LIFE often looks bleak for gay teens. Reports in the newspapers and from government and gay-rights outfits suggest homophobic bullying is rife. A large and growing collection of mostly American online videos, known as the “It Gets Better” project, reassures young gays that their lives will improve after they leave school. Yet a new study suggests things are already getting dramatically better.

Mark McCormack, a sociologist at Brunel University, spent a year with 16- to 18-year-old students in three schools—an ordinary comprehensive, a tough college dominated by working-class youth, and a religious school. His new book, “The Declining Significance of Homophobia”, describes an atmosphere of affection between male students both gay and straight, who no longer feel they need to act like sport-mad brutes to be accepted by their peers. He meets a bisexual boy named Harry who comes to school dressed in make-up and women's scarves without worrying about being beaten up.

Mr McCormack says nobody would have dreamed of coming out at his school, where he was closeted in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Vicious anti-gay language was the norm, he says. Pupils who graduated a few years ago from the schools he studies say the same thing, suggesting behaviour has changed only recently. Admittedly, some pupils still use the word “gay” to express disapproval—but they apply it to things like homework, and it is rarely a dig even when directed at people. Among these boys homophobia bore the same stigma as racism.

Even the glut of media attention on bullied gay students represents progress of a kind, Mr McCormack believes. “Twenty years ago there wouldn't be articles in the Daily Mail,” he says. Parents of harassed gay children used to be too ashamed to speak out. Now some loudly condemn bullying and demand better protection at school. Yet Mr McCormack is keen to counter claims that gay pupils are always destined for a hard time. He argues that it is wrong and counter-productive to harp on about the dangers gay teenagers face, if it prevents many from coming out of the closet.

“It was a different world 15 years ago,” confirms Ruth Hunt of Stonewall, a charity, recalling her own trials as a lesbian in secondary school. In the last year alone there seems to have been a “subtle but seismic” shift in young men's attitudes, she says. Alex, a recent school-leaver, recalls little trouble socially as a bisexual, although he says gay friends often had problems with their parents.