The slang term "being in the closet" has been used to describe keeping secret one's sexual behaviors or orientation disapproved of by society; typically homosexuality, bisexuality, or transgender, but also including various paraphilias.

A "closeted" person originally referred only to lesbians, gays and bisexuals who kept their sexual orientation secret. The reason is usually that the person does not want to face the environment's homophobia. In many places in the world, coming out of the closet means losing one's job, home, family, friends, and religious and political membership. There is often also a real risk of being the victim of violent hate crime.

The term is derived from the metaphor of the "skeleton in the closet ": a thing a person hides that they don't want to be found, but which is inevitably stumbled across. This often refers to a person's past love affairs and the like. In a homophobic society, homosexuality is understandably such a skeleton, and is therefore closeted. Use of "the closet" without skeletal embellishment is almost universally reserved for the gay community.

Coming out of the closet (often shortened to coming out) describes voluntarily making public one's sexual behaviors or orientation, "being out" to not concealing one's sexual behaviors or orientation, and "outing" for making public the sexual behaviors or orientation of another who would prefer to keep this information secret.

The term closet has also been used, seriously or not, to refer to other personal preferences; e.g. "John Doe is a closet postmodernist, communist, liberal, etc."; likewise for to come out of the closet, e.g. "John came out of the closet about his gambling addiction"; "Janice came out of the closet when she told everyone she secretly loved chocolate". This is part of a more general tendency towards taking sexual identity as identity.

One use of this is in a concept called the "broom closet", that refers to people who hide the fact that they are Wiccans for fear of social rejection and reprisals. Activists for Wicca and general religious freedom and tolerance stress that the same problem of the regular closet concept also applies to this variant and encourage people to come out for the same reasons.

See also

The Broom Closet -- Down-low -- Famous gay lesbian or bisexual people -- Homophobia -- LGB community -- List of gay-related topics -- National Coming Out Day

External links

• National Coming Out Project

Reading

• Epistemology of the Closet (reprinted 1992) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ISBN 0520078748.