What a fabulous Pride weekend: beautiful weather, beautiful people (especially that man in a short sequinned dress and six-inch heels staggering down our road) and a beautiful atmosphere.

Come dinner time on Saturday and as a family we were discussing the day round the kitchen table.

It turns out our sons were annoyed that roads had been closed, that the velodrome at Preston Park wasn’t available for a bike ride and that the seafront was jam-packed with Pride people.

Then came their killer question: “Why are they making such a fuss about being gay?”

My husband and I gasped in amazement, as it is within both of our lifetimes that male homosexual acts were still illegal in this country.

Our children, on the other hand, have grown up in a city acknowledged to be the gay capital of Great Britain, with friends who have two mothers or two fathers, with teachers who are openly gay in the classroom, where local shopkeepers are married men, and celebland is packed with gay idols, including Cara Delevingne, Miley Cyrus, Graham Norton, and two of BBC Radio 1’s most influential DJs, Nick Grimshaw and Scott Mills.

We also have a Prime Minister who ushered in legislation to legalise gay marriage, and it’s perfectly normal for male and female politicians to be gay, something unthinkable not so long ago.

So our children are aghast wthen we tell them how it used to be.

Before 1967, when the Sexual Offences Bill decriminalised homosexual acts between two men over 21 in private, homosexuality was considered by mainstream society as a horror, an abhorrence, a sickness, a decadent and chosen perversion.

It was only in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder by removing it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Until then, the “cause” of homosexuality was considered by many to be a conscious choice and therefore it could be expunged from the mind.

Various methods were used to “cure” homosexuality, including aversion therapy, where electric shocks were sent to the male genitals when a patient showed a positive response to images shown to him.

In America in the 1940s, families forcibly committed homosexual relatives to psychiatric facilities where they would be subjected to castration, torture drugs, shock therapy and lobotomies. And astonishingly, it wasn’t until 1992 that the World Health Organisation removed homosexuality as a formal psychiatric diagnosis.

History is littered with tragic cases of homosexual intolerance: in 1835, two men, James Pratt and John Smith, were hanged for having sex in a private room, notable only because they had were last two men to be executed for buggery in Britain.

In perhaps the most famous case, the writer Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for two years with hard labour in 1895 for gross indecency with Lord Alfred Douglas.

Quentin Crisp, the gay writer and raconteur, was rejected by the army at the outbreak of the Second World War because he was deemed to be “suffering from a sexual perversion”.

And Alan Turing, mathematician and computer scientist, whose life was portrayed in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, killed himself in 1954 after being given female hormones as an alternative to prison because of his homosexuality. In fact, the 1950s were a particularly bad decade for gays: while in America Joseph McCarthy was rigorously investigating homosexuals who worked in its foreign policy offices for fear they would fall victim to blackmail by the Reds, a state-sponsored crackdown on homosexuals in our government was being carried out by Scotland Yard, with up to 1,000 men a year imprisoned.

It was followed by a purge of society gays.

Today, homosexuality continues to be considered a cause for prosecution and execution – just look at what Isis does to suspected homosexuals.

Even here, in liberal Britain, and in slightly less liberal America, gay people are still attacked, murdered and persecuted.

I still find it shocking that 25 years ago, when I worked on a magazine, my boss, a man, explained that his father, a military man, would never be able to accept his son’s homosexuality and so whenever his parents came to visit, my boss would have to erase all traces of his partner from their flat.

My husband also has a friend who is gay and can never tell his father, even though his mother knows, a family secret that can never be out in the open.

This generation will die out and greater tolerance will replace it. But the fact that this generation divide still exists is why we still need Pride.

In many ways, Pride in Brighton has lost its novelty value – but in a good way.

My children and their generation take gayness for granted and that’s how it should be.