AOG
Interesting article, but I don't think the author came to the same conclusion as you.
This section is especially prescient:
"Section 28, forbidding the "promotion" of homosexuality, which gagged teachers from discussing it at all, was in effect from 1988 to 2003, but its shadow loomed for years after. To grow up gay in the Eighties, Nineties and part of the Noughties was to be the great unuttered, one's existence unacknowledged by those in loco parentis, muzzled by fear and law, unable to help or validate.
Add to this an epidemic of homophobic bullying that still pervades, and where as recently as 2012 (according to a study by Stonewall) 99 per cent of school children hear "gay" used as a pejorative. The majority of gay pupils report being bullied – 60 per cent of whom say that teachers who witness this do not intervene.
But the erosion of self-worth is both subtler and more panoramic than these obvious markers. It is compounded by a pressure to conform to gender roles while being pushed into a protective self-made closet – preventing truthful, intimate bonds among peers – amid a heteronormative society that validates little about a gay person's identity. As a minor, the message from every angle is clear: you are not welcome and you are not safe."