Margie has had quite enough, thank you, of gay people coming out.

It’s not the gay part that bugs her so much as the coming-out part what she sees as trumpeting one’s sexuality. Margie has issues with that. So she snapped off an e-mail to me after reading a recent column of mine about a gay professional athlete whose lover wrote an open letter imploring him to come out of the closet.

“If a person is homosexual,” she wrote, “why must they claim to the world that homosexuality is their sexual preference? … I am heterosexual, but have never told a soul; it’s none of anyone’s business other than my own or my lover’s. … I feel this ballplayer is not hiding in a closet. He’s probably just living a happy life, feeling no obligation to inform the entire world of his sexual preference.”

I like Margie’s reasoning because on its surface, it seems so, well… reasonable. Privacy, propriety, keeping your business to yourself… who’s going to argue against that? Might as well argue against Mother’s Day and little green apples.

That’s why this has become a favorite line of attack for people uninformed about, or hateful toward, homosexuality. Gays who are open about that aspect of their identity are said to be “flaunting” their sexuality, forcing the rest of us to know what goes on in their bedrooms. As opposed, one presumes, to the always modest heterosexual community that, as we all know from watching Jerry Springer, understands the virtue of keeping private things private.

I suppose it’s not that hard to find some gay man or lesbian who is guilty of “flaunting” his or her sexuality. On the other hand, Pamela Anderson, Mark Wahlberg and other presumably straight sex symbols could be said to do the very same thing.

None of which, in any event, has much to do with the reality of a gay man or lesbian woman who makes the difficult decision to come out.

Let us imagine for a moment, two guys who have a casual friendship. Joe is in the habit of nudging Fred in the ribs when some hot babe goes strutting by. He holds up the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated so Fred can admire the half-naked supermodel on the cover.

Now, let’s imagine that Fred is gay. Wouldn’t he at some point be tempted at the very least! to gently correct Joe’s implied assumption? Certainly he would. The sexual minority like any minority always finds itself facing that question: whether to challenge the majority’s false assumptions or live lies of omission.

Which is pretty much all that coming out comes down to. It’s not an issue of publicizing private things, but rather one of being if you’ll pardon the expression straight with the people around you. That’s doubtless healthy for a gay person as an individual, but it is healthy, also, for us as a nation struggling with this social revolution.

It’s easy to demonize gays when they are faceless and unknown. But it’s different when “gay” comes to mean Fred or Susie whom you work with. Or, yes, some ballplayer you admire. You don’t find it as easy then to caricature gay people according to your fears, or casually demean them by describing their orientation as a “preference.”

Which, by the way, I’ve always considered an especially insidious little insult, wrapped as it is in plain brown language. That bland phrase carries a deliberately belittling implication. Namely, that same-sex attraction is a conscious choice not unlike picking double chocolate chunk over Rocky Road. But if sexual identity really is that fluid, that malleable, mustn’t it work both ways? Isn’t heterosexuality, then, also a choice, or a preference? And if they really wanted to, couldn’t a straight man learn to love other men or a straight woman, other women?

Most straight folks would never consider that; many would be apoplectic at the suggestion. And they’d never grasp the hypocrisy of that response.

The majority is myopic. It views itself as the infallible “norm.” And it’s seldom able to see around that corner. So it needs to be reminded that its reality is not necessarily yours or mine.

Consider what Margie wrote: “I am heterosexual, but have never told a soul.”

That’s precisely the point: She would never have to.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.