Why I will never be converted to gay marriage

I am queer – an-old-fashioned term with which I am more comfortable than gay, which seems a silly and unsuitable word for my predicament. I have always been queer, my first enlightenment when I was eight. I have never lied about it, never denied it, but I did learn to dissemble, which is why I think of it as a predicament, a menacing situation.

At school, 70 years ago, it hardly mattered until we were in the Upper Sixth and authority was thrust on some of us, but National Service would have been impossible had the army known – and it was while I was in the Army that I was made terrifyingly aware of what could happen were I ever foolish enough to be open about my homosexuality. Sixty years ago, on March 24 1954, the 20th century’s most notorious trial for homosexuality concluded with the imprisonment of Lord Montagu, his cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers, and his friend Peter Wildeblood.

The offence was, of course, homosexual activity, but the trial was conducted so obviously from the high moral ground of bigotry and prejudice that homosexuality itself was in the dock, reason, common sense and natural justice abandoned, the letter of the law triumphant. The severity of the punishment, however, the notoriety and disgrace that ripped apart family and friends as tough to bear as the months in gaol, had unexpected consequences. It proved to be the tipping-point into a long and very slow change in the attitudes of society that, six full decades later and almost to the day, gives homosexual men and lesbian women the legal right to enter into marriages.

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