It was like coming up for air. When Queer As Folk was first televised, 20 years ago, I was a closeted 14-year-old who was, frankly, desperate not to be gay. Life is hassle enough, I thought. Any thoughts of same-sex attraction were met with an oh-God-please-not-this panic. A vision of a supposedly normal future life – wife, kids – was being snatched away, with no clear desirable alternative. Being gay seemed to me to be a mishmash of the threat of Aids, not being “a man”, dying alone, and a lifetime of misery and rejection.

I grew up in the centre of Stockport, and Queer As Folk was set just seven miles away, on Canal Street (“Anal Street”, my peers would snigger), the heart of Manchester’s LGBT community. It may as well have been a different universe: I lived in a suffocatingly laddish, heterosexual world (the Facebook wall of one of my then best friends is today rife with Tommy Robinson videos) full of jibes about being gay – taunts I would indulge, in order to fit in. It wasn’t for another six years, after a silent unrequited love for an evangelical Christian and several relationships with girls, that I came out.

It’s difficult to overstate how courageous or revolutionary Queer As Folk was. This was only just over a decade after the introduction of section 28 – the first new homophobic legislation since the 19th century – that meant LGBT issues were not discussed by a single teacher at my school, save for one occasion, when my class was told that anal sex was bad for you. Several anti-gay laws were in place: a different age of consent; the right to discriminate in goods and services; the banning of same-sex adoption. There were no civil partnerships, let alone same-sex marriages. In the 1980s the chief constable of Greater Manchester police had declared that HIV victims were “swirling around in a human cesspool of their own making”.

The year Queer As Folk aired, just 27% of Britons thought “sexual relationships between two adults of the same sex” was “not wrong at all”, according to the British Social Attitudes survey“always” or “mostly wrong”; nearly half the population thought it was .

Queer As Folk 2. Photograph: Channel 4

It remained an era of unapologetic media gay bashing: in the year Queer As Folk graced Britain’s scenes, one front-page Sun splash asked: “Are we being run by a gay mafia?” Less than a year earlier, the first openly gay footballer, Justin Fashanu, hanged himself in Shoreditch.

Watching Queer As Folk, then, was an all too brief refuge from a repressively homophobic world: a TV series that revolved entirely around a group of gay friends living their lives. This was the first time many gay teenagers saw same-sex affection, let alone gay sex. I had to sneakily watch it on an old 1970s TV set in my brother’s bedroom, perched right next to it so I could flick over the channel if anyone walked down the corridor.

It’s difficult to see Queer As Folk as anything other than an unapologetic fuck-you to a hostile world. When gay people had previously appeared on TV screens, they were either sexless caricatures to be laughed at in a “the gays are hilarious but I wouldn’t let my kids near them” kind of way, or the subject of tragic storylines. There was a notable exception – the drama This Life aired two years earlier featured gay and bisexual characters, and included what were, back then, shockingly explicit sex scenes – but that’s all it was.

So the defiance of Queer As Folk was liberating. At the end of the first episode, the two main protagonists – Stuart and Vince, both in their late 20s – drive the closeted teenager Nathan to school in defiance of his playground abusers in a car spray-painted by homophobic thugs with “Queers”, the scene played out to the tune of Suede’s Beautiful Ones. For gay men, of all ages, who had been brought up in a society that made them feel like deviants and objects of pity, this was a TV show that unapologetically showed love and sex.

Predictably, the media still treated LGBT rights as something contested and up for debate. “Gay TV drama gets mixed reception,” declared the BBC, adding that while “some welcomed” the show “as a sign that the UK is becoming a more tolerant society”, others “condemned it as further evidence that the country is sliding down a slippery slope towards permissive immorality”. On BBC Breakfast News, the journalist Peter Hitchens denounced the show as propaganda aimed at persuading the public “that homosexuality is normal behaviour”.

Twenty years on, all the anti-gay laws are gone, and – thanks to the struggle and sacrifice of LGBT activists – attitudes have undoubtedly been transformed. If only I could have told my 14-year-old self that being gay was not incompatible with a happy existence. Far from it. But this remains a profoundly homophobic society, one that inflicts terrible damage on LGBT people from the earliest age, which they internalise with lifelong consequences. Trans people today are suffering the same “moral panic” and vicious media campaign long endured by gay and bisexual people. And that’s why, with exceptions – such as the 2015 drama Cucumber, also from Russell T Davis, the creator of Queer As Folk – there is a depressing lack of similarly bold LGBT dramas. Two decades later, LGBT liberation remains unattained, and our lived experiences do not have the media representation they deserve.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist