…AND I WILL SING OF THE SUN: After the Koch thing about “the future of marriage,” I was asked what I would tell a gay couple to do. And I hear this a lot: You’re very clear on what they can’t do, but what should they do?

My response to that question is necessarily more personal than policy-oriented. It has two branches; the first I expect people have heard before, the second perhaps not so much. What follows is fairly close to a verbatim transcript of what I said over dinner to the Kochheads and Jonathan Rauch.

First: A lot of people find out that they are less homosexual than they thought. They find someone of the opposite sex and marry and have babies. This happens about a hundred times more than we are allowed to acknowledge these days. And it happens to people who only a few years before their marriages would have considered themselves thoroughly homosexual. It is worth keeping this fact in mind.

Second, too: These days we are inclined to think of sublimation as synonymous with repression, when in fact the two concepts are all but opposite. Sublimation is the transmutation of some strong desire (in this case, sexual desire) into something else and greater. Sublimation is intrinsically related to the concept of the sublime.

We hear virtually nothing about this today, but historically one of the basic ways of dealing with same-sex attraction has been sublimation–not repression, sublimation. The three most common forms of gold into which this base metal was transformed have been deep abiding friendship, great art, and personal sanctity. All three of these options are still open to everyone.

I wrote here about the ways in which marriage reconciles us to time and mortality. Great art and personal sanctity do the same.

So I guess that’s what I would say, if I were the Gay Dear Abby, and if anyone would listen: Be something extraordinary. Love deeply. And make your love sublime.