A pardon for Britain’s persecuted gay men represents an important nod to justice, but it somehow sticks in the craw. How can it not? Pardons imply an act of forgiveness for wrongdoing, not absolving the innocent of unjust guilt. Crimes and wrongdoing were committed not by men damned for who they were attracted to and who they loved, but by the state. If forgiveness is to be considered, it is the persecutors – not the persecuted – who should be begging for it.

I can hear the criticisms of this argument before they are even uttered. This was a different time, a different age, and it is wrong to apply today’s values to the past. There should now be gratitude at the government’s generosity, not least given the granting of legal equality, not just to gay and bisexual men, but to other LGBT people, too.

It is difficult to empathise with these arguments. In 1945, 800 men were prosecuted for homosexuality; a decade later, the number had surged to 2,500, with four out of every 10 of them jailed. People at the time knew it was wrong: including, to their credit, politicians and intellectuals such as Clement Attlee, Isaiah Berlin, Bertrand Russell and Barbara Wootton, all of whom formed the Homosexual Law Reform Society in the late 1950s.

The misery inflicted by this persecution is still poorly understood and appreciated. Alan Turing, rightly, has become the cause celebre. A genius whose contribution to the war effort against Nazism may well have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and yet he was persecuted, chemically castrated and driven to suicide. If they did that to war heroes, what hope for anybody else.

Lives were wrecked; people were humiliated; they lost their jobs; they were ostracised by their families; many lived lives of fear, misery and shame; they felt the anguish of rejection by their own country; their relationships were destroyed. With the horrors of such persecution, Turing was far from the only victim to take his own life. It has taken so many decades to pardon those whose lives were destroyed – some who still live today.

That’s because the struggle for LGBT equality has not been one of the powerful suddenly, of their own accord, becoming more enlightened. As the African American statesman Frederick Douglass pointed out in the 19th century: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.” The struggle for LGBT rights was a case study of how courage and determination from below – rather than generosity and charity from above – drives social change. Indeed, it was a difficult, courageous, often miserable struggle met with powerful, often vicious resistance. As the campaigner Peter Tatchell points out, even though homosexuality was partly decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967 – though not for another 13 years in Scotland – convictions for same-sex behaviour surged fourfold in the years that followed.

Those who campaigned for equality were poofs, perverts, deviants. When straight allies in the Labour party stood alongside them in the 1980s, they were castigated by an uncompromisingly bigoted press as the “loony left”. The Conservative party positioned itself as a political firewall against LGBT emancipation, even introducing the first new piece of homophobic legislation for centuries in the form of section 28 in 1988. The legal emancipation that came under Labour was the product of a long, difficult struggle by LGBT activists – some of whom are noted by history, most forgotten.

The legacy of persecution by police, politicians and media alike still looms over us

It is fashionable now, particularly among those who resent LGBT equality, to claim that the struggle is over. We gave you equal legal rights, did we not? We’ve even pardoned those prosecuted for their homosexuality. Where is the gratitude? The legacy of persecution by police, politicians and media alike still looms over us: the damage inflicted on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Despite the transformation of attitudes because of the work of LGBT activists, LGBT people are still exposed to homophobia and transphobia from the earliest of ages. A society that still fails to accept LGBT people as genuine equals causes much higher levels of mental distress among LGBT people, along with its grimmer symptoms: alcohol and drug abuse, even suicide. The government slashes funding to LGBT services and charities, and it deports LGBT people to countries where they are not safe.

Neither triumphalism nor gratitude are the right responses to the pardons. They may undoubtedly be a source of justified vindication to those still alive who were persecuted, who endured lonely years of hatred and rejection, and finally have some official recognition of the injustice they suffered. But the homophobia that underpinned those persecutions has not gone away. Even now, young teens coming to terms with who they are internalise shame because of the failure of society to accept them properly. The damage will continue for many decades.

The correct response to these pardons is to pay tribute to those who struggled, and to learn from their courage to finish what they started. No gratitude, no triumphalism. Only optimism that injustice can be overcome, and determination to defeat it.