal. The Conservative Party swooped in to use this as a wedge issue against them. Norman Tebbit drew up an election poster showing a shelf-full of gay books and the slogan: “This is Labour’s idea of a comprehensive education.” They accused Labour of supporting “perversion.”

Britain’s religious establishment rallied behind the Tories. Cardinal Thomas Winning announced: “It pains me to use the word perverted when discussing the homosexual act but that’s what it is. I will not stand for this sort of behaviour.” He compared gay people to the Nazis, saying: “In the place of the bombing of fifty years ago you find yourself bombarded with images and ideas which are utterly alien.” Today this seems like an act of psychological projection: he was, after all, a senior figure in a Church that was riddled with real perverts and paedophiles who were committing the mass rape of children under Winning’s own nose.

The Tories and the religious – from the Chief Rabbi to the Muslim Association of Britain – stayed with Section 28 to the end. Labour came to power in 1997 committed to repealing the anti-gay law. Tony Blair said: “I guess, reading the newspapers, that repealing Clause 28 is not popular, but we are doing it because it is the right thing to do. The truth is that this campaign is based on people who do not want to openly say they are prejudiced against gay people, so they hide behind the issue of child protection.” The Conservative leader William Hague called this “politically correct nonsense”, and said bizarrely that “true tolerance means a minority accepting the experiences and beliefs of the majority.” He ordered his party in the House of Lords to hold up the repeal for years.

The most senior figures in the Conservative Party today are still tainted by their association with Section 28. The Tory mayor of London, Boris Johnson, defended it, even though in his recent interview with Attitude he didn’t seem to actually understand what the law was. The current Tory leader, David Cameron, voted for it at every opportunity, and used the issue in his election literature to attack his Labour opponent.

The law was finally, at last and at least, abolished in 2004 – but its consequences live on. In every other area of British life, attitudes towards gay people have been radically transformed. Yet in our schools, anti-gay prejudices were preserved in the formaldehyde of Section 28. The fight against homophobia is only now beginning in our playgrounds – after it has been largely won in the places where it could be legally challenged, like the workplace. Stonewall found recently that 80 percent of schools admit they have a problem with homophobic bullying – but only 6 percent have a policy to deal with it.

Let end with the story of one boy – one of many – who paid the price for Section 28’s stalling. Jonathan Reynolds was a 15 year-old from Bridgend, South Wales, who came out to some of his closest friends in 2006. They blabbed – and he was bullied and harassed and threatened as a "faggot" and a "poof" until he couldn't take it any more. His school had no policy in place to protect gay children; any move to develop one had been squashed by the vast legal block of Section 28, and hadn’t recovered in time for him. So one day, after he sat a GCSE exam where he earned a starred A grade, he lay down on the train tracks near his home. He texted his sister Sam: "Tell everyone that this is for anybody who eva said anything bad about me, see I do have feelings too. Blame the people who were horrible and injust 2 me. This is because of them, I am human just like them. None of you blame yourself, mum, dad, Sam and the rest of the family. This is not because of you." Then a train sliced his body apart.

Jonathan Reynolds’ final text message – his last cry of “I am human” – should serve as the obituary for the late, un-great Section 28.

I also conducted two interviews to go with this article.

This first is with newsreader Sue Lawley:

JH: Can you tell us about how you came to be ravaged by the lesbians?

SL: (Roars with laughter) We were about to go on air with the Six O’Clock News – this is exactly twenty years ago now – and I was checking through my notes. I could hear a lot of shouting fro the gallery in my earpiece but there’s nothing surprising about that – that’s live news – when suddenly the door to the studio burst open.

JH: The lesbians!

SL: Well, I thought they were men. They were bloody big and dressed in combat gear and waving handcuffs. They dived at the cameras, and the music for the six o’clock news came up. And I thought: this is it. We’re going to be kidnapped. We’re destined for a cellar in Beirut. God knows how I thought they were going to get us out of the sixth floor of TV centre and to Beirut, but you don’t think rationally in a situation like that. Fear knows no logic.

JH: So what did you do as the theme music ended?

SL: One of the lesbians handcuffed herself to the leg of my chair, and the other one to the camera, and I heard them yell “Stop Section 28! Stop Thatcher!” And I remembered that a few weeks before some lesbian protestors had tried to get into the chamber of the House of Commons, and I realised what was happening. And I thought: well, all I can do is keep the show on the air. Ten million people are watching. Read the news.

JH: You were incredibly calm. You just politely say, “We’ve rather had an invasion in the studio, so apologies for any disruption,” and just carry on.

SL: Yes, I am rather BBC in that respect. Prim and proper. We had a big news story that day – Reagan and Gorbachev had met – and I had a bloody long introduction about it. Normally you just had a few sentences, but this went on forever – the East said, the West said… And the lesbians were screaming.

JH: Is it true Nicholas Witchell sat on the lesbians?

SL: Oh yes. The one that was handcuffed to my chair kept bobbing up into my shot – I could see her on the monitor – as I read the news. And then I realised that her head had disappeared and her shouts had become muffled. So I peeked over and Nicholas Witchell had straddled the lesbian and was gagging her with his hand, kind of bobbing and gagging. It was all happening about two inches from my left elbow. Then I peeked to my right and saw four senior BBC executives in their suits just staring at us all open-mouthed.

JH: How long did it go on for?

SL: Well, eventually I got through this introduction and we cut to the video and the security guards took the lesbians out. They had to take out the camera and the chair they were cuffed to, leaving me with just one camera to do the whole bulletin. I realise now they must have had some help within the BBC to get that far. To get through security and even to find that studio – TV Centre is a real labyrinth, and we were in the middle of the sixth floor – at just the right time… there was a BBC mole there. That night I got home and saw on the news that the lesbians liked me. They said I had been very cool, and they were impressed. It was my fifteen minutes of fame as a gay icon.

JH: Looking back, do you think there was something brave about what they did?

SL: Of course there was. Absolutely. They wanted to get publicity about Section 28, and they did. The next day, the Sun headline was: “Beeb man sits on lesbian.”

JH: Sue, may you reign forever as a gay icon…

The second is with Sir Ian McKellen:

JH: When you think of Section 28 now, what goes through your mind?

IM: It changed my view of the world. When you look back, it seems like so long ago. It was another world. It’s very hard to remember now but there were almost no gay voices in public life. There were a few individuals like Derek Jarman who spoke bravely and with passion, but they were very rare and isolated and there were no firm gay organisations or out politicians. Even the liberal press was indifferent to the gay point-of-view, it was never reported properly. All you’d ever hear was negative and hateful. At that time, people thought it was perfectly easy and proper to make the most outrageous comments about gay people.

JH: How did you become one of the leading figures in the fightback?

IM: It was what drove me finally to come out. I couldn’t bear it. This law was passed and there was very little public speaking out. I had never done any gay campaigning. I was a latecomer to it. I was on a radio debate with [anti-gay right-wing newspaper editor] Peregrine Worsthorne and he kept talking about gay people as ‘them, them, them’ and I found myself saying – it’s not them, it’s me, I’m gay. It shut him up.

When we got off air I had to make a couple of quick calls to members of my family. They basically knew – I was 49 and they’d met my boyfriends – but I’d never actually said it in so many words. They were fine with it. From then on I was suddenly put into a position I hadn’t wanted and wasn’t suited to – as a kind of representative of all the gays in the country. The media thought, well, he seems like a responsible figure, he can speak for them. There were a lot of people who did a lot more than me.

JH: Was there any negative response?

IM: I got some pretty horrific letters, all obsessed with sodomy and convinced that if you were gay you were also into paedophilia and bestiality. But on the Section 28 campaign, the vituperation was so strong that it convinced us even more that we were right. It’s not often when you express an opinion you know you’re absolutely right, but I knew I was.

JH: Is it true you went to see Michael Howard, the Tory minister who was piloting it into law?

IM: Yes. I went to see him on a Sunday morning in Notting Hill. He blinded me with the science of legality, which I know nothing about, and then asked me to sign an autograph for his daughter. It’s rumoured that I wrote, ‘Fuck off I’m gay’, but I didn’t. I should have really.

JH: It led to the creation of Stonewall, didn’t it?

IM: One of the best things about it was that Stonewall happened. Without it, all the changes of the past twenty years would have taken much longer. One of the Tory whips at that time was called Tristan Garrel-Jones. He was a very civilised man and an admirer of the fine arts and he was absolutely ashamed that he had helped push this law through. He called it – these were his exact words – “a piece of red meat thrown to the right-wing wolves.” He said – you’ve done well, but it’s not enough. You have to go out and start an organisation that works every week of every day so this can never happen again.

JH: Was it invigorating, to start that fight back?

IM: Absolutely. You have to realise how many people were closeted. Nobody was out. It was easy for people to be anti-gay because they believed gay people scarcely existed. It was so invigorating to publicly stand up for ourselves and to be taken seriously in a way we hadn’t been before. The feeling was – we’re on the move now, we’re fighting. It’s no coincidence we called it Stonewall: at last, we were doing what they did in America. We had an optimism we could take them on, we weren’t just waiting for a law to imprison us or anything like that.

JH: Do you think Section 28 still has a dangerous afterlife?

IM: Yes. Without it, schools would have done much more, aught perhaps even caught up with places like commerce and business where they go out of their way to attract gay people. These days, it should be easier than ever for schools to get it right, but they very often don’t. I’ve been speaking at a few private schools lately and they invariably have no policy for gay students or member of staff. None. It’s worst of all in faith schools, where it’s a terrible problem. That’s why Stonewall has four members of staff dealing with these issues. It will have to be dealt with one-by-one, school-by-school, getting them to provide counseling and mentoring for gay students and really deal with homophobic bullying.

JH: Yet it sounds like, for all the evil it did, you also think there were positive consequences from that period too.

IM: I have a lingering affection – not for Section 28, which was disgusting, but for what it enabled us to do. It was the beginning of the end for the old attitudes. It failed, and it deserved to fail, and we won in the end.

The London mayoral election is being covered as if it was a series of ‘I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Into City Hall!’ where instead of eating kangaroo penis, the candidates have to endure the more distasteful fate of being interviewed by Nick Ferrari.

It’s not hard to see why personality rules the coverage. This is a fight between a Homer-quoting comedian who seems to have skidded from the pages of Evelyn Waugh on a bob-sleigh, a one-time-revolutionary Labour rebel with a love for amphibians and a hatred of SUVs, and Britain’s highest-ranking gay policeman – who happens to have confessed an interest in anarchism.

But when I interviewed the mayoral candidates for this month’s issue of Attitude – Britain’s best-selling gay magazine, out on Monday – I found that behind the glitz, there is a serious skills gap between the candidates.

When I meet Boris in the shell of the old City Hall building – long-since sold off to Japanese developers and turned into hotels and offices – he is everything his ‘Have I Got News For You’ fans would hope. The jokes – genuinely funny, which is almost unprecedented in politics – tumble out. I ask him if Eton in his day was a hot-bed of sodomy. “To a degree I find personally insulting,” he says, “it wasn’t really like that for me.” I ask him if he agrees with a Ken Livingstone line from the early 1980s, that we are all potentially bisexual. “Oh, I am a polymorphous pervert,” he replies.

But when we get onto the issues, I get worried. I ask him why he supported Section 28, the notorious legislation that banned teachers from “promoting” homosexuality – and it quickly becomes clear he doesn’t actually know what it was. “As I recall the issue was to do with compulsion. Wasn't the question [about] whether or not schools should be compelled to have [these lessons]? I thought the issue was: are you compelling teachers in schools to take a particular line? I'm not in favour of that… There’s far too much proscription already of what teachers have to say and do. I’m against bossiness”

But Boris, I explain – Section 28 was the act of bossiness and proscription. It was a flat-out ban, telling teachers not to talk about gays. He goes into his ‘oh cripes’ routine, as if it is charming that he supported a piece of legislation he had totally misunderstood.

On all the questions, he seems to go into a sort of panicked free association, where he desperately to find a link to something he does know about. When I ask him what he would do to reduce the sky-high rate of suicide among gay teenagers, he starts talking about the need to get kids out of gangs – as if the Brick Lane Massiv is stocked with gay-boys and lesbians. He admits he isn’t sure what you call the unions between gay people – they’re civil partnerships, Boris.

And when I ask him how he can justify comparing gay marriage to a man marrying a dog just a few years ago, he says: “I think, as society evolved, taboos will go and shift. I was just making the point that things that seem unacceptable to one generation can be acceptable to the next generation. All I was doing was making a powerful point in favour of tolerance.”

The contrast with Ken Livingstone is startling. When I meet him at the top of the new City Hall he dubbed “the glass testicle”, he is in a laconic mood after enduring a relentless press kicking. He’s keen to talk about global warming, and says with a wry smile, “Thirty years ago, when I was planning what we would do after the British revolution, I never imagined that now I’d be trying to get people to insulate their lofts to save the world.”

But I pepper him with questions about very specific issues affecting gay Londoners, he always responds – without notes – with a battery of statistics and facts. I ask about the rise in HIV infections among gay men, and he knows the figures off the top of his head. He talks me through the practical problems: at the moment, in most of London’s STD clinics, if you go and ask for a test, they give you an appointment in two weeks’ time. “A lot of young people just aren’t going to say, ‘I'm not going to have sex for two weeks,’” he says. “The research shows that’s when you see a lot of STD transmission.” He then lists how he is lobbying the local health authorities to close this waiting gap, and what they need to do now – before going on to list other practical problems, and his solutions.

He knows the names of STD clinics all over London, and I don’t think it’s because he’s coming down with ghonnorhea: he offers this level of detail on every question I ask.

But there is one issue where gay Londoners – who have seen Ken as a defender and champion for thirty years – were shocked by the mayor. In 2004, Ken Livingstone invited an Islamic fundamentalist called Yusuf al-Qaradawi as an “honoured guest” to City Hall. This Egyptian cleric has been quoted calling for the murder of gay men and lesbians – yet when Peter Tatchell challenged Ken over it, he announced Tatchell was “Islamophobic.”

Ken backs down, a little. He says he didn’t know much about Qaradawi before this scandal broke out: he just knew that he had been praised by everyone from the Guardian to the Sun as the voice of moderate Islam. He says he “probably shouldn’t” have slammed Tatchell (damn right) but he is reluctant to believe what he has read in the papers about Qaradawi because he has read “so many lies” about himself.

“In politics you engage with people which you have profound disagreements with,” he says. “When the Mayor of Moscow comes here, I talk to him too, and he bans gay pride marches. It didn't stop me lobbying him for his three votes on the Olympics, internationally. If it had gone the other way, well, then Paris would be holding the Olympics.” He stresses that on every act of practical policy, he has sided with gay rights against religious rights. For example, when the Blair government said religious groups don’t have to follow the law banning discrimination on the basis of sexuality, Ken used the mayor’s office to lobby hard against it.

The Lib Dem candidate Brian Paddick isn’t embarrassed to appeal to the gay vote as One of Us. He says, “You know, we went through decades of being targeted by the police. Now it's pay back time.” He speaks about gay issues as a man who has fought through them all: he pledges to crack down on homophobic bullying in schools, as a survivor of it himself, and he promises to crack open homophobia in the police, as a man who rose through it to be Number Two in the Met. He has moving stories and some fresh ideas – but at times they are sketchy. When I ask him specifically what we should be doing about homophobic bullying, he keeps vaguely saying we must “do more.” Ken, by contrast, talked on this issue about the specific organisations he wants to fund, and the projects he wants to pursue.

If this race is the X-Factor of politics, Ken may end up as an ex-mayor. But if this is about who has the administrative skill, progressive politics and practical knowledge to run London, then this is no contest at all.

Nathan Shaked has been crowned International Mr Gay 2007 in the gay world’s biggest, glitziest global beauty pageant – but when Attitude meets up with him in a glitzy London hotel, he seems to belong to a different species from the stereotypical shrieking, air-headed gay beauty queen.

Nathan was conscripted to be a soldier in the Israeli army, and chose to stay beyond the mandatory three year term. Then he became a top-flight commercial lawyer, becoming a partner in his firm. And now, at the age of 37, he is a mega-bucks businessman, owning a chain of high-end gyms in Tel Aviv. He’s ain’t Miss Congeniality: he is a tough, hard-headed man’s man, with a brain as sharp as his abs.

JH: How does the Mr Gay contest actually work?

NS: Well, you win in your own country, and then you are sent to Florida, and the contest is in three parts. The first day, Friday, we went rock-climbing. (Laughs). I know it sounds odd, but they were trying to test our leadership skills. The second stage was an interview with the judging panel. For most of the contestants, the interview lasts five minutes, but with me we went on for half an hour because I was talking about Islam and gay issues and the peace process. And the third part was where they got us into our swimming costumes. You know, to represent gay people, they think you have to have a nice face, because it’s easier to relate to people who look nice. Then I won, and it was very American – lots of noise and fireworks and balloons. I was very pleased.

JH: Almost straight after winning, you were plunged into a controversy back in Israel. There were plans to hold a gay Pride rally in Jerusalem, and there was a really shocking and extreme religious backlash against it.

NS: Yes, because I was on the news already, I was really like the gay person the news organisations wanted to interview. There were a lot of rabbis prepared to go on television to condemn it, so they needed some gay people to talk back. There was a debate in court, and the police said that they could not guarantee our security if we were going to be in the streets. So it was held in a stadium, which is really not the point of Pride. So, it was ridiculous when you think about it, in the twenty-first century, in a country that is said to be a modern country, people cannot express who they are.

JH: How did you feel about the abuse directed at you personally?

NS: You know that I’ve learned not to really respond to people who saying things which are, to me, more than ridiculous. I can relate to situations when you have differences of opinions. As long as we sit as two human beings and talk about different issues, it doesn't matter how hard or how harsh those issues are, I can deal with it. However, when somebody regards me as not a human being, when someone regards me as an animal, we have no common ground. Should I try to convince him that I'm a human being? It is just a ridiculous discussion.

But I try to appeal to people who are not that extreme, but who just don’t know what gays are all about. You know, you live in London, I live in Tel Aviv, and it’s very open to gays, very trendy maybe. But to a lot of people gays are a complete mystery. So when you say you are gay there, they think about the stereotype. They picture a very effeminate person, very delicate, because that is what they see on the television. Whenever there is a gay character on Israeli television, his is that type. That's the television because they want ratings, so they won't be looking for just normal gay men. The result of this is when a gay person, a gay young boy, sixteen years old, discovers he is gay, he is terrified about it. He knows that when he tells his mother she will think, basically, ‘Oh my god, I have a woman in the house!’ That’s what she sees on television.

So what I'm going to try to do is I'll try to visit places, show myself in places to show a gay can be just a normal man, act normally. It's OK we have in our community gays who are a little bit effeminate, but we have every kind of gay person, and it the stereotype doesn’t define us. It is not what we are all about.

JH: One way you obviously defy that stereotype is that you were a successful soldier. Was it hard being gay in the army?

NS: In Israel, the army does not have any restrictions on gay people at all. We have conscription, so everybody goes at eighteen. And you leave your mother, you leave your family, you leave your warm bed. It is very harsh, very different to what you used to have, at first. And if you are gay you're even more lonely. Everybody's talking about their girlfriend, and everybody's talking about the things that are up to sexually, so you lie and say, “Yes, I was with my girlfriend this weekend,’ which is a complete lie. There are very few really, really brave guys who are 18 who say, “I'm gay, I don't give a shit about it.” In the army people are prejudiced because they worry that if they say they are gay, they won’t be seen as fighters any more. Just because they are gay.

JS: But you stayed in the army longer than you had to.

NS: Yes, for a few reasons. First of all I enjoyed my service, and I had great friends, even though I was in the closet, even though I couldn't talk about my sexuality. You get used to life there, but what’s so terrible is you learn to be a professional liar. You lie so much, you forget the truth sometimes. So I lied, that is what I did. And secondly, I think it might sound a little bit strange to you, but in Israel I think it is important to do the best you can. I don't take it for granted that we live in Israel, it’s something that took us a long time to achieve and it’s not obvious we will be able to stay this way.

JH: Did you serve in the occupied Palestinian territories?

NS: I don’t want to say where I served.

JH: Why?

NS: I don’t think it’s appropriate for this interview.

JH: When you were in the army did you have a boyfriend secretly?

NS: I had a – well, I don’t call him a boyfriend. I was in the army, he was in the army, we met sometimes for sex. It was not really a love relationship If our days off were corresponding at the same time, we would hook up.

JH: And would you feel obliged to go with women or to have a pretend girlfriend?

NS: There are lots of women in the Israeli army, and I would usually have this girl in my life, who I was pretending to everyone else I was going out with. It would two to three weeks, because I never got it take to a situation where I would have sex with them. So the minute it was getting that serious, and the woman wanted to get to the next stage, I would call it off.

JH: You came out quite late, didn’t you – when you were thirty?

JH: Yes, because I was terrified that I would be discriminated against by my friends. I had people I considered to be my best friends, and over the years they had told me their most delicate secrets, and I had lied to them all along. I thought they were going to be very angry with me. I also thought they wouldn’t consider me as part of the group any more. They would think I was different. Then when I was 30, I woke up one morning and decided I could not keep living a life that doesn't makes me happy any more.

I had become a lawyer after I left the army, and I didn’t want to do that any more. I was a partner, and I had a great office, and lots of money, but at the end of the day, I was a litigator, and that kind of law is all about doing bad things in many, many cases. It’s all built on somebody’s suffering. And you are constantly lying. I didn’t want to tell lies any more.

So I quit my job, and I wanted to come out too. But to get out of the closet is a process, it's not so easy. So I was at a party with a friend of mine and he was checking out a good-looking girl, and he got me to look at her. And I said, ‘Yes, she’s good-looking. But I think her boyfriend is even more hot.’ He looked at me strangely and then we talked about something else. And the next morning he called me, and said, you know, I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday. And I told him I was gay. And then in twenty minutes, all my friends knew! It was like a fire, shoooo!

That evening there was a birthday party of a friend of mine, and all my friends gathered around and said it was okay. It was great! Then they were asking me questions about gay behaviour and gay sex… So that was it. In addition to that, my mother called me to say she needed to talk to me. Now, my mother never needs to talk with me. She said, “One of the parents of one your friends gave me a call, and she said that you came out.” Nothing really changed in my life, as far as people's behaviour towards me. But I started to live with no fears, and it was so nice, and so refreshing.

JH: You said in an interview that your brother had not reacted well.

NS: My brother is not reacted well. I can't get why, maybe he needs to get used to the idea, I don't know. I just have to do the best I can to change attitudes, and hopefully that can include my brother eventually.

JH: Of course would be much more difficult to come out in any of the countries surrounding Israel.

NS: I would be shot and hanged. There are radical anti-gay laws over there. It is a problem. Many gay Palestinians come to Israel because they cannot be gay at home.

JH: Since you won, have you had lots of men throw themselves at you?

NS: No… I don’t think the fact I have a title changes anything.

JH: Do you have a boyfriend at the moment?

NS: No, I don't.

JH: Is that by choice, or…?

NS: Always it is by choice. I need to find the right man, then you make time. My last long-term boyfriend was three years ago. I was with him for eighteen months.

JH: Well, why don’t you leave the Palestinians alone and invade my territories, Nathan?

(Laughter. Interview ends.)

Do the British police still have a problem with gay people? Do ‘The Filth’ have a problem with ‘filth’? It’s easy to imagine that in our shiny metrosexual world of civil partnerships and civil rights, outright bigotry from agents of the state has ebbed away. But every few months now, new slabs of evidence emerge showing homophobia is still infesting the police service like dry rot.

Over the past week, there has been a row over a new campaign of police harassment against gay men – with the invention of the “willycam.” In the early 1990s, the police dedicated tens of millions of pounds to catching men who were having consensual sex in the middle of the night, in the dark. They used army-style infrared cameras and binoculars, and built huge hidden dug-outs, to spy on shagging men who could never have been seen by any member of the public – as the need for infra red equipment and dug-outs showed. They would send the hottest police officers into cruising areas to grab their crotches and see who was interested – and then arrest them.

This year, in Merseyside, this approach is back. After a complaint, the local police launched Operation Winchester. They have installed hidden cameras in public toilets, at penis-height and face-height, to catch gay men who want to have consensual sex. I’m not a defender of cottaging – meeting in toilets seems to me a pretty depressing left-over from the closet – but at a time when the police often don’t send out officers to investigate burglaries, is punishing consensual sex a sensible use of police time and money? And why the focus exclusively on gay meeting-points, and never the ubiquitous rise of straight “dogging” sites?

Yet police homophobia has produced much deadlier results than this. Look back over the 1990s and you find a line-up of gay Stephen Lawrences, murdered gay people who should have alerted us to the fact something was going badly wrong. For example, on a sweltering Saturday night, Michael Boothe – a 48-year old gay actor – went looking for sex in a public toilet near his home in West London. A few people there might have recognised him from his TV and West End work, but the group of seven thugs who entered the toilets were not interested in any of that. They were there to beat a faggot to death.

They dragged Michael outside and began stamping on his head and chest, punching and smashing his body so hard that his left foot was severed from his leg. A local gang known for yelling homophobic abuse had been reported for kicking off in the area that night. The police called them in - but they took no forensic evidence, and didn't bother to search their homes.

The police then publicly blamed the victim. They said his “lifestyle” meant he was “destined to come into contact with his murderers”. Chief Superintendent Shoemaker went further, declaring: “A person born with any sort of colour doesn't have a choice in the matter. I would suggest sexual preferences, however, are a matter of individual choice.” He attacked “the type of homosexual who often leads a double life, often using false identities, [and] has casual pickups for the purpose of sex.” We don't know what the police said privately because all the documents surrounding the case have now mysteriously “misplaced.”

But the gay community’s MacPherson Report never came – so the rot remains. A study this year by the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Advisory Group (LGBTAG), a group of independent advisors to the Metropolitan Police, looked in detail over the police’s handling of homophobic murders in all the years since – and found there is an entrenched culture of “institutionalised homophobia”. This prejudice has led to the deaths of innocent people: for example, it prevented the police from catching the serial killer Colin Ireland, who was merrily hacking and burning his way through London’s gay community. The first the police knew of his identity was when he appeared at a police station to hand himself in. Bemused that he hadn’t been tracked down, he asked, “Doesn't the death of a homosexual mean anything to you?”

Every week, the Gay Police Association (GPA) collates startling examples of police homophobia. It chairman, Paul Cahill – himself a distinguished police officer who has served as a detective and on armed response units – explains, “There are so many examples. We were just contacted by a gay officer who was stripped naked, handcuffed to a chair, and attacked with a truncheon while his fellow officers yelled that he was a ‘faggot’ and a ‘queer.’ We get lots of calls from officers who say that after they came out, their colleagues refused to eat with them in the canteen, sit in the police car with them on a shift, or go out on patrol with them. This hasn’t been declining – it’s actually increased in the past year.”

Cahill’s own story is a parable demonstrating how deeply rooted homophobia remains in the force. When he started as a police officer in the early 1990s, his locker was regularly superglued shut, with the words ‘faggot’ and ‘poof’ scrawled onto it by other officers. His car was vandalised, and his pigeonhole was stuffed with leaflets from the Terrence Higgins Trust, implying he had AIDS.

Cahill went on to excel as an officer nonetheless. After he was given a big promotion, he organised a party to celebrate in the bar at the RAF base in Uxbridge used by the police for training. But the guests – some of whom were gay – started to be barracked by soldiers with crude homophobic abuse. The party ended early, and as Paul was leaving, he was set upon by three thugs in RAF uniform. They kicked him to the ground and began to punch, kick and stomp on him so severely he they fractured his skill, broke his ribs, and caused severe internal bleeding.

Surely the police were eager to catch the hooligans who savaged one of their own rising stars? No. An investigating officer was not appointed for a whole fortnight – virtually unheard of in such a vicious assault. The Sun ran an article saying it was insulting to have poofters on an RAF base, illustrated with a picture of a grossly fat officer dancing around a handbag. It said nostalgically, ‘There was a time when the only fairies in a police station were on the Christmas tree.” A senior police constable visited Paul in hospital and complained angrily that this “negative publicity” he had caused meant that straight police officers in the area were being wolf-whistled and treated “as if they were gay”. He then explained that the police have very good relations with the RAF – using their facilities for free – and that if Paul insisted on pursuing the people who attacked him, that would “damage” the position of the police. The people who nearly killed him were never caught. If this is how the police deal with homophobic assaults against their own men, how do they deal with the public?

Paul had always loved being a police officer, but now, he explains, “I lost all faith in the service. It’s always understood in the force that however much you might disagree, when one of us is attacked we’re all one family who stick up for each other. But I realised that when it came to it, they didn’t see gay officers that way.” But after a lot of dark nights, he decided to persist – and fight to make the police service treat gay officers equally.

But why the increase in discrimination identified by Cahill in the past twelve months? Last year the Labour government introduced new equality legislation making it a crime to discriminate against gay people in the workplace. Gay police officers were hopeful this would lead to progress at last - but they soon discovered there’s a terrible loophole. The government simultaneously introduced laws guaranteeing “religious rights.” These have been pounced upon by religious homophobes, who insist that their “right to religious belief” includes their right to loudly hate gay people who happen to work alongside them.

Worse still, the GPA believe that the police are frequently refusing to investigate homophobic crimes if the perpetrators claim their motives are religious. To give one example logged by the GPA: a gay man recently approached his police station to explain he was being harassed by religious fundamentalist neighbours. They were screaming the most barking verses from the Bible at him every day, and they had scratched a crucifix onto his front door. To his astonishment, he was told by the police that “homosexuality is a sin in the Bible, so it’s a legitimate religious view and it’s protected by the law.”

Whenever homophobia is exposed in a police station, the offending officers now plead that they are just following their religion and that is the end of that. Religion has become a get-out-of-jail-free card for homophobic officers. Since 85 percent of police officers claim to be religious, this renders the equality legislation meaningless. While obviously individuals have to be free to be homophobic in their homes in their spare time, when they are working for us, they have to treat us all equally – and right now, they are refusing to do so, with the full protection of the law. These “religious rights” need to be repealed – in favour of human rights.

And more: the dysfunctional canteen culture of the police needs to be broken and remade. Right-wing pundits and Tory MPs use the “diversity training” that has begun this task as a punch-line and a punch-bag. They howl that any move towards equality is “political correctness.” This kind of foul rhetoric that allowed the thugs who stomped to death Michael Boothe to walk free. Enough: it’s time to read homophobic police officers their rights.

The portly, shrieking pantomime dame Christopher Biggins won ‘I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!’ last night, and to no doubt become the nation’s favourite eunuch for a few months. He’s part of a long tradition of gay men welcomed into the British mainstream who I’ve written about before: the safe, sexless, self-hating homosexual who doesn’t make you think about anything frightfully distasteful like men actually having sex with each other other. No – Biggins reassures you that homosexuality is about nice things, like wearing dresses and being friends with Joan Collins, dah-ling!

As it happens, on a personal level, I think he seems like a nice man. There are some gay men (a small proportion, as it happens) who simply are naturally camp, and they shouldn’t be condemned or lectured for simply expressing their true nature. But I thought we were moving beyond a time when this was The Face of the Gays on national television. I thought we were beginning to see that gay men are just as likely to be soldiers or war correspondents or brickies as they are to be pantomime dames or howling drag queens.

By rolling this progress back, by allowing the likes of Biggins and Graham Norton to be the main face of British gaydom, we actually make it harder for gay kids to understand their sexuality. The vast majority of gay boys grows up without any more ‘effeminacy’ than their straight brothers, and yet the only gay people they see represented are mincing queens, and they think: well, I’m not like that, and I don’t want to be like that, so I can’t be gay.

But the problem with Biggins goes deeper and becomes more fetid. For the sake of a few thousand quid, he has actually sold out his fellow gay people to the most repellent gay-bashers in the British media. The Daily Mail has a clever tactic when it wants to attack a minority and beat back social progress: it pays a small fortune to a member of that group to do it for them. Want to savage feminism? Find a self-hating woman. Want to rubbish race relations laws? Find a token black person. Biggins is their token self-hating gay, the one they wheel out to make it seem as if gay people are seriously divided on unequivocal pieces of progress.

For example, Biggins was almost alone in attacking the tender, touching introduction of civil partnerships for gay couples, with Melanie Phillips presenting it as a portent of the end of civilisation. Biggins announced in the Mail that he would not be entering into a civil partnership, saying: “Marriage, in my view, should always be reserved for the union between a man and a woman - primarily for the purpose of bringing up a family.” So is he in favour of banning infertile couples from getting married? What about couples in their sixties, seventies and beyond? They can’t have kids either; but he makes no comment on them.

He then says: “To go one step further and elevate partnerships into the status of marriage would make a mockery of an institution which, for all its faults, has served society well for many centuries.” A mockery? I’d say it was a tribute, a beautiful tribute. If you’re looking for a mockery of marriage, how about Jodie Marsh setting up a reality show to find her a husband? She is – somebody tell Biggins – heterosexual. But Biggins doesn’t, I suspect, believe this right-wing drivvel; he can’t feel good when he sees the notorious homophobe Richard Littlejohn – who was actually condemned by the Radio Authority for his bigotry – praising him for being “sensible”. No: he took the money and ran.
Biggins deserves to win a reality show. It should be called ‘I’m an Uncle Tom… Get Me Out of Here!’

You can comment on this entry, and read other people's comments, here.

It’s always strange and sad when you have to disagree with people who have purely good motives and purely good goals. Over the past week, I have smacked into disagreement twice with friends and allies in the fight for equality for gay people. Both times, the rows have boiled down to one core question: should the people who hate and detest us just because of a trivial and irreversible biological fact – homosexuality – be subject to extra criminal sanctions?

For years, the invaluable gay equality organisation Stonewall has been campaigning to have the laws banning incitement to racial and religious hatred extended to cover homophobia as well. Now they have succeeded: on Monday Justice Secretary Jack Straw told MPs that the Criminal Justice Bill will be amended to do just that. Soon, if you speak about gay people in language that is sufficiently extreme that it is deemed to be “a threat”, you will go to prison – for up to seven years.

I can understand why these measures are tempting. When I hear ‘Sir’ Iqbal Sacranie howling that gay people spread disease, or Richard Littlejohn raving breathlessly about “poovery”, my Inner Censor wants to shut them up. Doesn’t this kind of talk encourage thugs who are likely to bottle somebody on a Saturday night? If the law says encouraging people to hate Muslims or Jews is a crime, isn’t it discrimination to leave us out?

I have argued in public with plenty of the people who would be victims of this law. The agony aunt Lynnette Burrows (and the emphasis is on the agony, believe me) was questioned by the police a few years ago, after she vituperatively attacked gay adoption rights. Around the same time, I appeared opposite her on a TV pilot called ‘Mad As Hell’, where Burrows was arguing – along with a deranged fundamentalist preacher called Rvd. Jim Dowson – that homosexuality should be criminalized. They were a pair of cackling lunatics who appeared to be primarily motivated by a strange anal fetishism, constantly citing “studies” that “showed” 50 percent of gay men eat their own faeces, want to have sex with underage boys and obsessively engage in “fisting”.

I found them revolting – but it never occurred to me to say they should be arrested. The deal is simple: in a free society, they have the right to insult us, and we have the right to insult them in return. If we ask to be protected from the things that offend us, then other groups will ask to be protected from the Gay Pride marches and the PVC hotpants that offend them. If we say their most extreme statements could make bigots beat up gays, they will say our most extreme statements could make gays beat up bigots. (That does occasionally happen, by the way: in Bournemouth in 2005 a group of gay men attacked up a pitiful old geezer called Harry Hammond who wove a banner saying ‘Stop Homosexuality’.) This is a spiral that can only work against gay people and corrode the basis of a free society.

Gay people need to be confident enough to know that our arguments are so strong they will win in any free, open exchange of views. For fifty years, hearing the arguments for-and-against on homosexuality has made the decent majority of British people side with us. At the end of that TV programme, I went to shake Dowson’s hand – I believe in being polite, even to enemies – and he thrust his hands angrily into his pockets. “I know where it’s been,” he said. Isn’t it better for people to see and hear that? Why introduce a law that will turn somebody like him into a martyr, at the very moment when they have so comprehensively and humiliatingly lost the argument?

Worse, if gay people demand laws that protect us from “incitement to hatred”, it’s hard to object when religious people demand and receive similar group rights for themselves. Yet these parallel protections have been a disaster for gay people. The major Western religions are all based on pre-modern hallucinatory ‘Holy Books’ which contain calls to kill gay people. But the legal framework protecting religion makes it increasingly difficult to call these the poisonous, repellent works of fiction that they are. I hate these texts. I call on others to hate these texts. Yes, I “incite” them to do so. Under the existing law, that is a crime. Gay people should be seeking to repeal that law – not extend it to ourselves.

The second disagreement I had with my fellow gay rights campaigners this week began when Peter Tatchell and Green MEP Caroline Lucas – two of the most admirable people in British public life – renewed their call for the extension of ‘hate crimes’ legislation to cover gay people. These laws create an additional penalty under the law for having a homophobic motive. This means that some thug driven to beat up gay people by homophobia would be given a harsher sentence than, say, a mugger driven by greed to beat people up and steal their wallets.

They point out there are far too many instances where, even now, the police don’t take crimes against gay people seriously. This February a 28 year old gay man called Robert Goddard – who I recently met – got on the bus to East London after a long night working in a West End club. He was knackered and rested his head on his boyfriend's shoulder - when suddenly a group of five big, aggressive lads began to shout at them. “You fucking batty-boys! We're going to smash your head with a brick. We're going to follow you off the bus and kill you,” they declared. Rob called the police – but they refused to come. The gang broke Rob’s nose and badly beat his boyfriend too.

Hate crimes laws would, their proponents say, jolt the police into taking these sorts of crimes against gay people seriously, and show criminals they can’t get away with it. But it is already deeply illegal to attack gay people, or threaten violence against us – because we are human beings. If the police don’t enforce the existing laws, there’s no reason to believe they will enforce new ones. The real solution is to force the government to push through cultural change in the police force, along the lines proposed by the Gay Police Association – and to stand up against the fools who call this “political correctness gone mad”.

Hate crimes laws undermine one of the most persuasive arguments of the gay rights movement. At every step of the way, all we have asked for is the same rights enjoyed by straight people: to have sex, to get married, to adopt. The anti-gay lobby has always claimed we are asking for ‘special rights’, and it has always been a lie. But hate crimes law do, finally, turn us into a special category. It says that stabbing me is worse than stabbing my heterosexual brother.

When there are so many real fights against homophobia still to be won – not least in our schools – these battles are a draining, downbeat turn in the wrong direction.

POSTSCRIPT: Peter Tatchell has an interesting discussion of the new 'incitement' proposals here.

You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters -at- independent.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

You can read my other articles about gay issues here.

You can read a critical response to this article here.

This week, it is fifty years - and an eternity - since the publication of the Wolfenden Report, which began to rip up the laws that turned gay people into criminals. If you had whisked John Wolfenden and his committee by time machine into the Britain of 2007, they would have dismissed the country we live in as a utopian sci-fi fantasia. Openly gay people rising to top of every profession, including the government, army and police, a law banning discrimination against gay men and lesbians, gay people able to effectively get married - and even a Tory Party conference applauding equality for gay people? Nice dream, boys.

But we're there. A generation of gay people born today simply can't imagine the strange world my parents were born into, where gay men were jailed just for having sex. The gay rights movement has been a shimmering model of how a persecuted minority can peacefully appeal to the decency and humanity of the majority, and win.

Yet today, there is one corner of Britain where viciousness and violence against gay people are still endemic. It is a place where 41 percent of gay people are beaten up, and 17 percent receive death-threats. You have been there, and so have I. It's called school - and our playgrounds need a Wolfenden report of their own.

Jonathan Reynolds could have told you why. He was a 15 year-old boy from Bridgend, South Wales, who came out to some of his friends last year. He was bullied and harrassed and threatened as a "faggot" and a "poof" until he couldn't take it any more. So one day, after he sat a GCSE exam where he earned a starred A grade, he lay down on the train tracks near his home. He texted his sister Sam: "Tell everyone that this is for anybody who eva said anything bad about me, see I do have feelings too. Blame the people who were horrible and injust 2 me. This is because of them, I am human just like them. None of you blame yourself, mum, dad, Sam and the rest of the family. This is not because of you." Then a train sliced his body apart.

The bullying Jonathan endured is not unusual. It is the norm in Britain's schools. The word 'gay' is an all-purpose insult, the worst thing you can be called. Earlier this year, the gay equality organisation Stonewall published a detailed study of over 1000 gay pupils, carried out by the Schools Health Education Unit. It discovered that a majority of Britain's gay kids feel so unsafe that they skive off school to avoid abuse. Another three-year study found that more than half consider self-harm or suicide. I get e-mailed by a lot of distressed gay teenagers, and one intelligent, kind 15 year old girl recently wrote: "After it went round the school that I had told my mate I was gay, my locker was smashed up and a dead squirrel was put in it. In every corridor people just yelled at me I was a dyke and a rug-muncher, all that. When I went into my form room everyone got up and moved to the back, including my best friends. The teacher didn't do anything. I told [one of my teachers] and she said I shouldn't have told anyone. I should make it less obvious. They [other pupils] won't get changed [after PE] when I'm there." She used to love school. Now she feels "I can't stand to go in any more."

Homophobic abuse is often ignored by teachers - and sometimes even encouraged. I remember when I was at school a teacher called me "a poof" in front of a class and thought it was hilarious. Stonewall found that while 97 percent of pupils have been told racist bullying is wrong, only 23 percent of pupils today have ever been told by teachers that homophobic bullying is unacceptable. But there is good news in the study too: where there is a clear policy of punishing homophobia, it works. Those pupils in schools where action was taken were 60 percent less likely to be bullied and 70 percent more likely to feel safe. Teenagers might be insecure group-formers, desperate to punish difference, but there is no reason they should fixate on homosexuality as the marker of difference.

Homophobia is not inevitable among kids: they are simply picking up on a nervous ambiguity among teachers, who too often will not punish prejudice for fear of a backlash from bigoted parents. There have been excellent pilot schemes showing it doesn't have to be like this. George Green's School, near where I live in East London, has a tough anti-homophobia policy, in an area mostly populated by recent immigrants with uber-conservative views. Head-teacher Kenny Frederick has faced down homophobic parents and insisted on equality for all her students. If she can do it, any headteacher can.

So how do we ensure there are more schools like hers? The newly appointed Children's Minister, Kevin Brennan, is a decent person and says the right things. He recently told a gay equality conference: "Just as it took several years for racial equality laws to feed into real cultural change where racist language became unacceptable, we need to achieve the same with homophobic language."

But are the government's actions backing this up? In one significant way, they are making it worse. There is one type of school where homophobic bullying is most severe: faith schools. Pupils there are more than 10 percent more likely to be subject to anti-gay bullying, and 23 percent less likely to feel they can tell anyone about their sexuality. I was e-mailed by a 17-year old gay boy at a Muslim school last year who was told by one of his teachers in a lesson that "sodomites should be killed". In the Stonewall study, an 18-year old boy called Matthew said: "It's a Catholic school... and we are told 'gay people will go to hell because the Bible condemns it'... It's horrid, you just want to go and cry at come of the remarks made by the teachers." The government is currently embarked on an expansion of these schools. There is a danger that after abolishing Section 28 by the front door, the growth of faith schools unwittingly reintroduces it by the back door.

So a Wolfenden for the playgrounds would introduce a law, today, requiring all schools to have a tough anti-homophobia policy that can be monitored by Ofsted. If they refuse on the grounds of "religion", shut them down. The Littlejohnian right will howl about "political correctness", just as they howled at Wolfenden's report fifty years ago. Let them. We wouldn't tolerate a school that permits the persecution of black students; why aren't gay students accorded the same respect? How many kids like Jonathan Reynolds need to die texting "I am human" before we protect them?

To support the campaign against homophobia in schools, you can join or donate to Stonewall or Outrage!

I have written some related articles you might want to check out if this interests you: on gay pupils at boarding schools, why Damilola Taylor may have been a victim of homophobia, the epidemic of homelessness among gay teenagers, why I think the seperate gay school in New York for gay teenagers in not the solution to homophobic bullying, why it would help gay kids if some of our footballers came out, and - while we're at it - other reasons to oppose faith schools.

All feedback welcome to johann -at- johannhari.com

In the past few weeks, both the far right columnist Mark Steyn and the far right columnist Richard Littlejohn have responded to my detailed, factual criticisms of their 'writing' with equally detailed, equally factual rebuttals.

Only joking! Instead, they have responded to my detailed, factual criticisms, drawning on hard figures, statistics and academic studies, by essentially calling me a faggot.

After I exposed that Mark Steyn's use of figures is innumerate and that he uses urban legends as the basis for whole books, he didn't defend his figures, nor did he defend his use of plainly fake anecdotes. Instead he wrote:

"I think he has the hots for me. Next time don't be so shy, man. I'd be happy to sing you a couple of choruses of "These Foolish Things"."

(Read the blog entry here.)

Similarly, after I exposed Richard Littlejohn as an outright liar about the money given to asylum seekers and as suffering from a psychiatric obsession with gays, cottaging and lubricants, he wrote in the Daily Mail (sadly, no link):

"HEARTFELT thanks to all of you who have bought Littlejohn's Britain and propelled it to Number One in this week's non-fiction bestsellers' chart.

Many readers have written to ask if I'll be doing any signings. I'll keep you posted.

Special thanks, too, for the glowing reviews and tributes from all my friends and admirers at the Guardian and the Independent, especially the excitable work experience trainee 'Dirty' Hari, who appears to have a Littlejohn fixation.

I think he fancies me."

That's it. That's his defence. Why am I "dirty"? Because I'm gay. That's all. Unable to defend his arguments, he simply points his finger and yells - but he's a fag!

I think that means I won the argument, boys.

Has Britain already had a gay Prime Minister - only a few decades ago? The answer now seems to be yes. Brian Coleman, a Tory member of the London Assembly, finally pushed the rumours into the public domain last month when he said it was "common knowledge" in Tory circles that Edward Heath, Conservative resident of Number Ten Downing Street from 1970 to 1974, was gay.

Coleman claims Heath had to be warned warned by police to stop cottaging in 1955, when he ascended to the Cabinet. There were splutters of denial from some of the old Tory establishment to the allegations. Heath's successor as Tory MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, Derek Conway, snapped: "Ted was absolutely wedded to politics. He didn't have a great deal of personal companionship in his life but there are people who are capable of getting on without companionship."

But people who knew him well said Coleman was broadly right. Matthew Parris, a gay Tory MP-turned-columnist who knew Heath, thinks he "probably was" gay. He explains: "Ever since, as a young MP, I escorted his car into my constituency, leather-jacketed on my motorbike, I used to notice the twinkle in Ted's eye... Ted simply loved male company. He like to be teased, even twitted, by younger men. Women at his table - and there were few - tended to be ignored unless they stood up for themselves."

Yet gay people have been strangely reluctant to embrace the news that Heath was (to borrow a phrase from his arch-enemy, Margaret Thatcher) One of Us. Julian Clary asked: "Must we? Aren't there some grounds on which he can be disqualified? I do hope I didn't inadvertently pleasure Ted Heath all those years ago. Please God, I feel nauseous just thinking about it."

So who was this lost gay Prime Minister? Edward Heath was the first Tory leader in modern times from a poor background. His mother had been a maid in Broadstairs, Kent, and he climbed from grammar school to Oxford into the Tory ranks. He seems to have sublimated his sexuality into obsessive ambition, becoming a champion sailor, a concert-level conductor, and the leader of the country.

At the time, the rival Labour politician Barbra Castle looked at these achievements and said: "We do not know if Mr Heath is a repressed homosexual or a repressed heterosexual. All we can say is that he is a repressed something." He seemed so sexually unusual that his biographer John Campbell records a rumour that swept across London during his Premiership. Every Friday night, it was said, a black limo was pull up outside Number Ten and he would be whisked to Regent's Park. The gates to London Zoo would silently swing open and Heath would be led to the panda den - into which he would descend for a long fuck-session with the Chinese bears.

This ridiculous fantasy nonetheless captures something. Heath seemed to the outside world to be a notoriously cold, odd man. His Prime Ministership is usually considered to be a disaster, since he was forced to turn out the lights in Britain and reduce the country to a three-day working week in the face of industrial action.

But he had one towering passion and achievement: he brought Britain into the European Union, the cause to which he dedicated his life. As a young man, he cycled across Europe, even feeling Hitler brush past him at a Nazi rally where he gaped at in horror. After serving as a soldier in the war, he became determined that the only way to prevent Europe from consuming itself once more in fire and blood was to build a united continent.

This was only one of the issues on which Heath became bitterly divided from the woman who came to dominate the last years of his life: Margaret Thatcher. As PM, Heath was reluctant to promote Thatcher to the Cabinet because he presciently guessed that "if we do, we'll never bloody get rid of her." But he did - and Thatcher knifed him, siezing the Tory leadership from him in 1976. For the rest of his life, Heath famously sunk into "the longest sulk in history", refusing to accept he had been deposed and damning Thatcher (usually for good reasons) at every opportunity. When she finally fell from power in 1991, he said just one word: "Rejoice."

Although he kept it secret, at no point was Heath a hypocrite about his sexuality. He supported liberalizing the country's anti-gay laws. It's true that, as Chief Whip in 1958, he had to sack the Foreign Office minister Ian Harvey in 1958 after he was caught sucking off a 19 year-old Guardsman in Hyde Park - but that was for stupid indiscretion, not his sexuality. If Harvey had been caught performing cunnilingus on a 19 year old girl in a park, he would have suffered the same fate.

But should we care? Does this submerged history matter? Peter Tatchell thinks it does. He says that the gay rights movement has been "fighting a great liberation struggle handicapped by an almost total lack of knowledge of our own past. Our minds are colonised by a straight version of history, where we gay people are invisible. Our existence has been erased from the historical record. Apart from Oscar Wilde, the only gay people who come to attention in the history books are mass murderers, spies, child abusers and men entrapped by the police in public toilets."

Heath probably was not our first gay Prime Minister either. Pitt the Younger was famously attached to a young male friend, Tom Steele, who he would take to Brighton (then, as now, a gay haunt) on long holidays and write fawning letters to him. At the time, people compared Steele to the gay men who had influenced kings. Pitt would go with straight friends into brothels, but never touched a woman. His biographer William Hague - who faced gay rumours himself until he married - says "we have no sure evidence that Pitt was homosexual" but the most likely answer is that "Pitt had homosexual leanings but supressed any urge to act on them for the sake of his ambitions."

Showing that there were gay people in every crevice of history - even at the apex of power - shows how normal and ordinary and ineradicable homosexuality is, and always will be. It's not about "role models". It about our sheer, unexciting ordinariness.

And it's revealing that the people most keen to scorn these revelations about the gay Prime Ministers in our past are the people who would be most hostile to gay Prime Ministers in our future. Andrew Roberts, a far right historian, sniped in the Daily Express that discussing the sexuality of dead figures is "a baleful phenomenon" which "adds to a new terror to death - that someone can be accused of performing then-criminal acts such as cottaging." He insisted Heath was suffering from "a rare for of thyroid complaint" that made him "asexual".

A gaggle of ugly right-wing commentators has declared that Britain will never again tolerate a gay leader. Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph says it is "undesirable" that "political parties or governments should have an unrepresentative number of homosexuals in their upper ranks. As the present Labour administration has demonstrated, it is difficult for ministers to grasp problems affecting the family if you don't have one." Glossing over the bizarre idea that gay people don't have families - does he think we hatch from an egg? - he continued, "The obsessive nature of politics that so absorbs homosexuals may also deny them a sense of perspective, and deny them a hinterland in which to retreat."

Similarly, Bruce Anderson - a colleague of mine at the Independent, who once charmingly called me "an uppity little queer" during a drunken rant - says, "A homosexual who seemed to be a contender for the premiership might be subjected to the most intense scutiny. Though homosexuals may be the beneficiaries of increasing tolerance, this would not extend to an attempt to adopt children. 'Jonny lives with Bob and Jerry' - possibly, but not in Downing Street."

If we want to prove these bigots wrong, we have to show that gay people have always been around power (and everywhere else too) - and we always will be. The only difference is that now we are no longer going to supress our sexuality, as poor sad Ted Heath did, to appease their rancid bigotry.

POSTSCRIPT: You can read more articles by me on gay issues here.

You can send comments on this article for publication in Attitude to marcelo.dossantos@attitudemag.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com