This is the title (at the moment) of my latest book and the reason for the long blogging silence. It’s an oral history based on the lives of 20 or so gay men over the past 100 years and again it’s a collaboration with Steve Humphries, who is making a Channel 4 documentary to accompany it (as I like to think of it, though it’s really the other way round).

Like the Aberfan book, it had to be written in a matter of weeks. What made this possible was the power and lucidity of the stories the book and doc are built around. Stories like Alex Purdie’s…  Alex was an out gay man in the 1930s when ‘out’ and ‘gay’ had different meanings. He got a taste for frocks and lipstick from the age of 5 and spent much of the war in both as part of an army concert party entertaining the troops in the Far East.

His story, and the many others of ‘ordinary’ gay men in the book remind us that gay rights have been hard-won since the 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised sex acts between men (women who love women have never been criminalised) 50 years ago. We’ve come far, especially since the late 1990s, but with bumps along the way like AIDS and Section 28 which set the cause back years.

Trump, Brexit and the rise of the far-right in Europe are bad news for all minority groups – which make handy targets for hatred in troubled times. We take nothing for granted: hard-won rights, whether they benefit us directly or not, have to be defended.

Not Guilty: Queer Stories from a Century of Discrimination published by Biteback. Book and Channel 4 documentary out June 2017 (probably).