At the reception after the civil partnership ceremony in my play, Clapham Junction, Will (played by Richard Lintern) tells the guests how he and Gavin met one summer’s night sixteen years before on Hampstead Heath. ‘But now,’ he says, ‘we’ve stepped out of the shadows and into the light, declaring our love for all to witness.’ Although this was cut from the film in the last few days of the edit, it stands as a simple statement of fact: that in the past few decades, huge progress has been made in society’s stumbling acceptance of its large gay minority.

I was brought up in Birmingham in the Fifties and Sixties, yet had a relatively easy time of it as far as my sexuality was concerned. I can’t remember ever having suffered at the hands of bullies, and by the age of fifteen I was enjoying sex with boys and men. This was about a year prior to the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalised homosexuality, but our law-breaking libidos weren’t deterred.

I arrived in London in the Seventies. At that time there were still a few gay establishments, in upper rooms around Soho, I seem to recall, leftovers from a more repressed age where you’d have to ring a doorbell to gain access. But these were fast being superseded by the brazen cockiness of clubs such as Heaven, a regular haunt which, on many nights, in so many ways, lived up to its name. Gay London, with its clubs, cottages, commons and heath, was a playground. Then in the 1980s, with a sickening, deadly thud, Aids brought the party to an end.

It took several years, and much pain and grief, for gay society to regroup, but regroup it did, with perhaps more confidence and a more positive outlook than ever before. The appetite for excitement tinged with danger prevails once again, to the extent in some quarters of even shunning the notion of safe sex. With the advances in HIV/Aids treatment, undreamt of in the mid-Eighties, and the great legislative strides that have been made towards equality since the 1967 Act (the gradual equalisation of the age of consent, the repeal of Section 28, the Civil Partnership Act), together with a less covert presence in the media, there is no doubt that we have come out of the shadows and into the light. All would seem to be rosy – and there are some in the gay community who resent any suggestion to the contrary.