Coming out

Coming out of the closet, often shortened to coming out, is a metaphor mostly used to describe LGBTQ people's self-disclosure of their sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity. While mostly used in contexts involving sexual orientation or gender identity, it is sometimes used as a shorthand in other identity self-disclosure contexts, such as the revelation of atheism or irreligion, or of one's political affiliations.

LGBTQ self-disclosure is often framed and debated as a privacy issue because the consequences may be very different for different individuals, some of whom may have their job security or personal security threatened by such disclosure. The act may be viewed as a psychological process or journey; decision-making or risk-taking; a strategy or plan; a mass or public event; a speech act and a matter of personal identity; a rite of passage; liberation or emancipation from oppression; an ordeal; a means toward feeling LGBTQ pride instead of shame and social stigma; or a career-threatening act.

The term coming out of the closet is the source of other gay slang expressions related to voluntary disclosure or lack thereof. LGBTQ people who have already revealed or no longer conceal their sexual orientation or gender identity are out of the closet or simply out, i.e., openly LGBTQ. By contrast, LGBTQ people who have yet to come out or have opted not to do so are labelled as closeted or being in the closet. Outing is the deliberate or accidental disclosure of an LGBTQ person's sexual orientation or gender identity by someone else, without the first individual's consent. By extension, outing oneself is self-disclosure. Glass closet refers to the open secret of a public figure widely thought to be LGBTQ even though the person has not officially come out.

Between 1864 and 1869, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs wrote a series of pamphlets – as well as giving a lecture to the Association of German Jurists in 1867 – advocating decriminalization of sex acts between men, in which he was candid about his own homosexuality. Historian Robert Beachy has said of him, "I think it is reasonable to describe [Ulrichs] as the first gay person to publicly out himself."

In early 20th-century Germany, "coming out" was labeled as "self-denunciation" and entailed serious legal and reputational risks. In his 1906 work, Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit in seinen Beziehungen zur modernen Kultur (The sexual life of our time in its relation to modern civilization), Iwan Bloch, a German-Jewish physician, entreated elderly homosexuals to self-disclose to their family members and acquaintances. In 1914, Magnus Hirschfeld revisited the topic in his major work The Homosexuality of Men and Women, discussing the social and legal potential of several thousand homosexual men and women of rank, revealing their sexual orientation to the police in order to influence legislators and public opinion. Hirschfeld did not support 'self-denunciation' and dismissed the possibilities of a political movement based on open homosexuals.

The first prominent American to reveal his homosexuality was the poet Robert Duncan. In 1944, using his own name in the anarchist magazine Politics, he wrote that homosexuals were an oppressed minority. The decidedly clandestine Mattachine Society, founded by Harry Hay and other veterans of the Wallace for President campaign in Los Angeles in 1950, moved into the public eye after Hal Call took over the group in San Francisco in 1953. Many gays emerged from the closet there.

In 1951, Donald Webster Cory published his landmark The Homosexual in America, saying, "Society has handed me a mask to wear ... Everywhere I go, at all times and before all sections of society, I pretend." Cory was a pseudonym, but his frank and openly subjective descriptions served as a stimulus to the emerging homosexual self-awareness and the nascent homophile movement.

In the 1960s, Frank Kameny came to the forefront of the struggle. Having been fired from his job as an astronomer for the Army Map service in 1957 for homosexual behavior, because it was considered to make people vulnerable to blackmail pressure and endanger secure positions, Kameny refused to go quietly. He openly fought his dismissal, eventually appealing it to the US Supreme Court. As a vocal leader of the growing movement, Kameny argued for unapologetic public actions. The cornerstone of his conviction was that, "we must instill in the homosexual community a sense of worth to the individual homosexual", which could only be achieved through campaigns openly led by homosexuals themselves.