Wheres the term coming out of the closet derived from?
It is a play on the phrase “a skeleton in the closet” which means that people all have scandalous doings and other bad things in their past histories they do not want others to find out about so they keep them a closely guarded secret, hidden away ‘in a closet” so to speak. Gays kept their sexual preferences hidden for hundreds of years. This has changed over the past 50 years or so and now homosexuals are not so secretive. Coming out of the closet means declaring your sexual preference is homosexual. Example: In 1994 Ellen De Generes came out of the closet when she announced her gayness by portraying herself as a lesbian and kissing a woman on her prime time TV sitcom.
