Dear Rose,
My best friend and I are both eighteen, male, and incredibly intelligent. He and I are very close and have been since a young age. Suffice to say, we do almost everything together, including taking our education into our own hands rather than entrusting it to our professors, who must cater to our former classmates. We are, as I have said, terribly close and we have many personality traits in common; we look out for each other and, although I do not consider myself to be a replacement for his utterly disappointing, disowned runaway of an older brother, I certainly consider my best friend to be a part of my family.
This would all be perfectly lovely, but it seems as though we cannot escape unjust persecution for our friendship. Several people have made insinuations about the exact nature of our relationship, often implying that we are or otherwise outright accusing us of being homosexuals. Neither of us is such and I know that both of us are terribly tired of having such awful slander violently hurled in our direction. It is all terribly vexing, especially given how badly our families would respond to being told such lies about us and given how most possible solutions require that we relinquish certain elements of our friendship, such as our habit of sequestering ourselves in one of our bedroom's and complaining, at great length, about the deplorable state of the world.
How can we make these awful people cease and desist without compromising or sacrificing any present aspect of our friendship?