I once walked out of a pub with a friend who joked: “I’m an eastern suburbs Jew, I think I know a bit about anxiety.” I couldn’t help myself: I’m an Outback Queensland raised gay, welcome.

It was a joke, and not, as many things often are.

This morning I wrote a news report based on two interviews I did with two Islamic imams I spoke with on Friday, June 17, 2016. One imam said the punishment for being homosexual is death. The other, more cautious, said he’d “have to check”.

Perhaps I was naive but I did not expect these comments to be defended by people, some of them straight, who admonished me for ignoring the Christian right, our politicians, other church leaders in my 800-word article.

Ignore them? They have been my atmosphere for almost every one of the 29-years I have been alive. To be born gay in this country, even today, is to grow up in an environment in which your growth is not assured. The character of those around you, as a child, is overbearing. This is the case for better or worse.

For precisely seven years in my late teens and early 20s I spent most of every day in fear. I received messages filled with hate in my hometown. I had friends try and convert me. They were not malicious. They just didn’t understand. How could they? At my 18th birthday drinks in my first proper job as a cadet at a Gold Coast newspaper I wore a pink sweater. And then agonised over whether I would be found out. Disowned. Banished. My father does not “agree with my lifestyle”. Thankfully, my mother is a hero.

I am no longer afraid in the same way, though the anxiety has never left. You grow crooked in this world. That’s the way of it. I had my first panic attack at the age of 21, after I had come out, while attending a party with high school friends in my hometown. There have been many since. I don’t talk about it because, really, that’s for me and not for you.

I am almost 30 and I am still boxing at shadows that sometimes materialise. The hate-filled faggot yelled on the street by drunk men, the commentary dripping with either disdain or hurtful ignorance. The word faggot is a gun shot. I hear it everywhere. I remember it. You never forget the sound of a gun shot.

There are fault lines in your soul, to be gay in this world.

It taught me other things, things that I often think I could not have learned growing up where I did. Compassion for others on the outer. To be careful with my words. To have consideration for where people have come from, for what they have seen and heard, how their families treated them. I know the things that set like concrete if they happen early enough. People are accountable for their actions but their pasts, too, should be held accountable for creating the people that take the decisions they do.

Yesterday I calmly listened as an imam told me unequivocally that the Islamic law punishment for homosexuality is death. I was gentle and curious in my questioning. I asked how the process worked, after he explained there is no way religion allows an individual to just go around “bashing and killing people”. It wasn’t until the interview ended that I realised how deeply desensitised I had become to such forms of hate. I’ve never spoken directly with someone who so resolutely believes acts of homosexuality should be met with death. Sure, plenty of angry people have told me I should kill myself but that’s old hat now.

Now, I am a reporter. We all hear things we would rather not. I take no issue with it. But then came the people who were angered by my story. Angered by my paper’s stance on other issues.

This is not the first time I have been held to account for working at The Australian. Gay men have recently taken to calling me a traitor for working where I do. One said the LGBTI employees, all of us, are morally culpable. They said look at what the paper is doing to “our community”, as if I had never been a part of it. I would find no dramatic tension working in a newsroom where everybody thought the same things.

I am proud of my reporting. Proud of the time I broke the story about the Catholic Church’s intervention in corporate support for marriage equality, proud of the stories I have written about equality in all its forms throughout my career. And when I spoke to the imam it did not occur to me for one second that I should keep it quiet. To what end?

To ignore Islam’s role in homophobia is paternalistic and a form of privilege. Who cares about the thousands of gay and lesbian and queer Muslim kids? Do we only care about the Christian ones? I’m not Muslim, so that is the extent to which I should speak of it. Others have and will continue to have that conversation.

I resent explaining myself through the prism of my own sexuality, which is as much a part of me as my elbow is. It might sound like a sob story but it is my story. I resent being told by people how to qualify and rank hate. Being told that my contribution to equality can only be measured after I overcome the perception of the handicap of my employer.

Not by my design, my life has been ruled by my identity. And it continues to be shanghaied into the work I do as an adult. This is worth the price of admission, to write about things that matter.

At a certain stage, you become used to the noise.