The cornerstone of his conviction was that, "we must instill in the homosexual community a sense of worth to the individual homosexual", which could only be achieved through campaigns openly led by homosexuals themselves. 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 US Supreme Court. Having been fired from his job as an astronomer for the Army Map service in 1957 for homosexual behavior, Kameny refused to go quietly. In the 1960s, Frank Kameny came to the forefront of the struggle. Everywhere I go, at all times and before all sections of society, I pretend." Cory was a pseudonym, but his frank and openly subjective descriptions served as a stimulus to the emerging homosexual self-awareness and the nascent homophile movement. In 1951, Donald Webster Cory published his landmark The Homosexual in America, exclaiming, "Society has handed me a mask to wear . 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 wrote that homosexuals were an oppressed minority. The first prominent American to reveal his homosexuality was the poet Robert Duncan. Hirschfeld did not support self-denunciation and dismissed the possibilities of a political movement based on open homosexuals. In 1914, Magnus Hirschfeld revisited the topic in his major work The Homosexuality of Men and Women, 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. In early 20th-century Germany, "coming out" was called "self-denunciation" and entailed serious legal and reputational risks. Historian Robert Beachy has said of him, "I think it is reasonable to describe as the first gay person to publicly out himself."
#Nfl cowboys gay meme series#
ġ9th-century gay rights advocate Karl Heinrich Ulrichsīetween 18, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs wrote a series of pamphlets-as well as giving a lecture to the Association of German Jurists in 1867-advocating decriminalization of sex acts between men, in which he was candid about his own homosexuality. 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 self-disclosure.
Outing is the deliberate or accidental disclosure of an LGBT person's sexual orientation or gender identity, without their consent forced on by someone else. 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 or gender identity are out of the closet, i.e. Ĭoming out of the closet is the source of other gay slang expressions related to voluntary disclosure or lack thereof. 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". Coming out of the closet, often shortened to coming out, is a metaphor used to describe LGBT people's self-disclosure of their sexual orientation or their gender identity.įramed and debated as a privacy issue, coming out of the closet is 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 a career-threatening act.