As more gay people come out, tolerance will spread

PHILIP LARKIN was only half-wrong. Sex didn’t begin in 1963, as the poet joked; for a hefty minority of Britons it was four years later—legally, at least—when Parliament nixed the law prohibiting gay sex. In this age of rainbow flags and pride parades, it is easy to forget how few lesbians and gays could be open about their sexuality until relatively recently. One who was, the journalist Peter Wildeblood, was “no more proud of my condition than I would be of having a glass eye or a hare lip”. Two years after decriminalisation in England and Wales, the Stonewall riots in New York popularised a term for this: coming out.Since then, the closet has burst open. Actors and the characters they play are openly gay. Leo Varadkar, prime minister of Ireland until June, has a male partner; Serbia’s prime minister is a lesbian, as are the mayors of Chicago and Bogotá, the Colombian capital. Yet coming out remains a pivotal moment of self-recognition for gay teenagers. Thanks to the internet, they are finding the means and the confidence to do so in more places than ever before, and at a younger age than in previous generations (see ).