The Stonewall dinner left me with one question: why are volunteers so horrible to one another?

I watched the video with some trepidation. Stonewall (the campaigning gay and lesbian equality organisation) had just sent me the YouTube link. This was to a short film of the dinner that Stonewall’s founders attended last year to celebrate the quarter-century anniversary of our existence; and most of us had been there. Now we were but wrinkled reminders of the young revolutionaries we had once been.

So this could have been a rather mellow occasion. We had started the organisation as a defiant response to what came to be known as ‘Section 28’: a small measure that was part of a sprawling local government bill and intended to stop the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools and by local authorities. In trying to mobilise opposition to the measure we’d been encouraged by the sense of purpose we’d found — and by a good deal of public sympathy and support. So we had determined not to let the momentum be lost.

That was 25 years ago and it’s fair to say our cause had succeeded beyond our wildest early hopes. An anniversary dinner could have been the occasion for celebration, reflection, some mutual backslapping and a little dash of discreet self-regard. That’s what anniversary dinners are for; and that’s the impression conveyed skilfully by the video: cordial, uplifting and faintly worthy.

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But, oh my goodness, that isn’t the dinner I recall. The whole thing bristled with submerged hostilities. I won’t bore you with them, they’re too tedious for words, they don’t matter, and anyway I played some part in stirring them. Suffice it to say that when I accused a colleague I actually like and admire of gassing on for too long, there was a small explosion. We both calmed down and climbed down but the incident (beautifully excised from the video) was indicative of other tensions — not all of which I understood at the time — beneath the surface.