As a vocal leader of the growing movement, Kameny argued for unapologetic public actions. He openly fought his dismissal, eventually appealing it all the way to the U.S. Having been fired from his job as an astronomer for the Army Map service for homosexual behavior, Kameny refused to go quietly. In the 1960s, Frank Kameny came to the forefront of the struggle. 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, with many gays emerging from the closet. In 1944, using his own name in the anarchist magazine Politics, he claimed that homosexuals were an oppressed minority. The first prominent American to reveal his homosexuality was the poet Robert Duncan. Years later, Magnus Hirschfeld revisited the topic in his major work The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1914), discussing the social and legal potentials of several thousand homosexual men and women of rank revealing their sexual orientation to the police in order to influence legislators and public opinion. 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. Claiming that invisibility was a major obstacle toward changing public opinion, he urged homosexual people to reveal their same-sex attractions. In 1869, one hundred years before the Stonewall Riots, the German homosexual rights advocate Karl Heinrich Ulrichs introduced the idea of self-disclosure as a means of emancipation. ġ9th century LGBT rights advocate Karl Heinrich Ulrichs introduced the idea of coming out as a means of emancipation
Lastly, the glass closet means the open secret of when public figures' being LGBT is considered a widely accepted fact even though they have not "officially" come out. By extension, outing oneself is unintentional LGBT self-disclosure. Outing is the deliberate or accidental disclosure of an LGBT person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, without his or her consent. Oppositely, LGBT people who have yet to come out or have opted not to do so are labelled as closeted or being in the closet.
LGBT people who have already revealed or no longer conceal their sexual orientation and/or gender identity are out, i.e. Author Steven Seidman writes that "it is the power of the closet to shape the core of an individual's life that has made homosexuality into a significant personal, social, and political drama in twentieth-century America." Ĭoming out of the closet is the source of other gay slang expressions related to voluntary disclosure or lack thereof. Coming out (of the closet) is a figure of speech for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ( LGBT) people's disclosure of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.įramed and debated as a privacy issue, coming out of the closet is described and experienced variously 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 gay pride instead of shame and social stigma or even career suicide.
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