Yesterday, Stonewall published a report, Serves you right, based on a survey on the experiences of lesbian and gay people. Apparently it was the first statistically-significant survey of its kind, surveying 1658 people of YouGov’s panel of 115,000. (I was one of those surveyed, by the way. YouGov, here’s a hint for free - we have civil partnerships now, we can’t get sacked for being gay, heck, we can even serve in the army, so you really don’t need to preface the question with “Some people might think the following questions to be of a personal nature”. We’re grown-ups, and we can cope with you just asking which team we bat for).

Anyway, even if the survey was the first of its kind, it was really rather bland, to be honest. Most people still know that the Tories don’t really feel very comfortable with the gays (Boris gave some rather wonderful proof of that the other day). The extent of homophobic bullying is still depressing. Discrimination, prejudice and the perception of it still deter lesbian and gay people from using public services and getting involved in their communities - particularly anything where lesbian and gay people might come into contact with children.

The bit that particularly interested me was about the gays and politics. Apparently between 60 and 70 per cent of gays think they’d face barriers to selection as a Labour parliamentary candidate or council candidate, and about ninety per cent for the Tories.

My experience is that it’s not been an issue for local party members, people in my ward, or councillor colleagues of all parties or staff of the council; it’s been an issue for commenters to this blog (notably here) and for the anonymous writer of the political column in the Oxford Mail, who is wont to insert the description “lefty lesbian” in front of my name, as if I were some early-eighties GLC throwback (though s/he’s got a bit better recently). What I couldn’t do is put up with the sheer homophobia Conservative wannabe-MP Iain Dale experiences in any comments thread on his blog which even touches lightly on homosexuality. And I recognise that my experience, in a liberal-minded city with a youngish Labour group and an active local party is probably not the norm.