MY heart was beating as if it were trying to escape my body. My mind was racing and hands shaking. All from what would usually be the comfort of the sofa. Was I ready? Ready as I’ll ever be, I told myself. I was standing at the greatest watershed moment of my life and was acutely aware of it. I was about to come out publicly as gay to more or less everyone I knew, all at once, through a post on Facebook.

I had already talked to my parents and closest friends and word had spread to the close family. This was designed to finish the job, ensuring everyone heard it from the horse’s mouth, not on the rumour mill, and more than a little self-indulgently I admit, as catharsis after 20 years too many of trying to ensure no one would ever know.

I touched the ‘post’ key, threw my eyes shut as adrenaline, dread and relief filled me, then slowly opened them to assess the damage from the G-Bomb I had dropped. I anticipated that it would garner attention and elicit praise from my young, liberal peers, but I hadn’t realised the response would explode like a giant confetti canon at Pride.

It turns out a lot of people are refreshing Facebook at three in the afternoon at the beginning of February. With 480 likes, a thread of congratulatory comments a mile long and an inbox inundated with more heartfelt messages expressing the same, I was overwhelmed, overjoyed, and filled with exactly the love and support I needed to close the door behind me for good on the ghastly closet and get on with living. I even received a hand-written letter from a university friend. I still have it somewhere.

A few weeks later, a straight guy at university with whom I’d rarely spoken made a point of telling me he was so moved by my coming-out post, made four years ago tomorrow, he was punching the air at his desk. I was incredibly touched as I set about navigating the dating scene as a gay man for the first time, keen as I was not to waste any more time. Because I did feel dreadfully behind my friends, something I later learned I was wrong about. That misconception is a common feeling, gay or straight.

Coming out is a journey, and it’s one children begin to undertake from a young age and face alone. Before I could feel the slightest attraction for anyone, I was immersed in a society where all around the message is that opposite sexes attract. Before you can even conceive of coming out, you realise you’re not how you’re “supposed” to be and walk unknowingly into the closet where it feels safest. Everyone’s experience is different, but there are certain commonalities.

Some are most particularly afraid of how their friends will react, while often it’s family. Catholicism is part of my family fabric, and I worried about how readily my parents would go through the cognitive gymnastics often needed to reconcile the two. While my family is English on one side and American on the other, the reality is most families in Scotland have a religious influence, practicing or not, that helps inform instinctive attitudes on the transgression from “the norm” that is being LGBT.

Eventually I realised that just as it was a journey for me in learning to embrace and love my gay self, so too is it a journey for our parents, wider family and friends. My parents, Paul and Lisa, had concerns my life would be harder, focussing on my welfare, particularly in those first few weeks while at university after breaking the news on Facebook. At the same time they could at last begin to reimagine how the future would play out.

For many families, having an LGBT member does not fit in neatly with their hope of appearing at once perfect and – rather contradictorily – normal. The gossip at the school gates far outlives a parent’s years standing at them, and many bend over backwards to keep up appearances. But the picture painted in programmes such as Modern Family, with its gay members, interracial marriages, divorce, and adoption has long been much closer to reality.

But sexuality is far from the only area in which notional normality eludes us, or at the very least, eluded me. This next anecdote forms a key part of the emotional roller-coaster that was that immediate post-coming-out period but I haven’t previously shared it beyond a few friends.

On a trip to China in the summer that year, I hosted a party in my hotel room at a remote conference venue for the British, American and Canadian students I was with on the first night of a week-long stay.

After everyone else had left the room, I found myself alone inside with a male student I’d met that day but had barely spoken to. He crossed the room towards me and began kissing me. He pushed me on to my bed and lay on top of me. I told him to stop, thinking an unambiguous message was needed. Whenever he freed my mouth to breathe, I eked out a “stop”. Sometimes I alternated it with “please stop”, as if manners could charm me out of the situation.

I pushed upwards to no avail. I was never going to be able to bench press his body weight. Not least when I was so drunk. As I realised how defenceless I was, and he moved to undress me, I knew the fear so many people, predominantly women, have experienced before me.

As his weight on me eased for an instant, I slipped out from under him, ran for the door and collapsed in the hallway as it shut behind me.

“What happened?” an American boy who was still outside said to me.

“Nothing”, I said panting.

“That did not look like nothing”. The words hung in the air as I let them go unanswered.

For six days none of us left the complex as there was nowhere to go. The attacker (the word jars to write, and yet what is the alternative?) had the good grace not to come to the next party the following night.

A week later in central Beijing, we all went clubbing to celebrate his birthday.

I dredge up this memory because the simple and happy story of a boy who came out to rapturous applause was only ever going to be part of that tale. I do not know what form others’ earliest sexual experiences take, but I would imagine a greater number resemble mine than they do a Disney fairy tale. But I could be wrong. Sadly I think most parents and grandparents know very little about what is really going on in their young loved ones’ lives.

So where do we go from here?

It is our shared moral imperative to fathom others’ experiences of the world and to be amongst those dragging society forwards. I’m under no illusion that the average Scot reading this is free of all misgivings about having a child who is LGBT. But all LGBT children will be highly perceptive to any commentary on these issues. The passing comments. Do you remember everything you said out loud about gay marriage legislation when that was debated? From the comfort of your living room, how do you react when gay characters or gay kiss scenes appear on TV shows?

It is not acceptable to assume a child is or will be straight. Firstly because we all know the fact is that not everybody is straight. In a 2015 YouGov survey, 23% of respondents placed themselves somewhere other than zero on a scale of zero to six where zero is exclusively heterosexual and six is exclusively homosexual. Among 18-24-year-olds it was half.

The conclusion I draw from this and the age group discrepancy is that far more people are LGBT, possibly bisexual, than they let on and certainly than older generations are prepared to acknowledge about themselves.

When half of young people surveyed say they aren’t entirely straight, basic maths says it’s time to stop assuming your children or grandchildren are straight.

But beyond this it is incumbent upon every one of us to embrace the likelihood of gay, bi or trans loved ones, whatever personal feelings one might have, because of the occurrence of mental illness amongst LGBT people, particularly in the closet, which I can only call an epidemic. Nine in ten young trans people have thought about killing themselves and 72% have self-harmed at least once. That isn’t an alarm bell you hear ringing; it’s an air-raid siren.

A key catalyst for my coming out was the realisation my past bouts of depression would most likely only recur with increasing duration and depth possibly one day ending in suicide if I didn’t. The decision was made.

What comes next after that decision certainly doesn’t go as well as hoped for everyone, with a quarter of homeless young people being LGBT. Far more progress is needed to eradicate the rejection LGBT people face from their families.

While in the legal context we have made great strides since the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and the social movements of that era, these statistics make me despair at my straight peers’ complacency, seeing our more liberal generation and gay marriage and appearing to think we’ve pretty much arrived at the society we need to build.

When talking in the office about the cover photoshoot for this piece, one gay colleague older than me made a point of saying how much he admires my openness in talking at work about being gay. I was very appreciative, but it reminded me that while my generation is likely the most consistently visible and outspoken, we stand on the shoulders of generations whose struggles were far greater than young LGBT people in the West today will ever know on a societal level.

As recently as 1998, people in Britain were arrested and convicted for having gay sex, the cornerstone of any gay rights. A group of men, the Bolton Seven, were convicted under the Sexual Offences Act 1956, since only sex between two men – not three or more – had been legalised in England and Wales in 1967. But Scotland did not even see that most basic change until 1980.

Thankfully Scotland’s slow start to LGBT liberation was turned around when around 2014 it gained attention worldwide for having the “gayest” parliament and party leaders of any country.

In researching Britain’s march away from rampant and state-sanctioned homophobia, two quotes stood out for me. At the Conservative Party conference in 1987, prime minister Margaret Thatcher said: “Children who need to be taught traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.”

One year later she brought in legislation that would deny a generation of LGBT children any form of recognition that their sexuality or gender identity was valid at school in their most formative years. After the removal of “sodomy” laws, this was two steps forward, one step back.

Then in 2010 the Supreme Court ruled two gay men from Cameroon and Iran had a right to asylum in the UK. With striking echoes of Thatcher’s language 23 years earlier, Lord Hope instead said reading the judgement: “To compel a homosexual person to pretend that their sexuality does not exist or suppress the behaviour by which to manifest itself is to deny him the fundamental right to be who he is.”

Real change does happen. We have seen it in our own lifetimes as we see it in these quotes. But it is not handed to us. Queer history is a story of fighting for our rights, in courts and in the streets. Pride is one such protest, and the LGBT community must continue to question the genuineness of companies all too keen to exploit our struggle and achievements as an opportunity for virtue-signal advertising.

And just as the movements of the 20th century began with trans women of colour, white gay men like me must remember the raised status we have won is worth nought without trans and minority ethnic members of our community seeing those gains.

It is just as important, though, that the fight takes place in the home – for those who feel able – and at the pub, club and office desk – calling out our friends and families for the small indignities and inequities which chip away at that fundamental right to exist and holding them to the highest standards we deserve, not just for our own sake but for that of their future children, nieces and nephews too.

One challenge on the road to coming out is letting go of the safety and unquestioned esteem of straightness. But it is a safety and esteem maintained through exhausting pretence and denial.

In doing the cover photoshoot for this story, we used nakedness to recreate some of the vulnerability of that Facebook post and place it alongside a stoic pride. But if a vulnerability is perceived, it was scarcely felt in that moment. For all the energy once spent trying to be straight, I wouldn’t swap being gay for love nor money.

Four years out, I’ve had one loving boyfriend, introduced him to my family, dated, taken up sports, earned two degrees, and at my aunt’s invitation I hope to go over for New York Pride this summer. A bit further along in my journalism career I want to marry and adopt children. In other words, at this point in time, I’m exactly where I want to be.