bananaloaf - I have to respond to your posting! First, I think it's a bit of a sweeping statement to say that 'gays and lesbians feel the need to tell everyone' - I'm guessing they're probably as individual as everyone else and some will come out fairly easily, others will struggle to and some choose never to talk about it.
Secondly, of course you don't feel the need to broadcast you're heterosexual - you don't and would never have to - the world assumes you are!! Everywhere you look, everything you read, watch on telly, every poster, shop, advert will all assume that you're straight. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing because statiscally you're more likely to be.
What I'm trying to say is that if you don't fit into that majority mould it's hard sometimes to have what you might consider to be an ordinary conversation without telling people. It happens all the time - someone at work will ask what you did at the weekend. Now if I was responding I could just talk about my dp, instead of using "her" or "she", but I'd have to think about every word in every sentence. If you were talking about your home life to someone you wouldn't even think about the pros and cons of mentioning or not mentioning your dh/dp.
Now I've got children that kind of conversation comes up even more - questions from colleagues, people in shops, or from new friends etc. about who looks after the children, do they look like me or my husband etc.etc..... Is letting them know feeling the need to tell everyone?
So while I don't set out to be any kind of militant, political lesbian - would never describe myself as that - I inevitably end up telling everyone I know because that's how real life conversations go. It happened only today - a colleague from another part of the country who I don't see that often has noticed I've changed my surname since my civil ceremony and asked why. He didn't know anything about my home life up until today. I could have said I got married, but instead said I've had my civil ceremony and have changed my surname to match my boys', which is an amalgamation of mine and my dp's.
Being in a same sex relationship and having children makes it all the more important to me to make sure that we (my family) don't feel the need to hide the truth - is this feeling the need to tell everyone and broadcast things, or just trying to develop the same freedom to be who we are and talk about stuff in the same way that you might without ever giving it a second thought?