Closet
The imaginary hiding place of a gay man who keeps his sexuality secret: in the closet you pass as straight, out of it you are openly gay.
The closet is the imaginary cupboard where a gay man keeps his sexuality hidden. If you are in the closet, the people around you think you are straight, or at least you hope they do; if you are out of it, you have come out. As an adjective it means secret: a closet case, a closet queen, closeted.
It is a small word for a big thing. Living in the closet means editing every story, changing "he" to "she", knowing which friends know and which do not. For some men it is a phase of a few months, for others a whole life, and almost all of us spent some time in there.
Where it comes from
The image is of a hiding place, a cupboard where you keep what you do not want anyone to see. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds closet in its gay sense first in an Allen Ginsberg poem of 1955, and by 1961 a sociologist was recording "closet fags" as a term from the "gay world". Bruce Rodgers' 1972 dictionary of gay slang defined in the closet as refusing to associate with known gays for fear of being discovered.
It is younger than you might think. The historian George Chauncey points out that the closet metaphor does not appear in the letters, diaries and novels of gay men before the 1960s. Before then, coming out meant entering gay society, not leaving a cupboard.
How it is used today
- In the closet, closeted: not out. You can be closeted at work and out with friends.
- Closet case: a man who is very obviously gay to everyone except, officially, himself. Not kind.
- Closet queen: the older version, now mostly heard from older queens.
- Glass closet: when everyone knows and nobody says, often said of celebrities.
On the apps
The closet has moved online. Faceless profiles, "discreet", "DL", "straight-acting" and "no fems" are the closet's modern vocabulary. Some of it is real fear, in families, jobs or countries where coming out is dangerous; some of it is internalized homophobia dressed up as a preference. Either way, the guy behind the blank profile is often someone the rest of us used to be.
The phrase escaped into general English long ago: people are now closet smokers, closet romantics and closet fans of reality TV, which shows how deeply the gay meaning soaked into the language.
Related terms
Sources 3
- Green, Jonathon. "closet, n." Green's Dictionary of Slang, online edition. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/43n4yzi
- Green, Jonathon. "closet, adj." Green's Dictionary of Slang, online edition. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/km7ye7i
- Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. ISBN 978-0465026210.