Every weekend we’d go out in cabs to some rich kid’s party where girls were assaulted by boys. There were so many times, I can’t remember them all. The richer the boys and men, the more obvious their impunity. For all the ridiculous rules designed to instil some kind of British schoolhouse discipline and academic achievement, nobody took seriously the rape culture at the heart of private school life.

Part of what underlies this debate is that the Yes campaign for marriage equality in 2017, in its most formal organised form (under the banner The Equality Campaign), emphasised LGBTIQ equality in private family life, rather than broader public life. The campaign quite explicitly decided not to defend Safe Schools, gender diversity, or to confront the homophobia and transphobia stirred up by the No campaign.

Over the past three years, a series of raids against and arrests of LGBTQI people have been conducted throughout Indonesia by police and vigilante groups. The populist electioneering cycle currently taking place is only worsening the situation. One of the most confronting anti-queer raids to date took place on 21 May last year in Jakarta, at the men’s-only Atlantis Gym & Spa.

In a piece written for Guernica, Lydia Yuknavitch talked about ‘the small violences in our daily lives’, and I couldn’t help but liken it to the queer experience. Small daily violences committed against queer people are so invisible to those in positions of power and unexamined privilege that they are rendered implausible. This is why we need marriage equality – not in a year, not next election, but now.

Remembering Tyrone Unsworth, the thirteen-year-old student who died in Brisbane last week.

‘That’s the issue with bisexuals’ says my girlfriend, jokingly. ‘Double the choice, double the chance of cheating. You should be scared.’ She’s joking, of course. She’s bisexual, I guess; I don’t usually feel a need to express it so simplistically. She’s mocking the dialogue that goes on even in liberal circles. But she’s not offended as such. Like me, she recognises the trade off. Given the dialogue around bisexuality – that bisexuals are less real, more flippant – the homophobia directed at you can feel somewhat less real, less harmful.