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Closeted
Closeted and in the closet are metaphors for LGBTQ people who have not disclosed their sexual orientation or gender identity and aspects thereof, including sexual identity and sexual behavior. This metaphor is associated and sometimes combined with coming out, the act of revealing one's sexuality or gender to others, to create the phrase "coming out of the closet".
Some reasons why LGBTQ people stay closeted include discrimination, fear for one's safety, internalized homophobia or transphobia or living in a hostile environment.
Nondisclosure of one's sexual orientation or gender identity preceded the use of "closet" as a term for the act. For example, the writer Thomas Mann entered a heterosexual marriage with a woman in 1905, and had six children, but discussed his attraction to men in his private diary, which by contemporary terms would have designated him a closeted homosexual man.
D. Travers Scott claims that the phrase "coming out of the closet", along with its derivative meanings of "coming out" and "closeted", has its origins in two different metaphors. "Coming out" was first a phrase used in the early 20th century in reference to a young woman attending a debutante ball, such that she was "coming out" into society. In past times, the word "closet" meant "bedroom", so one's sexuality was not shown beyond there. Later in the 1960s, the metaphor of a "skeleton in the closet", which meant to hide a secret due to taboos or social stigmas, was also used in reference to a gender identity or sexuality that one may not wish to disclose. As such, to reveal one's LGBTQ+ identity that was previously hidden or kept secret was to allow a skeleton to come out of the closet.
One linguistic study suggests that the transgender community may use different vocabulary to refer to the disclosure status of one's gender identity, such as "stealth" in place of "closeted".[dubious – discuss]
A 2019 study by the Yale School of Public Health estimated that 83% of LGBT people around the world do not reveal their sexual orientation.
In 1993, Michelangelo Signorile wrote Queer in America, in which he explored the harm caused both to a closeted person and to society in general by being closeted. The closet is difficult for any non-heterosexual, non-cisgender identified person to fully come "out" of, whether or not that person desires to do so. Scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of the Epistemology of the Closet, discusses the difficulty with the closet:
...the deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like Wendy in Peter Pan, people find new walls springing up around them even as they drowse: every encounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets.
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Closeted
Closeted and in the closet are metaphors for LGBTQ people who have not disclosed their sexual orientation or gender identity and aspects thereof, including sexual identity and sexual behavior. This metaphor is associated and sometimes combined with coming out, the act of revealing one's sexuality or gender to others, to create the phrase "coming out of the closet".
Some reasons why LGBTQ people stay closeted include discrimination, fear for one's safety, internalized homophobia or transphobia or living in a hostile environment.
Nondisclosure of one's sexual orientation or gender identity preceded the use of "closet" as a term for the act. For example, the writer Thomas Mann entered a heterosexual marriage with a woman in 1905, and had six children, but discussed his attraction to men in his private diary, which by contemporary terms would have designated him a closeted homosexual man.
D. Travers Scott claims that the phrase "coming out of the closet", along with its derivative meanings of "coming out" and "closeted", has its origins in two different metaphors. "Coming out" was first a phrase used in the early 20th century in reference to a young woman attending a debutante ball, such that she was "coming out" into society. In past times, the word "closet" meant "bedroom", so one's sexuality was not shown beyond there. Later in the 1960s, the metaphor of a "skeleton in the closet", which meant to hide a secret due to taboos or social stigmas, was also used in reference to a gender identity or sexuality that one may not wish to disclose. As such, to reveal one's LGBTQ+ identity that was previously hidden or kept secret was to allow a skeleton to come out of the closet.
One linguistic study suggests that the transgender community may use different vocabulary to refer to the disclosure status of one's gender identity, such as "stealth" in place of "closeted".[dubious – discuss]
A 2019 study by the Yale School of Public Health estimated that 83% of LGBT people around the world do not reveal their sexual orientation.
In 1993, Michelangelo Signorile wrote Queer in America, in which he explored the harm caused both to a closeted person and to society in general by being closeted. The closet is difficult for any non-heterosexual, non-cisgender identified person to fully come "out" of, whether or not that person desires to do so. Scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of the Epistemology of the Closet, discusses the difficulty with the closet:
...the deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like Wendy in Peter Pan, people find new walls springing up around them even as they drowse: every encounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets.