With this year’s Brighton Pride taking place on Saturday, broadcaster and founding member of Stonewall, Simon Fanshawe, argues the event is about more than gay rights.

Is being gay really that special anymore? Is it in need of special attention, campaigning, focus or even Pride?

Prejudice may no longer be an all-day event. But it’s still an every day event. Kids in school and staff at work all experience prejudice.

But let’s face it, life is a hell of a lot better than we ever dreamed it could be when the Tories banned us from schools with section 28. Or further back when men were sent to jail for being in a gay friend’s address book. When lesbians married, or became nuns or just bit their nails as the agony of their sexual selves turned inwards in denial.

Yes, things have changed. We are in a different situation now, especially in Brighton. And I don’t intend to belittle any harassment people experience or the violence when people are gay-bashed.

Counter-intuitively Brighton’s very tolerance and liberalism doesn’t make the intolerant, tolerant. It pushes them into a corner and they become even more intolerant. More violent.

But the lives of gays, lesbians and transsexuals in Britain have changed dramatically for the better after the Labour years and the generational shift that happened between the late nineties and now. So what’s the next step?

When we started Stonewall, we knew, in the hostile environment in which we were campaigning we had to do two things: we had to find friends - allies who would support us as we’d never bring about change alone. And we also had to find a message that spoke beyond our own self-interest to the good of the society at large. One that spoke to the kind of communities we wanted to live in.

The equal age of consent wasn’t just about gay men, it was about the fundamental principle that people should be treated equally under the law.

Asking whether gays and lesbians should be parents is a meaningless question once you take bigotry out of the answer.

The real debate is about what do we as a society expect of parents and what can we do to bring up children properly? The real issue is about the quality of parenting. What says gays and lesbians are good or bad parents? Ditto heterosexuals? Nothing.

Sexual orientation tells you very little about the brilliance of parenting. It’s just that heterosexuals can confuse the right to have kids with the ability to have kids.

All our battles were won with the support of others. When we tackle bullying, why just tackle gay bullying? Are we in favour of all others sorts? Of course not. So we should make alliances with all those parents and teachers and work out how to stop it in schools.

And the parents who feel uneasy about talking about gays in school? Well when we are there side-by-side with them dealing with the bullying their child might be experiencing for being black, or short or red-headed, they will see that being gay is not the issue, being bullied is.

We need to heed those lessons still. We should still be very wary of being “too gay” about it all, rather than widening the campaigns out so that we do everything in alliance and everything to build with others the wider community we want to live in.

We - Pride, Stonewall, Outrage - can become too gay. Too focussed on what we claim are our needs, rather than lifting our sights to the wider society. And now, the wider world.

With the Commonwealth Games underway, we are so aware that of the 53 member states, 42 of them criminalise same-sex relationships. And every day we read from the likes of Uganda, Nigeria, Russia stories of anti-gay legislation, rhetoric and violence.

We are allies of those LGBT people abroad. And we should turn our attention to them now. But not carelessly. It is complex territory. If governments make aid conditional on the human rights of gay people, gays get it in the neck from opportunistic local politicians.

If we satisfy our own selfish need to feel we are doing something by boycotting vodka, we simply reinforce the rhetoric that Putin and his ilk use to paint us as a self-indulgent Russian-hating West obsessed with homosexuality.

Attacking gays for these people is not always about us, it’s often about their own domestic political agenda. We are collateral damage in the push back against secular human rights.

So when we support activists abroad, we have to act thoughtfully.

Firstly there is nothing special about gay rights. They are human rights, and others excluded – the disabled, the mentally ill, women forced into genital mutilation or marriage – are allies with each other in understanding and fighting the damage that exclusion causes.

Pride ceases to matter when it becomes too gay. It only matters if it’s part of shaping the world we want to live in.

It’s not about sex or love or frocks or leather, it’s about the values we want to see here in our city and in our world.

And we share those values with others across the globe: equal treatment for men and women under the law, an end to poverty, the right to be politically engaged, education for all children - and so on.

In other words: we just want the freedom to live. I am glad it’s not called Gay Pride anymore. It’s a bigger battle now.