That is not sex, he said. The teacher had just shown a series of sex education videos and asked us what we thought. I’d raised my hand and said they were good but did not mention gay sex. I was 11.

That is not sex, he said. It was 1988, the year a new law was enacted that forbade local authorities and teachers from “promoting homosexuality”. Today is exactly 30 years since that law (which was not repealed until 2003) came into effect. It was so vague as to muzzle everyone working in schools from mentioning gay people. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic.

In the confusion and furore surrounding Section 28 (often called Clause 28) of the Local Government Act 1988, teachers – those we entrust to prepare the young for the world – became mute through fear of contravening it. Pupils like me did not know at the time that teachers had been prohibited from talking about homosexuality, because they had been prohibited from talking about homosexuality.

This would be the only almost-amusing irony. We did not know it, but we felt the absence. My generation did not know how many others would feel it too. Or what the silence would do.

At the time there were demonstrations. There were lesbians abseiling into the House of Lords and disrupting a BBC News studio to protest against the law. Ian McKellen, Michael Cashman, Lisa Power, and others founded Stonewall to fight it, now the biggest LGBT rights group in Britain. These were the adults trying to protect children like me. The public war between them and the politicians proposing this clause is clear, concrete, and well documented. The private battles of the children affected is not.