And if we read the letters page of The Daily Telegraph or

And if we read the letters page of The Daily Telegraph, or hear about Baroness Young going on and on and on about sodomising 16-year-olds, or admit the very real fear into our minds that someone, sooner or later, is going to try to blow us up, then we weigh a fear of intolerance and evil against our firm conviction that we have a right to live our lives as we choose, and a duty not to give in to that fear.I was in Soho again on Friday afternoon, oddly; I bumped into a pianist friend and went for a beer with him, again in Rupert Street There were already about 50 or 60 people there at 6pm At about 6.20pm he had to leave to go to a rehearsal. I had to go home – my mate Laurent was coming round for an evening with James Bond and a six-pack on the sofa.”All a bit worrying, this,” I remember saying as we walked down Old Compton Street. “I bet you a tenner it’s Golders Green this week and Earl’s Court next.”We agreed, as everyone had been agreeing all week, that it was going to be Golders Green this week and Earl’s Court next. And then I got on my bike, and cycled off; at about 6.25pm at a guess. If I’d looked carefully, I’d probably have seen the bomber, walking briskly through the elegantly sauntering crowds. Walking away silently, and very fast.That’s the moment where the imagination fails. To take a bomb into a bar, to put it down next to someone chatting, perhaps laughing; perhaps to look at them, and to be able to suppress the universal interest that human beings have for each other, not to wonder about their lives and feelings and thoughts.

Just to put a bag down, and know that in a moment that person will be dead. The imagination will go so far, but not as far as that, and all I can see is a man walking away down the street in the evening sunshine; all that comes to mind, like consolation, is the last line of The Secret Agent. There he goes; the man who thinks he stands for what the newspapers call “the majority”, who certainly agrees with Baroness Young’s moral crusade, who thinks everyone should be exactly like him. There he goes, “unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men”.Of course, I don’t mean to suggest for a single moment that those members of the House of Lords who were campaigning so successfully recently for the right to tell us whom we may go to bed with would be pleased to hear that homosexuals had been murdered.But there is an undeniable continuity of thought between the disapproval and hatred voiced in the debates on the age of consent in the House of Lords and that which spoke on Old Compton Street on Friday night.

Both voices assumed the unelected right to inform us that our lives are worth less than theirs; that they have the duty to protect society from our malign influence. A continuity of thought, too, between the bomber and those newspapers which, over the weekend, saw fit to dwell on the fact that heterosexuals were killed in the bombing, as though they were uncertain, until learning that fact, whether this could strictly be classified as a tragedy. We have come a long way – the Home Secretary Jack Straw’s statements on the bombing struck exactly the right note of concern, unembarrassed sympathy and respect. “Homophobia” has now mysteriously and abruptly joined racism as something all reasonable people may be assumed to deplore; even the politician Alan Clark uses the expression now.At some point, even the newspapers may stop referring to “a known gay bar” as if it were some sort of criminal haunt, talking about gay men as “gays” – a linguistic usage that offends gay men more strongly than almost anything else – and may even start to write as if they could conceivably have gay people among their readership, even on their staff.There are not many of them left; but even a small and dwindling band of small, envious minds can take on the power to disrupt our lives. And what can we do? We can go on with our lives as they were It is not much of a weapon, but it is all we have. I keep going back to my night in the Rupert Street bar, and the half-dozen friends I bumped into – Alan, Yusef, Will, Colin, Giovanni, Laurent – and just being quietly thankful that this time it just missed. It so happens that I didn’t know anyone, as far as I am aware, who was in the Admiral Duncan pub on Friday night, so cruelly chosen because it was at the top of the alphabetical listings of gay pubs; and I have no means of knowing how many familiar faces were there.