Last week, it was revealed that a 67-year-old man faces deportation to Malaysia because Home Office officials, and a tribunal judge, refuse to believe he is gay. Yew Fook Sam, known as Sam, came out two years ago and spent 10 months in Harmondsworth immigration removal centre. He arrived in the UK in 2005 after his wife found out he had been having sex with ladyboys in Thailand and left him.

The Home Office has suggested the fact that Sam does not have a boyfriend raises suspicions about the legitimacy of his asylum claim, leading to a rejection of his claim. His lack of sexual partners lent weight to their suspicions.

Let’s get one thing out of the way very quickly. Having a partner does not maketh the homosexual. It is perfectly possible to be a virgin, and be gay. Sexuality is about so much more than whose bits go in where. It’s about love, lust, romance, kinship and friendship. It is a multifaceted and complicated thing that goes far beyond a propensity for Kylie and blowjobs (though those things are also great). That someone who has been forced to hide themselves for the majority of their life might not immediately be found in a dark room, popper burns around their nostrils, having sexat 9am on a Sunday morning really shouldn’t be a complex concept with which to grapple.

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That we are still having this argument, still having to spell out the various complexities that are woven into our sexualities – particularly in relation to someone who has been forced to be closeted for most of their life, having grown up in an institutionally homophobic society in which it is illegal to be gay – shows just how far we still have to go.

But I’m not sure I’m surprised. Just a month after Sam lost his final appeal, the Home Office was forced to bow to public outrage and abort its attempts to deport Kenneth Macharia – a gay rugby player who was threatened with removal to Kenya country where gay sex is banned.

Sam and Kenneth’s cases are not one-offs. They are part of an endemic culture of distrust, of callousness and xenophobia, that is rampant within the Home Office. A culture instigated by Theresa May, and one that has only become further entrenched by successive home secretaries. In 2014, during May’s tenure, an Observer report revealed that LGBT asylum seekers were “routinely humiliated” as they were asked a series of deeply personal questions about their sexual practices. The report commissioned to investigate the Home Office’s handling of LGBT asylum claims found that more than 10% of interviews contained questions of “an unsatisfactory nature” while in about 20% of interviews claimants were stereotyped.

In 2017 official Home Office guidance to LGBT people being deported to Afghanistan was to “pretend to be straight”. In 2018 the Guardian found LGBT asylum seekers are being routinely failed by the system, while government data showed that the number of refused LGBT asylum claims had surged, with 78% rejected in 2017.

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We are a country with a rich and textured history of exporting anti-sodomy laws to countries across the world, only to change our mind about gay people, and then use the very laws we implemented as a way of demonstrating how backwards those countries are. Over and over again the right utilises the protection of LGBT people from intolerant newcomers as an argument for stricter immigration controls – yet when it comes to protecting some of the most vulnerable in our community, they are the ones buying their plane tickets home.

For LGBT people within our immigration system, the outlook is bleak. But we must remember that this goes far beyond simple, good old-fashioned homophobia. If the Windrush scandal has taught us anything, it’s that at the heart of this government’s noxious immigration policy lies a determined and entrenched xenophobia. In arguing for people like Sam and Kenneth, for people from the LGBT community, we must not fall into the trap of separating out LGBT and non-LGBT migrants as “deserving” and “non-deserving”. With every day the desperate need for an overhaul of our immigration system – one with humanity at the heart of it – becomes clearer and clearer and we can’t allow the creation of two-tier sympathy when we fight for the rights of individuals. If LGBT people are to be protected, then the system must be made just – and that means justice for all people, regardless of their sexuality.

Sam’s case must be the catalyst to fight for a fairer system for all of those in need of our help, safety and refuge.

• Ben Smoke is a journalist and activist