closeted

What it means

1. informalNot open about one's sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity.

   Sally Gearhart, an ex-christian from Illinois who in the early seventies abandoned closeted lesbianism on Midwestern church college faculties for radical feminism in San Francisco,

   1979 December 15, Jil Clark, Sally Gearhart, “Spirituality vs. Politics”, in Gay Community News, volume 7, number 21, page 8

   1 more example

   1992, Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995, Part Two: Perestroika, Act One, Scene 4, p. 156, Belize: Get out your oven mitts. Guess who just checked in with the troubles? The Killer Queen Herself. New York's number one closeted queer.

   Synonyms: in the closet

2. broadlyNot open about some aspect of one's identity, tendency, or fondness; secret.

   Now he feels a connection between his own closeted, esoteric sufferings and strivings and those of the poor urban working people all around him.

   1982, Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Penguin, published 1988, page 45

   2 more examples

   […] the remaining quotations, chiefly from English poetry, interested me only slightly more. They were the elegiac favourites of a closeted Romantic.

   1971, Cynthia Ozick, “The Pagan Rabbi”, in Collected Stories, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, published 2006, page 12

   Sokolsky asks if he realizes that this is a walk-in clinic for closeted reality benders, and he's a disaster-response coordinator, not a therapist.

   2022 September 12, “Exploring the SCP Foundation: SCP-7000 - The Loser” (10:38 from the start), in The Exploring Series, retrieved 25 Mar 2023

In a sentence

Sally Gearhart, an ex-christian from Illinois who in the early seventies abandoned closeted lesbianism on Midwestern church college faculties for radical feminism in San Francisco,

1979 December 15, Jil Clark, Sally Gearhart, “Spirituality vs. Politics”, in Gay Community News, volume 7, number 21, page 8

Where it comes from

From closet (“state of concealment”) + -ed.