Ben Summerskill: Nice to have pride. Shame about the bias that lingers

The Pink List reveals the progress the gay community has made - and how far we have to go

In one of its rare attempts to feature ordinary gay lives in documentary programming, the BBC recently suggested that whenever a group of homosexuals gather together everyone is quickly undressed and on drugs. Yet when the Mayor of London held a major reception to launch EuroPride last Tuesday, 500 people stayed fully clothed for hours. By late evening, even Ken Livingstone hadn't started on the crystal meth.

One of the starkest retorts to the BBC from The Independent on Sunday's latest Pink List is an evident 21st-century truth. Not that all gay people are the same, but that they're hugely different.

A similar list executed 50 years ago might have featured Sir Norman Hartnell, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Noël Coward, subject to their not being imprisoned for their inclusion. (After yet another Metropolitan Police witch-hunt against gays in the early 1960s, the Queen Mother observed to a dining companion: "If they go on like this, we'll have to go self-service.")

Half a century later, for every high-profile gay couturier there's a corporate accountant; for every entertainer there's a multimillionaire entrepreneur. But anti-gay sentiment certainly isn't dead in modern Britain: the List is unable to feature a single one of our talented lesbian and gay sportspeople. The reason they don't come out is that they know how much prejudice still festers.

Six weeks ago, it emerged that the Archbishop of Westminster had sacked a press officer after discovering he was gay. The Cardinal, who had claimed in The Times four days earlier that he opposed discrimination against homosexuals, was forced to pay £23,000 in compensation for unfair dismissal. (The Lord, whose omniscience surely stretches to EU employment directives, truly moves in mysterious ways.)

But each death rattle of a unified Anglican communion reminds gay people of how much terror their quiet lives still have the capacity to impart. One example was the appointment of the openly gay bishop Gene Robinson in 2004, which wasn't a quaint liberal stitch-up of the sort that many in the Church expect. Robinson was elected, not selected, after tens of thousands of devout communicants had prayed to their God for months.

This week God brought more bad tidings. Yet another credible piece of research was published, this time from the University of Ontario, suggesting further links between homosexuality and genetic make-up. One man's acceptance that homosexuality is a genetic predisposition, of course, is another's grudging awakening to the fact that homosexuality might well be - whisper it very softly - God-given.

The thought must terrify Sir Iqbal Sacranie. The recently retired head of the self-styled Muslim Council of Britain opened 2006 with a furious blast at gay people, based not upon Islamic theology but his own prejudices about "disease" and "morality". It's a sign of the gay community'smaturity that, for every activist who demanded Sacranie's swift arrest, there was someone else who simply reflected that pompous people have every right to make fools of themselves.

Gay people's residual awareness of inequality can still lead them to be derided, in the delightful words of one Observer columnist recently, as "truculent poofs", but possibly some of their cultural sensitivities remain well-founded. The BBC recently refused to censure the Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles for using the word gay as an insult. (No one suggests, incidentally, that Moyles is merely homophobic. Halle Berry derided one of his "racist moments" and the distinctly sensible Fawcett Society deplored his descriptions of women as "whores".) But Chris Moyles isn't a late-night shock-jock. He's a highly paid public service broadcaster on a programme targeted at millions of young people.

The BBC might not have a single openly gay member on its governing body or senior management team - unthinkable nowadays in almost any commercial creative environment with a future - but the world of independent TV production brims with gay talent, as the Pink List reminds us.

Waheed Alli, the only member of the House of Lords with a diamond ear-stud, is part of the No 10 kitchen cabinet in 2006, but he and his partner, Charlie Parsons, saw their opportunity with the launch of The Big Breakfast 20 years ago. He's now managing Paul O'Grady as well as TV revivals of Miss Marple and Noddy and has never had to worry about what his boss thinks of his ear-stud.

Alli's footsteps have been followed by a constellation of other TV talent, including Sebastian Scott and Remy Blumenfeld. Just as Huguenots, Jews and Ugandan Asians have realised for centuries, gay people have decided that, if the establishment doesn't embrace you, then make your own way.

One of the most remarkable transformations in the UK workplace in recent years has been the increasing keenness of the private sector to recruit and develop lesbian and gay staff. In contrast to the BBC, there are senior role models at businesses such as KPMG, something unthinkable even a decade ago. Ashley Steel's presence on the KPMG board isn't just an encouragement to gay staff to join the business; it's a reminder to those already there that they have the opportunity to rise to the top, breaking past the pink plateau which has constrained them in the past, just as the "glass ceiling" and the "snow cap" have constrained women and black people.

It's an arresting insight into the way Britain is changing that hard-nosed corporates such as Barclays, Lloyds TSB and the Royal Bank of Scotland choose to be major sponsors of a charity such as Stonewall. It's similarly revealing that four million people now go to work every day for an employer engaged in Stonewall's good practice programmes. That's three times as many as attend Church of England services every Sunday. In 21st- century Britain, gay people feel they can be activists just as much by persuading their employers to adopt partner benefits as by waving placards. The Royal Navy's decision last year to take advice from Stonewall on good employment practice wasn't reported just across the British media, but on the front page of The New York Times, too, a tart reminder to Americans of the idiocy of sacking Arabic-speaking military intelligence officers who happen to be gay.

Once upon a time we waved banners and hurried to unfold the sweaters in Benetton before being thrown out by security guards. (Slipping gently into the quietude of middle age, I've forgotten what we were protesting at.) In 2006 gay people protest in quieter ways. Just like everyone else, they are exploring the gentler - but arguably more effective - charms of ethical consumerism.

British Airways' decision in 2004 to ditch their director Baroness O'Cathain - a Christian fundamentalist campaigner against gay equality - led to a migration of gay business from Virgin to BA. Some Guardian readers have stopped buying the paper on a Saturday, tired of the years of low-key sneering at them and their friends from its columnist Simon Hoggart.

I'm not sure I thought I'd ever say it, but do shed a tear for Norman Tebbit. Lord Tebbit of Chingford must twitch nervously as he reflects that the party of which he was once chairman now has twice as many homosexuals on its Commons front bench as the "pansy-loving" Labour Party he once derided.

It's apolitical irony of our times that the multimillionaire blonde lesbian entrepreneur Margot James, a Tory candidate you couldn't make up, is likely to be found a safe seat at the next general election. Meanwhile, not a single out lesbian MP has been elected as beneficiary of almost two decades of Labour's women-only shortlists.

It's a curiosity that the Green Party now benefits from the strategic advice and public support of the veteran campaigner Peter Tatchell. But, in spite of his being one of the best-known Green physiognomies in Britain, his avant-garde party hasn't featured him in any public advertising, even among a bewildering sea of their unknown "spokespeople". Might they be brave enough to give him a party political broadcast before the next election?

Occasionally it's not the Norman Tebbits, Melanie Phillips and Anne Widdecombes who frustrate. It can be gay people's fine liberal pals, often well-meaning and generous. They've already attended a civil partnership and they certainly never thought that gay sex should be criminal. Yet they still don't quite understand our frustration that there's just one openly gay high court judge, or that The Sun thinks "Another one bites the pillow" is a joke, rather than a validation of prejudice. However much we love them, they don't necessarily understand the fear that an incident such as last year's murder of 24-year-old Jody Dobrowski on Clapham Common causes, when we know that even in the most tolerant city in Britain someone can set out to kill a person they've never met just because of the way he was born.

One sameness between lesbian and gay people and their heterosexual counterparts is enduring. Lesbians are underrepresented on the Pink List, with just two in the leading 20, but fewer women than men would be on a heterosexual list of power, influence or profile, too.

Many of the older people on the Pink List - Ian McKellen, Antony Sher, Simon Callow - grew up at a time when homosexuality was illegal. It's not surprising that some migrated to the arts and the theatre, or that years of suppressing the public truth about their lives made them resolve to fling their closet doors open with irredeemable gusto. But it's the profile of people such as McKellen, an Oscar-nominated actor with a sideline in civil rights, which has given new generations the will to fly in a rainbow collection of professions once closed to them.

Perhaps one day no one will compile a Pink List. A catalogue of well-known lesbians and gay men will seem insufficiently remarkable. In the meantime, The Independent on Sunday's celebration of McKellen as a gay national treasure is a fitting tribute to a life now devoted to making the extraordinary seem everyday.

Ben Summerskill is the chief executive of Stonewall