Young people who discover they are gay still have a terrible fear of isolation and rejection by family and friends if they come out It can still cost you your job. That’s why I was disappointed William Hague said that if he were homosexual he wouldn’t have stood for the Tory leadership. It was a pity he felt obliged to say that.”The fact is, most gays are still in the closet. We’re the only minority without visible natural leaders, without our visible equivalent of a grand rabbi. In the homosexual community the leaders are the strident ones, people with nothing to lose.” Such views have earned him the scorn of modern, in-your-face activists as a trimmer, even an Uncle Tom But Grey is unrepentant “They don’t understand what it was like in the Sixties You couldn’t have shouted and waved banners back then. Europhobes and homophobes alike will shudder, but three separate cases currently before the European Court of Justice may prove decisive in the gay lobby’s campaign to reduce the age of consent, protect against discrimination in the workplace, and end the ban on homosexuals in the armed forces.Ultimately, however, not only laws but attitudes must change.

True, crusading independent backbenchers such as Leo Abse are a breed close to extinction, and the extent of Mr Blair’s reformist zeal may be doubted – certainly, he will not want to repeat Bill Clinton’s 1993 fiasco over gays in the US military. “Anything we can get to a vote, we’ll win,” is the bubbling prediction of Angela Mason, director of the gay and lesbian pressure group Stonewall.And should Westminster fail, there’s always Strasbourg. If parliamentary time is granted, repeal of “Section 28″, the infamous 1988 provision barring local authorities from “promoting” homosexuality, looks another sure bet. Even so, a promised free vote should bring a majority in favour of lowering the homosexual age of consent to 16, aligning it with the law for heterosexuals. A majority of the population would love to bring back capital punishment, and a substantial minority would outlaw abortion. But apart from pathological queer-bashers, no one seriously believes homosexuality between consenting adults should once again be deemed a crime.

And the moment for another reformist push may be ripe.Labour is back in power, its ranks filled with young and idealistic MPs, just as three decades ago. “The public debate is more open, but there’s an awful lot to be done In many ways, the Sixties were a better time than today. The drug culture was in its infancy; the atmosphere was gentler and more idealistic.”But at least William still commands the support of the public, however unenthusiastic. Hence, according to Antony Grey, leader of the lobby for reform in the Fifties and Sixties and now elder statesman of Britain’s gay community, a piecemeal, inconsistent approach by successive governments.

But despite an ever noisier, more confident gay culture, the practising homosexual remains suspect. There may be gay MPs, gay ministers and mainstream gay chic, but according to the latest British Social Attitudes survey, almost two-thirds of the population believe homosexual sex to be wrong, a proportion basically unchanged for 15 years.Then there is Britain’s quite peculiar attitude to sex, a strange, tabloid- driven cocktail of prurience and puritanism that leaves the rest of the world in uncomprehending mirth, as it lurches from puerile titillation to supercharged moral outrage at “sex monsters on the loose” – as often as not, homosexuals. John Vassall, of course, was a straightforward blackmail victim – but for others, such as Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean, dissimulation and subterfuge were seamless. If one is forced by society into a secret sexual existence, then how much easier to embrace an equally secret political loyalty? The second oldest profession still flourishes, but rarely these days for reasons of sexual orientation.For the rest, however, the legal follow-through has been meagre. In 1994 the age of consent for homosexuals was lowered from 21 to 18. For them, the best solution would be licensed male brothels, “run by respectable persons, with charges strictly controlled …

such as I have occasionally patronised in New York and San Francisco”. Or, he might have added, the underground urinal in central Moscow, whose merits Driberg once pointed out to the exiled Guy Burgess.Indeed, one unarguable beneficiary of William has been the security of the realm. Given the climate of the time, small wonder so many British spies earlier this century were homosexual. “The passing of the sexual offences act, welcome though it was, really made no difference to the problems of the lonely and the promiscuous” (in other words, himself). But at the third attempt, almost a decade after the 1957 Wolfenden report first urged that homosexuality be decriminalised, a Bill was passed. Admittedly it was imperfect, and most gays would prefer to stay in the closet. But no longer did prison automatically beckon, or the unanswerable gouging of a blackmailer.In his lurid autobiography Ruling Passions, which is studded with cameo accounts of his own hasty, illicit couplings, Driberg makes but one, melancholy, reference to the measure.