Livre d'Or

"You could just stop doing that! You have a choice!"

Actually, that was historically an argument as to why homosexuality is immoral (US to the 1960s or so)!

There's this whole idea of sexual orientation which we take so for granted, which is not at all a universal or eternal concept. Previous to that paradigm, same-sex sexual behavior was understood as either simply behavior (if you were lucky) or behavioral evidence of psychopathology (which came in in a big way in the mid 1940s and persisted until the events that lead to the deletion of homosexuality from the DSM, a process kicked off in the months following Stonewall and concluding in 1974). Discourse about homosexuality -- even, as I understand it, in the pages of the Mattachine Review! -- was framed in terms of whether the behavior could be changed or at least desisted from. The idea that homosexuality had something to do with how one loves, unless one was offering the widely accepted theory that homosexuals couldn't love, was entirely outside of the cultural and scientific mainstream.

You know how cultural conservatives tongue-cluck over "the homosexual lifestyle"? You know who came up with that expression? Gay rights activists just post Stonewall! They came up with the idea of homosexuality being a lifestyle -- just as valid as any other lifestyle -- in rebuttal to the predominant cultural narratives that homosexuality was a (possibly compulsive) sexual behavior, and just a behavior. It was an attempt to get at the idea that same-sex sexual attraction was a bigger deal to a person than just what one did in the bedroom. If homosexuality was just a behavior, it was legitimate to say, as you note, "You could just stop doing that!"; they introduced the idea of "gay lifestyle" to say, "No, being gay is a whole package, it's more than whom we fuck or how we fuck, it's about whom we love, the relationships we forge, the communities we form! We have a right to live our lives as we please! And that includes loving whom we choose and all the rest!"