Thread by @simonjedge

A little story about Stonewall in the pre-lunacy years, told to me at the time by a friend who worked there. I've been thinking about it in the past few days and I think it's illuminating.

It must have been around 2014, when the Cameron/Clegg government had surprised everyone by legalising same-sex marriage. This, remember, was something Tony Blair insisted would never happen: he repeatedly said civil partnerships were a good thing but marriage was a step too far.

Stonewall themselves had got into a tangle on the issue. Since there was almost no practical difference between civil partnership and marriage, they badly underestimated the appetite for marriage proper. An aggressive campaign by Pink News made them look remote and out of touch.

They eventually realised their mistake and helped steer same-sex marriage through Parliament. It gave lesbians and gay men complete equality before the law in most of the UK (except Northern Ireland), and it was clear that Stonewall's work as a law-reform lobby was done.

(Readers of my novel The End of the World is Flat may notice parallels with the fictitious Orange Peel Foundation, which has nothing left to do once it persuades Google to stop using the outdated Mercator Projection in its world maps.)

At this point, various senior figures – within Stonewall and in the wider community – started brainstorming to explore what could come next for an organisation that had exceeded even its founders' wildest expectations.

My friend told me about one bigwig in particular: a well-known figure who had played a major role in the community in the 90s/00s and had been rewarded with a title. This person collared my friend at a social event, saying he had a great idea for Stonewall's next campaign.

Now that gay men could get married, he said, there should be a fresh look at the nomenclature of titles to correct a new anomaly: if a straight man got a knighthood or a peerage, his wife would automatically become 'Lady'; but if a gay man got one, his husband remained plain 'Mr'

Boo-hoo, you may say. You may also object that the anomaly wasn't new. If a woman is made dame or baroness, her husband remains 'Mr'. (That's one reason they made Denis Thatcher a baronet, so they could talk about Sir Denis and Lady Thatcher rather than Baroness and Mr Thatcher).

You may further add that the solution is obvious: stop giving honours in the form of titles before the name. Just put letters after people's names – OBE, OM, CH etc – which only attach to the recipient and not the spouse.

Those arguments were obvious, but my friend didn't immediately raise them. Instead my friend just laughed, thinking the bigwig was taking the piss out of himself. This fight had been about liberty and fundamental human rights, not about coronets and baubles.

To my friend's embarrassment, however, the bigwig wasn't laughing. He was dead serious. The newly be-baubled grandee really was bothered about getting a title for his hubby.

Why am I relating this story? Because it's the perfect example of where Stonewall had got to. They had achieved virtually everything and the only legal anomalies still remaining were absurdities that affected 0.00003% of the population. (I think that figure is roughly right.)

For the community itself, this should have been cause for great celebration, and for many individuals of my generation who remembered life in the old days, it really was. But if lobbying paid your mortgage, you obviously had a problem. You had to find a new cause, quickly.

So you can see how attractive it was when an entirely new group of people came banging on Stonewall's door asking to be teamed with the LGB community, with a long shopping-list of demands. Not just that: they came with a new Pandora's box ideology, devised in US universities.

(Another parallel with The End of the World is Flat: Joey Talavera, tech billionaire and flat-earth crank, who hires the Orange Peel Foundation to spread his batshit ideas by stealth.)

In the real world, this new ideology said oppression based on same-sex orientation was old hat. There were new oppressions, new genders, new identities that could be added, their open-endedness defined by the symbol '+' which would be added to the community's name for itself.

That '+' spoke volumes. It effectively said: 'Don't ever think about winding yourselves up. You can go on and on for as long as you want, making up new minorities and oppressions among impressionable people whose sense of victimhood will pay your salaries for ever more.'

The friend who told me the story about bauble equality didn't stick around for the madness. But some prominent people from yesteryear are still around, ploughing a furrow that looked worryingly barren for a while and then suddenly became waaaay more fertile.

They were there. They know. But because they see themselves as saviours rather than cynical careerists, they've convinced themselves this is the Good Fight. It really isn't.

If pre-lunacy Stonewall had campaigned for honorifics for the spouses of knights, dames and peers, it would have been (rightly) a laughing-stock.

Better that, though, than the chilling pronouncements of Stonewall 2.0, whose CEO says people with exclusive sexualities – such as preferring the same sex to the opposite sex – should examine their 'societal prejudice'. For shame.