Flynn - Good as you: from prejudice to pride, a gay British history

In 1984, the pulsing electronics and soft vocals of Smalltown Boy became an anthem uniting gay men. A month later, an aggressive virus, HIV, was identified and a climate of panic and fear spread across the nation, marginalising an already ostracised community. Yet, out of this terror would come tenderness and 30 years later, the long road to gay equality would peak with the passing of same sex marriage.

Paul Flynn charts this astonishing pop cultural and societal U-turn via the milestones that effected change from Manchesters self-selection as Britains gay capital to the real-time romance of Elton John and David Furnish. Including candid interviews from major protagonists like Kylie, Russell T Davies, Will Young, Holly Johnson and Lord Chris Smith, as well as the relative unknown individuals crucial to the gay community, we see how an unlikely group fought for equality both front of stage and in the wings.

This is the story of Britains brothers, cousins and sons. Sometimes it is the story of their fathers and husbands. It is one of public outrage and personal loss, (not always legal) highs and the desperate lows, and a final collective victory as gay men were to be finally recognised, Good As You.

Paul Flynn has worked as a journalist for the last 23 years. He began writing at City Life magazine in Manchester and is currently the Senior Contributing Editor at Love, Features Director at Man About Town and a columnist for Attitude and Grazia. He has previously been a contributing editor and writer at i-D, Pop, Dazed, Fantastic Man, The Gentlewoman and GQ Style and has written for the Guardian and Observer, Sunday Express and the Sunday Times newspapers. He lives in London.

For Dave

I was sitting in the basement of a coffee shop in Soho, London, waiting for a celebrated and garlanded rent boy from the parish. It was 2010, and Greek Pete had been the subject of a recent documentary film, following a year in his life. I was to interview him for the Dutch gay magazine BUTT. A Chinese man was slumped on the next table with a seeping paper cup of tea beside him, sleeping for the duration of what turned out to be a quietly riveting conversation.

I learned so much that afternoon, most alarmingly about how much it costs to have someone killed, a tale Pete told in relation to a friend of his in the same profession who was worried for his safety, as he had a famous MP as a client and his story looked like it was about to go public (it never did). Pete had not long since given up his life in prostitution and was thinking about returning to the education hed abandoned when he started his career. Hed started reading philosophy again and was knee-deep in Platos Republic, prompting something of an early-life crisis about the meaning of what hed been doing, why and how it had all happened and what the consequences might turn out to be. Crisis is probably the wrong word, actually. It was more of an evaluation. Pete was a deeply wise fellow. Young men whove seen a lot of life often are. Part of coming to terms with being gay, he suggested at one point, is accepting that all your previous belief systems collapse. You are not accepted in normal, functioning society. So what is my function? I took that question and I ran with it.

In the 45 years of my lifetime so far Britain has fluctuated between the wildest extremes of rejection and acceptance when it comes to gay men. Weve fallen in and out of fashion like hemlines. One minute it was clobbering us over the head with truncheons in public lavatories, the next it was Nick Grimshaw waking up the nation on Radio 1, Gok Wan talking about frocks on Channel 4, national social-media mourning for Pete Burns, apologies to pensioners for putting them in prison and musicals about Alan Turing at the Royal Opera House. This being Britain, I suppose we were always going to take the wonky route.

I was having a drink with a straight couple Im very fond of in 2014, the year it looked like the equal-marriage bill would pass through parliament, the last piece of statute to cement equality for gay men and women. One of them asked how I felt about it. Under a broad lens, of course, it felt brilliant. Why wouldnt it? Who wants to be unequal? But under a more microscopic glare it took me deep into the realms of a truth Pete hit on, one that I hadnt thought about for a while that strange transition that happens in a gay man of my ages life, from feeling like an enemy of the state to being its friend. The thought lodged and I couldnt rid myself of it. How weird was it to have lived a short life with these odd parentheses wrapped around it? To have a lifes experience right up to the point of becoming unquestionably middle-aged pivoting on the acceptance of people youre never likely to meet and the temperature they set toward your kind of folk in law?

Look, Ive lived a pretty gay life. I went into the manic testosterone recesses of male post-pubescence in 1984, the same year Smalltown Boy and Relax came out, and I actually clocked the major acts of social significance in both songs. Theyre records I cant hear now without feeling like the boy I once was from the vantage point of being the man I never thought Id properly be allowed to be.

I went to my first gay club at 16. I met the first gay man I knew dying of AIDS at 17. Not unrelatedly, that year was the last I ever said no to the question are you gay? I had my first boyfriend, not a secret, an actual one I told friends about, at 18. I read all six volumes of Tales of the City at 19, in between taking full advantage of the strange transition of my home city turning from Madchester to Gunchester to Gaychester. I had my first appropriate boyfriend at 20. I went on holiday with him to an eastern European capital city for the first time at 21. Because the sensation of being in love with someone of the same sex who I actually wanted to tell the world about felt so unequivocally ace and so completely alien, I behaved absolutely appallingly to him. I went to Trade for the first time at 23. At 24, I met an airline pilot in a club who took me to New York for the first time two weeks later. We danced at 4am in a dungeon close to the Chelsea Piers to Junior Vasquez playing an 18-minute, pots-and-pans remix of Get Your Hands Off My Man, just because we could.

By the age of 25 I had written my first feature for national gay magazine Attitude, about the filming of the first episode of Queer As Folk. I was 27 when the first gay man I knew to kill himself did so. I met my familys big musical hero Elton John at 30. I went to my first civil-partnership ceremony at 33. I got my first mortgage with a boyfriend that year, too. I interviewed the first Oscar-winning actor to play a gay role at 34. (It was Heath Ledger and he was absolutely amazing. I was offered ten minutes on the phone with him during the publicity run for Brokeback Mountain and I replaced the receiver an hour-and-a-half later).

I met Dave, the love of my life, at 36, walking up Upper Street, the site of Britains first ever Gay Pride march. I met my first gay MP at 37, introduced to me by the gentlemanly Newport West Labour minister with whom I share a name, Paul Flynn, in a bar at the House of Commons. I went to my first gay bar in Beijing at 39. When I was 42, a really lovely vicar who was marrying our friend Polly offered his Wesleyan chapel for the purposes of gay marriage if Dave and I ever wanted to avail ourselves of his services.