A few days ago, after rereading my diary from the age of 13 to 15, I tweeted about its contents: “Every page: ‘I want to kill myself. I hate myself. My life is going to be awful because I’m gay.’” And swiftly followed this up with: “Wish I’d known then what I know now: being gay has made my life fascinating, liberated, immeasurably enriched, meaningful and v v fun.”

Bully for you, you might think. Yet this transformation hasn’t only happened because of changes in the law and culture but for another couple of reasons: I work in the media and live in London. And this is a problem. Our understanding of the daily realities for LGBT people in the UK does not emanate from a 14-year-old in Motherwell, or a still-closeted retiree in Penarth, but from metropolitan professionals depicting gay life from a turret of privilege.

And so we come to a blackout: a London-run media so complacent about the liberal times “we” live in that scant coverage has been devoted to the human rights regression in Northern Ireland, the potential removal of carefully built-up legal protection for gay people.

Shall we start at the top and work our way down? The first minister, Peter Robinson, is backing a private member’s bill, introduced this week by Paul Givan (the DUP member of the legislative assembly), which seeks to introduce a “conscience clause” into equality legislation allowing businesses to refuse to serve gay people on “religious” grounds.

The DUP is the party that opposed the decriminalisation of homosexuality as recently as the 1980s and today continues to block equal marriage, still illegal in Northern Ireland, even after three attempts to introduce it. And its leader is married to Iris Robinson, the former DUP health spokeswoman who said gay people could be cured.

The bill arose as a result of the furore surrounding the Ashers Bakery, which refused to make a cake with an equal marriage message. At the DUP conference last month cupcakes were sold from the Ashers Bakery and a collection was held to help fund its legal costs. Thus, the DUP is the party paying for the right to discriminate, while LGBT constituents will be the ones paying.

Children, in this dark age, already are. Last month a school in Belfast issued pupils with a worksheet about 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, with the following questions: “What do these verses tell us about homosexuals?” “Who else is included with homosexuals?” And, “What hope is there for all these people?”

We know the answer: very little, if the dignity and human rights of gay people are not protected. How, we might ask, can homophobic bullying be tackled when implicitly sanctioned by the school’s own literature?

Such a hostile environment can profoundly affect mental health. The results of a study into the wellbeing of LGBT people in Northern Ireland last year found 47% had considered suicide, 25% had attempted it, 35% had self-harmed and 71% had suffered depression.

The question we are left with then is why the DUP do not, will not, see the connection between the culture they seek to create and the 13-year-old boy sitting in his room, writing in his diary that he wants to kill himself because he, witnessing the laws that do not protect him, and the protection for those who hate him, feels this: for gay people like me there is no future.

• The Samaritans can be contacted on 08457 909090 or at jo@samaritans.org. Help is available 24 hours a day and all calls are anonymous