If you are one of Britain's 100,000 millionaires, beware: someone has got your number. So I paste on a sickly grin and make myself chuckle at the thought that that, of course, is what a lot of other people obviously want to do, too. I drop "Breaking the Silence" into the second drawer, left hand side, shoving other books on top Out of sight, out of mind I don't want to break the silence, I want to bury my head. Murder is the ultimate act of discrimination.And still I can't help it. As communal as the teenage gang of four, masters of the en masse ambush, liable to stuff the victim's keys in his mouth and take turns jumping on his face and slashing his genitals, egged on by a thousand direct and diffuse forces that assured them what they were butchering wasn't fully human anyway.

As regular as Kevin Callagher's weekly outings, climaxing in the multiple stabbing of Ronald Eades. One in three gay men will become a victim of violence.Violence as organised as that carried out by George Rees, who stripped, bound and knifed his prey, gloating that they would bleed to death. A third of gay men and women have been victims of hate crimes in the past five years: 9 per cent have been "systematically" beaten up, 16.5 per cent have been hit, punched or kicked, and 4.5 per cent assaulted with a weapon. Since then the murders of a further 60 gay men have gone unsolved, possibly due to police indifference.

Between 1986 and 1990, more than 70 gay and bisexual men were murdered in Britain. I want not to have to look over my shoulder, to go to the corner shop without racing back and forth, to feel that who I am won't be the death of me, so I tell myself anything - that it happens there, it doesn't happen here, even as rising figures make me a liar. Three men convicted of one such killing describe it as "a sport": "Hell, what we done is done all across Texas on a Saturday night."The cases accumulate - an Iranian stoned to death, an American bludgeoned into a coma, an Irish man with broken glass ground into his eyes - and the impulse to ignore these facts as thoroughly as history has ignored the Nazi campaign of homosexual castration, forced sterilisation and marches to the gas chamber grows stronger, not weaker. Arms and legs and buttocks (to prolong the agony, understand) before the final bullet to the skull. Gay men seized from cruising areas are later found beaten, robbed and shot.