I have a confession to make. When I read about the United Nations panel’s decision to remove sexual orientation from an anti-execution resolution, I sat down and I wept.

The resolution has contained a reference to lesbian and gay people since 1999. Today, it was announced that this has changed. Other groups are still covered, including those facing persecution on the grounds of religion. But not us. 

According to Pink News, “the vast majority of countries in support of the change were African or Arabic” - ie, those countries with the worst records on human rights abuses against lesbians and gay men, countries where gay people are regularly stoned, flogged and publicly executed.

As I sat there, wiping the tears from my eyes, I was reminded of a night more than twenty years ago, when I came home to my flat in Kennington to find my flat mate Vaughan in floods of tears because the government had just passed a law banning “the promotion of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. It was the first time in living memory that laws relating to homosexuality in the UK had actually gone backwards.

I’ll admit that I didn’t appreciate the significance at the time. I was young, gay, and committed to having fun. It embarrassed me to see a grown man weeping over something so intangible to me as a change in the law. Gay politics meant very little to me then. It took Section 28, and Vaughan’s subsequent death from Aids, to change that. I’ve been a political animal ever since.

It’s strange, isn’t it, how we somehow assume that things will only get better? Especially those of us in the “progressive” West? I have American friends who were genuinely shocked when Proposition 8 was passed. Then again, I’ve met lesbians and gay men from the Middle East and Africa who have told me such horror stories, I’m amazed that they find the strength to keep on fighting.

And it’s for them that I found myself crying earlier. Because what this change in the law says is that it’s okay for homophobic regimes to continue murdering people on the basis of their sexuality. And while it angers me to think that the UN could allow this to happen, it doesn’t affect me in the way that it affects them. 

This is a sad day for the international LGBT community. And a shameful day for the UN.