The recent letter by Joe Zammit of Paola, condemning homosexuals, doesn’t really merit a reply, so ignorant and anachronistic was it. But, as a 65-year-old homosexual sharing this small island space with such an intellectual and spiritual dinosaur as Zammit, I must express my concern.

I knew, as an altar boy aged 11, that I was homosexual: I was devout but I had no choice or any say in my sexuality. It happened and I’ve lived with it, as a blue-eyed person lives alongside a brown-eyed person.

People like Zammit seem to believe that we make choices about our sexuality, like voting Labour or Nationalist, but scientific research many decades ago resolutely proved that genetic and environmental factors are the tools which form us.

I offer myself as an example: when I was a youngster, my father was absent for many years, having served as a submariner based in Malta, so whose ways and sensibility did I identify with in my formative years? My mother’s.

I have endured many decades of hostility and humiliation because of my homosexuality.

Now, I am so thrilled that iconic global figures like US President Barack Obama,