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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, liberalIn terms of politics, the word liberal (or Liberal can refer to: an adherent of the ideology of liberalism or something in accordance to this ideology. Note: the words "liberal" or "liberalism" can be different in various countries and can be related to t, 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 WiccaFor the pre-Christian wiccans see Volva. For the book series Wicca see Sweep (book series) and Circle Of Three''. Wicca is the most popular Neopagan religion, originally founded by the British civil servant Gerald Gardner, probably in the 1930s, althoughns 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.