I still played my old records but, at the same time, dipped my toe into unfamiliar musical waters. The resulting chimera of a collection caused eyebrows to be raised: “Lou Reed! Billy Joel!”

(I would shrug nonchalantly.) “You don’t look the type.”

A further surprise came some time later when I became friendly with a gay man who, I had been told, was “very like me”. On my first visit to his bedsit, I looked at the posters on his walls and felt curiously at home: Carol Channing, Dorothy Squires ... and, poking out of his record shelf, a familiar sleeve. When he suggested putting some music on, like the true connoisseur that I was, I gave a one-word answer: “Judy.”

We went from Ms Garland to Liza Minnelli to Ethel Merman and so on. My friend was delighted that I knew all the lyrics to a host of musicals that had closed before either of us was born.

I learned that my friend and I shared a heritage that I had found despite the horrors of growing up gay in Oldham.

Then along came the pernicious effects of Thatcherism, “Clause 28", James Anderton (the homophobic Chief Constable of Greater Manchester) and later, AIDS. I became a hardened gay activist and swapped Ethel Merman for Tom Robinson.

When I was asked by Roar Material Theatre Company — sadly, now defunct — to write French Paste, I was still bridling at the incredible injustices I saw all around me and fondly considering myself to be Manchester’s answer to Howard Brenton. It was only at the read-through, when my colleagues began laughing, that I realised that I had written a comedy (honestly!). Later, the play was to be done again with Michael Cashman as Stephen. Michael, who is now an MEP, had just come out of Eastenders, having shocked the nation with soap’s first gay men’s kiss. In real life, he combined integrity and bravery with a laser-sharp impersonation of Eartha Kitt and so embodied the man I wanted to be when I grew up.

I had played Stephen myself during the original run and so Michael’s performance brought me some objectivity. I experienced that familiar feeling when my characters begin to take on a life of their own: Tom and Stephen were parts of myself metamorphosing into two, very different, people who had a life outside my imagination. The play’s politics were still relevant and Tom’s more universal demands for self-affirment despite all opposition promised its longevity and a wider audience.

This is a new version of the play, re-written to accommodate the time that has past. Nearly twenty years on, the battles have largely been fought and won. Today’s young gay men prefer Kylie to Judy, Lou Reed is played on Radio 2 and my camper recordings would be valuable antiques were it not that the CD versions are available (Readers’ Digest recommend them as an ideal present for Grandma). My play, which in the nineties I considered to be “dated”, may now call itself a “period piece”. I could ease up on the agitprop and get down to the necessary task of fixing it in its own time. I recalled the storms of 1987 and realised that the recurring theme of The Wizard of Oz had at long last found its cyclone. I used this and other, sly, little images from Oz and then began to pare away the parts of the script that time had made redundant. Pam came in from offstage; Geraldine was demoted from a television star to a wannabe; Stephen was able to relax a bit and Tom ... Well, what could anyone ever do with Tom?

Tom and Stephen’s marital strife can be seen as a metaphor for any kind of domestic upheaval.

Politically, we can look back – gay and straight –and see, as Mr Sondheim put it, “how we got there from here.” However, we must guard against complacency; prejudice still exists, not just for gays and lesbians, but for all minorities.

After one performance of French Paste, a woman told me that her twenty-three year-old son had chosen my play as a suitable prelude to telling her that he was gay. Magnanimous, maternal and unintentionally patronising, she declared, “I liked your play and, after all, you’re just people like everybody else.” As soon as his mother went to the lao, the son downed a stiff gin and sang a snatch of Get Happy. His mother arrived back and caught him at it. She smiled indulgently, giving him the courage to risk a quick Bette Davis quote.

If his mother had ever wondered why he’d never brought girlfriends home to tea, she need only have looked at his record collection ...

Richard Gallagher