As one who's been on both sides of the Christians vs. Gays debate, I believe part of where the confusion comes is that the standard conservative Christian viewpoint is supposed to separate between homosexual activity ("sin") and homosexual feelings ("temptation"). You can't control what you're tempted by, but you can control how you respond to temptation (or as Luther said, you can't stop birds from landing on your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair). So when conservative Christians talk about "being gay", it's supposed to mean having one or more gay relationships, or at least actively, intentionally entertaining thoughts thereof, whereas when gay people say "I can't stop being gay," they're referring to the feelings.
In most cases*, the feelings cannot be significantly changed -- this has been shown scientifically, and it agrees with orthodox Christian doctrine. The problem arises when definitions are not kept clear and communication is garbled (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not).
Doctrinally, conservative Christians who believe that homosexual activity is a sin** ought to treat it as any other sin. In practice, this is never the case, as American Christians allow themselves to be highly influenced by the homophobic tendencies of the natural, worldly, secular society. The knee-jerk reaction to homosexuality for most heterosexual people is "Ew, gross." And most American conservative Christians look at the one or two verses in the Bible that appear to label homosexuality as sinful and take them as confirmation of their natural tendency, rather than allowing themselves to be transformed by the renewing of their mind. I mean, someone can stand up during a Bible study or prayer circle or whatever and say that they're struggling with greed, or anger, or slothfulness, or rebellion, or gluttony, or even porn, but if anyone ever says they're struggling with homosexuality, they get driven out of town for it, because at a gut level, we don't think it's a choice -- if you've got those feelings, then that means you're one of them. The temptation and the sin get conflated, in part because everything the fundamentalist/evangelical conservative Christian believes is put at the same level. The existence of God, his denomination's view on soteriology, his personal feelings about homosexuality, the United States Constitution -- they all have Bible verses to support them, and the Bible is the infallible word of God, so that means all of those things, all of his opinions, are infallible.
If homosexuals are sinners, then first of all, they ought to be treated the same as all sinners (a group that includes everyone ever, including Christians), and if they need to be saved from their sins, it should be done with love, not condemnation. The only people Christ spoke condemningly of when he was on earth were hypocritical religious leaders. When he spoke to Gentiles -- the outsiders, basically the contemporary equivalent of non-Christians -- it was to encourage them, to comfort them, to heal them, to commend their faith. Jesus didn't yell at unbelievers about how they're going to hell because they don't believe the right things. When he talked about hell (literally Gehenna, which was Jerusalem's city dump), it was a place for hypocrites who claimed to be righteous followers of God yet never followed through on it by loving their neighbors.
Whether homosexuality is a sin or not, the sin Jesus would be concerned about is the utter lack of love from so many of those who name themselves after him.
*- Most people are probably at least slightly bisexual, but in the majority, one side or the other is clearly dominant and relative levels of attraction are rather stable. "Conversion therapy" does not work for those who would not have been open to the other side anyway (these are usually people who are relatively in the middle who would probably best be identified as bi, for whom there kinda is a choice -- you can't chose to not be attracted to both genders, but you can decide to stick to one or the other; you can "pass" as either one without having to date people you aren't at all interested in).
**- There is no sound, internally consistent biblical argument to say that inadvertent homosexual feelings and desires are sinful. Orthodox Christianity has always held that it is not sinful to be subject to temptation, or else Jesus, who was "in all ways tempted like we are" (Heb 4:15), could not be a sinless sacrifice, and the whole thing kinda falls apart. And with so few mentions of homosexuality in the Bible, it's pretty difficult to argue that it's at some much higher level of sin than the others, the way we tend to treat it. If any sin is at that level of egregiousness, it would probably be oppressing and/or ignoring orphans, widows, the poor, and similar vulnerable groups, the sin that's mentioned just about everywhere in the Old and New Testaments.
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