I think Andrew pretty much sums up the problem of choice. We choose our friends, but when it comes to love, the notion of choice is, at best, compromised and subsumed. Those who argue that homosexuality is a choice view us, and view our relationships, as friendships either perverted or at best gone wrong. We have often been called, even sometimes sympathetically, “friends” (Uncle Albert and his “friend” will be coming to dinner), but that was a nice way of avoiding the real subject. It kept the language of same-sex relationships in a closet of its own, a frame that helped everyone cope.
You don’t hear that kind of language from our supporters any more. Only our opponents are clinging to that outmoded notion of choice. They think the whole debate over same-sex relationships is about our choice of friends. They still can’t, or won’t, imagine that the flood of emotions and connections that they recognize as love can occur between two people of the same sex. I’m sure that a lot of them don’t even think it’s demeaning to our relationships to view them as falling within the kind of choices we make about our friends. They want us to have friends. They just refuse to believe that the powerful and mysterious forces they remember and/or experience with love can happen, for some people, with members of their own sex, and are every bit as gratifying and amazing — are, in fact, the same thing they know so well.
All we have been trying to do for the last half century or so (“All!”) is edge the public’s understanding of our relationships closer to what we actually feel and live. We have friends, sometimes lots of them. We choose them and treasure them. But when it comes to love, we aren’t the ones doing the choosing. Heterosexuals know that about themselves, and as Jonathan Rauch notes below, an emerging majority of them are coming to understand that we are sometimes lucky enough to be swept up in the same wonderful mystery.