Today, a big decision on my sexuality. And in this column the announcement. Something I’ve been wrestling with for months but can see at last that I’m just going to have to come to terms with. So take a deep breath . . . and here goes.

I’m coming out as a post-homosexualist. Forty years (tomorrow) after the 1967 law ending the absolute prohibition of homosexuality, 13 years after the reduction of the age of consent from 21 to 18, six years after the further reduction from 18 to 16, and two years after the arrival of civil partnerships, I have finally become bored with the whole damn thing. Bored, not with being gay, but with talking about it. I blame Tony Blair.

Do cats witter endlessly on about being cats? Do redheads drive us to distraction with their thoughts on being ginger? How many serious comment columns in the editorial pages of newspapers are devoted to the musings of straight men on what it is to be a heterosexual? No, they just get on with it – with being cats, redheads or straights. Such things are for the lifestyle sections of weekend magazines, not rubbing shoulders with the debate on global warming, housing or the terrorist threat.

Fellow-queers: stop moaning. How interesting is any of this to the rest of the world any more? Other groups out there have it worse than we do in Britain. We’ve got the political changes we asked for. Social change will take longer but it’s happening, steadily. Kidding ourselves that we inhabit some sort of a gulag is making it harder, not easier, for the next generation to relax about their sexuality. Let’s remind them that in the whole history of mankind there has been no better, luckier, time or place to be gay than Britain in 2007.

Our main persecutors now are religions – the “faith community”: Islam, Catholicism, Anglicanism, evangelicals, Judaism, Hinduism – but most of our fellow Britons don’t seriously subscribe to any of these superstitions, so why take it out on them? The brave thing now is to take the battle into the cathedrals, temples, synagogues and Rastafarian dives, not the opinion pages of The Guardian.

To the mosques, homosexualists! Post-homosexualists – to the opera!

Anyway, the new sin is smoking. I wonder whether every era possesses general stocks of things like fear and disapproval, whose overall volumes remain steady but which we shift on to new objects as fashions change.

Thus, Soviet communism being no longer appropriate for the role of preoccupying threat, the IRA having gone away, and bird flu having failed to live up to early hopes, we have fixed on al-Qaeda. It would need to achieve about four big explosions a week to match deaths from MRSA and road accidents, but commonplace dangers lack the scare value we crave. Thus too, unwanted pregnancy having lost its power to intimidate, syphilis being curable, and homosexuality having gone out of fashion as a sin, we have lighted upon smoking as our new moral horror.

This particular posthomosexualist thought as much when he walked into Buxton’s beautiful little opera house for a total masterpiece of a performance of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux as this year’s Buxton Festival ended last weekend. My neighbour Roy Hattersley (“When good Sheffielders die,” he says, “they go to Derbyshire”) ends a triumphant reign as festival chairman. But at the entrance to the auditorium was a big sign: WARNING: THIS PERFORMANCE CONTAINS A PERSON SMOKING ON STAGE.

A joke? No. The brief appearance of Sir Francis Drake, pipe in mouth, now requires a public warning. Harrumph.

Harrumphs, however, turned to a more thoughtful noise when my partner and I walked into our local pub to find all seats taken except at a table with an elderly couple whom I’d never seen there before. They were dressed as for a social occasion. I apologised for my scruffy trousers, stubble and frayed collar.

“No, no,” the lady demurred, “for you I suppose suits and ties are work clothes, and you’re off-duty now. But for us this is our night out.

“We haven’t been to a pub for 15 years because of all the smoke. But now there’s no smoking in pubs, we thought it might be nice to try an evening here again.”

I hope they come again. Oh dear, one begins to warm to the new regime in public places. I too, a victim of the moral shifts that steal up on us unawares, have become irritated by smoke.

Funny, because Dad smoked 30 a day and it never used to bother me. It bothered him though, in the end, and he’s dead.

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