MY high school’s motto was “veritas”, but “just say no” was the institution’s real line. When it came to sex, drugs and adolescent facial hair – we received an abstinence-based education at Hutchesons’ Grammar. No sex, no drugs, no bristles. There were almost no gays or lesbians to speak of in the curriculum either. The heterosexuality may have been compulsory, but the repression and hypocrisy the school did its best to cultivate was universal.

I can still remember the community police officer who stumped up to class with a cabinet of curiosities in my final years at the school. The ringmaster of a Victorian freak show, the cop brought with him a catalogue of stories of all the gruesome and terrible ways folk have killed or been killed under the influence of controlled substances. There were lurid tales of LSD beheadings. Unexpurgated photographs of the manky bedsit where some poor sod coughed up his collar bone under the influence of heroin. Shock and awe. Horror and disgust. “Just say no.”

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This approach assumed our heads buttoned up backwards. It assumed we couldn’t tell the difference between getting hooked on smack and smoking the occasional joint or dropping E. I doubt the presentation persuaded a single kid not to try any of the drugs which were offered to them in the years that followed. It was education as grand guignol: brief, crass, one-sided, sensational, designed only to horrify.

The same morbid spirit informed our early 2000s sex education, which was split between biology labs and classrooms. In the first setting, we learned about the reproductive cycle of frogs, flowers and a selection of the smaller, sexually less-suggestive mammals. This was interrupted occasionally by watching our anxious substitute teacher trying to persuade what seemed to be the slipperiest condom in Christendom to fasten neatly around a boiling tube. There were probably useful life-lessons here – insights into the shared frontiers of sex, and vulnerability and embarrassment – but these were all lost on us at the time. As Terry Pratchett says, “the gods gave people a sense of humour to make up for giving them sex”.

The young women in my year were spared this lesson. Instead, they were herded off into another room to discuss the mysteries of the female menstrual cycle. Our teachers, for whatever reason, decided this was information which the boys were best left in ignorance of. On any substantive reckoning, this wasn’t really sex education. It was disembodied reproductive education, limited to what happens in a biological sense when sperm cell A meets the cell wall of egg cell B.

Suitably briefed on the biology, the school felt it was also necessary to give us some social context to the interactions of our gametes. To this end, we were instructed by a dragon lady on the evils of intercourse. The dragon lady had a developed a – perhaps well-founded – hostility towards the male sex’s capacity for ethical and responsible decision-making.

As I remember, she counselled the young women against fornication on the basis that “we all know who’ll be left holding the baby, don’t we girls?” But the risks of teenage pregnancy were only the beginning of the horrible, suppurating, leaking, crisping, detaching, infecting world of sex this ghoulish woman had in store for us.

From some obscure corner of the 1990s, the dragon lady dug up an elderly American VHS. The star of this dated production was a blonde woman of middle age, whose formidable roll call of sexual partners left her crying “full house!” in

venereal disease bingo. Like the drugs briefing, the gist of this miserable tape was that sex was dangerous and only inclined to leave you sick, unhappy or nursing a screaming cot alone.

I’m not arguing that kids should be told sex has no consequences. But the school’s morbid fixation on all of the potential downsides – and complete failure to say anything positive about sex – served only to pathologise our teenaged bodies and relationships and desires – gay, straight or haven’t the foggiest.

The institution conflated the idea of sex education with a crash course in the epidemiology of sexually transmitted infections. When the only time you talk to school kids about gay people is to talk about HIV and Aids, something has gone tremendously wrong.

This pitch seemed ludicrous at the time. It seems even more ludicrous in retrospect. But I can’t help remember it in a week when the Time for Inclusive Education (Tie) campaign has won significant concessions for an inclusive LGBTI curriculum in Scotland. A more reflective sex education is, obviously, only a small part of this wider agenda. But the education Tie has been fighting for was posted missing during my whole time in high school. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, it was still the “love that dare not speak its name”.

Just over a year after I was born, Margaret Thatcher addressed her party’s conference in Blackpool. In 1987, the Prime Minister’s speech ranged across the Tories’ recent general election victory, the fight against crime, defence policy, inner cities – and education.

Mrs Thatcher invoked the “plight of individual boys and girls” abandoned to the care of “hard-left education authorities and extremist teachers”. The examples she gave of this domestic extremity? “Anti-racist mathematics” as opposed to good old-fashioned algebra. “Political slogans” allegedly being taught in place of the Queen’s English. Oh and “children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay”.

The Prime Minister concluded that “all of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life”. Mrs Thatcher meant business. Her administration introduced section 28 to the Local Government Act of the next year. The legislation provided that local authorities “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or promote “the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

In 2000, MSPs backed the repeal of these provisions in the teeth of organised resistance by Brian Souter, relentlessly amplified by the Daily Record and finding parliamentary voice in the Conservative Party.

Some people emerge from the historical record with credit. Others less so. Wendy Alexander charged into the breach. Back at the turn of the millennium, the First Minister argued in Holyrood that section 28 “was not, is not and never will be about protecting children”. Nicola Sturgeon said: “It is simply about discrimination; it is about isolating people in one section of the population and labelling them as unacceptable in a way that would have been unimaginable had it concerned any other minority in Scottish society.”

Dipping back into the Holyrood archive, we find the Scottish Conservatives railing against the Scottish Executive. Invoking “impressionable and vulnerable” kids, Annabel Goldie described the elimination of this discriminatory measure from the statute book as the act of an administration “zealously obsessed with the politically correct, rather than the result of mature and measured consideration of an issue that is profoundly sensitive and potentially hurtful to many people”.

In 2000, little consideration appears to have been given for kids whose governments mandated a restricted discussion of their inclinations, lives and futures. It was only “political posturing, political correctness and juggling with parents’ emotions”, according to the Scottish Tory head. This was a shameful line of argument then. It remains a shameful line of argument now.

But things change. Thanks to the work of Jordan Daly, Liam Stevenson and many others – 14 years after I left secondary school, 18 years after the discriminatory provisions of section 28 were rolled back – a little veritas will finally be entering all of Scotland’s classrooms. Small mercies.