Due to the design constraints of a fully voiced MMO of this scale and size, many choices had to be made as to the launch and post-launch feature set. Same gender romances with companion characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic will be a post-launch feature.
I found out about this mainly because some nutjob right-wing conservative group was getting a case of the butthurt over this, and frankly, I’m not linking to them. I’ll instead link to the thread where I got the above quote from. I haven’t heard any official release information on this yet, but I hope it’s soon. Maybe not before fully-configurable UI (seriously why did they flip the chat and party and put the map in the lower right instead of the upper right just to be different from every other MMO I mean seriously) but soon, please.