In a way, I found the old homophobia of the 80s/90s preferable to today’s. At least its proponents were upfront about why they wanted to stamp us out. Today’s homophobia comes wrapped up in ‘be kind’ rhetoric and uses LGB in that infernal construction ‘LGBTQ+etc’ as a Trojan horse to further the aims of, largely heterosexual, trans and ‘queer’ progressives who similarly wish same-sex attracted people ill. They’ve even co-opted the old slur, ‘queer’, which was the last thing gay men like me and uncounted others heard before the ‘queer bashers’ of yore put the boots to us in the 90s and before. I work in a university and have discovered that ‘queer theorist’ academic colleagues, to whom university mangers seem in thrall, feel quite free to proclaim the new homophobia in research seminars, doctoral student presentations etc. There are now not one but two months devoted to ‘celebrating’ the LGBTQ+etc ‘community’ (in fact, no such thing exists) in which the trans and ‘progress pride’ flags, the latter signifying the literal penetration of gay and lesbian people’s rights, lives and bodies by the sinister TQ+ movement, fly alongside that of Ukraine, insolently implying some kind of equivalence. I’m older than Andrew, on the wrong side of 55, but like him find it incredible that gay and lesbian people are having to fight the same battles all over again. I’d thought, after we’d won our equality, that we could go about our lives as full contributory citizens like everyone else and put the period of activism behind us. How strange that we’re now being traduced and abused once more, this time not from a conservative direction, but from the allegedly ‘progressive’ left.