The author argues that the increase in support for same-sex marriage in the United States
must be interpreted in light of the changing social imagination of homosexuality. The author
measures the social imagination at the micro level by comparing the frequencies and
semantic contexts in which two cohorts use metaphors and analogies to talk about same-sex
marriage. Younger informants articulate them in ways that characterize homosexuality as
identity, whereas older informants characterize homosexuality as behavior. Because the …