I won't go back through 42 pages of posts, but didn't you say when asked you kiss your wife in public?
Doesn't matter - going to dinner with her is to announce you are straight. When you go to a show together, and parties together, and do 100 things married couples do together, you're announcing you're a heterosexual couple. I don't know if you're on Facebook, but the few times I go online, my married friends SCREAM that they're a heterosexual couple, with pictures of themselves and their kids together. Same with their Christmas cards - always photos of them with kids or just of the kids. When my wife leaves on a plane, we kiss each other goodbye.
And IME with all my brother's friends, dozens of interactions, street parties, house parties, Thanksgiving, and more, that's how they act. I've never once heard a conversation about gay SEX with them. They are people, who are gay. That's it. They just don't try to HIDE it.
And if some gay people announce it and gay rights are part of their concerns, that's NORMAL. What you take for granted - a baseline of assumed respect as normal citizens, at the core, which bleeds into discrimination at work, etc. - they still don't have, and wanting that is NORMAL, as is fighting for it. We've made immense progress BECAUSE people fought for it, in public. They should be applauded for it, not condemned because you'd rather not know they exist.
You might think discrimination against them is a thing of the past, but that's not true. There's a reason something like 40% of homeless kids are gay and it's because they've been forced from their homes by parents who reject them because they are gay. One friend of ours was so disowned by his parents his mother went through a year long battle with cancer and died, and he found out months after the funeral.
And the best way to make progress is how it's happening with you, to be honest. You have a great friend, and he'd been that for a long time I assume. You find out he's gay, and.....nothing about him changed, but that he's gay. You're to be commended for keeping him as a friend, but what you've learned is being gay is as far as you're concerned not all that big a deal. He's still a great guy, and you welcome him in your life.
Now do that million times, with a million gay people, who have millions of coworkers, family and friends, and you've got a change in society. You can't be bigoted against a guy you KNOW is a really good person, so him being gay becomes a thing, like he's fat or skinny or short. That's how it should be and being open about his sexual preference will do more than any protest for changing minds.
