Can you feel the "love" tonight?

I'm a fan of disney, and still until now, I love disney classic movies like Aladin, lion king, little mermaid. In most disney classic movies, not all, there is always a love story between a Prince and a Princess.  Now let me give you an example from a disney classic movie which doesn't feature the love story of a prince and a princess but the story from fictional animal kingdom, the story of lion king. In the film, Simba grows up and falls in love with a lioness named Nala; during a rather lengthy sequence, they playfully wrestle, caress, and nuzzle one another as a love song (“Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”) plays. But for Simba and Nala to be straight meant only that they were in love.   I hear people do this all the time. When we think about a straight couple fall in love, we typically imagine the relationship in non-sexual terms: Love, romance, dating, candle light dinner,  Weddings. And yet, when we think about gay couples, many straight people conjure up images of sex acts. We wonder what people do in bed and how it all “works.” And so when we hear that someone is gay, we—and by “we” here, I mean many straight people but not all—naturally think of that in sexual terms rather than romantic ones, it goes right down to sex. 

Especially if you are in conservative christian circles, there is unfortunately a strong preconceived notion about the gay community which they feel they know about them but actually they don't. I had a conversation with a friend a while ago about what it meant for me to be a gay person, I was trying to make him understand that being gay is not something that I chose. People do not choose their sexual orientation, and I was baffled with how he seemed to always narrow down being gay to having sex. To me that was very upsetting that he equated being gay with having sex. For the gay community, they refer to themselves as gay to describe that they are people who are exclusively attracted only to the same gender, but for straight people gay doesn't mean what it is supposed to mean as what gay people mean. Whether gay people have sex or not it doesn't make them less gay or more gay, because orientation is the deeply ingrained part of someone's being that shapes you as a human. It involves how you feel attracted, develop romantic feelings, develop the emotional attachment for another human being, the need for each other companionship, who you fall in love with, it gives you the ability to be committed to the person that you love. All these things form up sexual orientation regardless of heterosexuality or homosexuality.  Sexual orientation is a complex set of feelings that are part of a person’s core being, directing his or her yearnings for romantic love and bonding.

The truth  is that gay couples are no more or less sexual that straight ones. You know the old jokes about straight married couples who never have sex? Plenty of gay couples are in the same boat. They watch TV together. They make dinner. They take out the trash. They go on a trip together. They’re not drawn together by sex—at least, not any more than straight couples are. They’re drawn together by that same human need that led God to say that it was “not good” for Adam to be alone. They are drawn by the mutual bonding to build life together. 

Obviously, for Christians who believe that the Bible condemns same-gender sex, that condemnation would still hold even if it’s only a tiny part of a gay couple’s relationship. But in that case, it’s worth recognizing that what you’re condemning isn’t the relationship itself—the selfless service of one another, the chicken soup when the other is sick, the hand-holding in good times and bad, the laughter, the tears, the commitment, the love. When the church fails to recognize that, it ends up coming across as ignoring 99% of someone’s relationship in order to focus on the 1% we have a conflict over, and in so doing, we convince the world that we, the Christians, are the ones who are obsessed with sex.