The expression “come out of the closet” is a loan from English, and arose from the union of the phrases “to come out” and “skeleton in the closet.” How did they come together to mean making homosexuality public and how did the idiom pass into Spanish?
In the 19th century, “to come out” was a popular idiom in the United Kingdom and the United States, and it had nothing to do with sexuality. It referred to the presentation act of girls when they came of age, a kind of welcome to adulthood with a party included, from which, with luck, a marriage would emerge.
At first, the “coming-out party” was a thing for high society, perhaps originating from the ball that King George III (1738-1820) organized in honor of his wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. However, over time the middle classes adopted the custom, which is still alive in high school graduation dances, a common setting in romantic comedies and teen horror films.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the homosexual community adopted the expression, but with an intention that was even different from today. As historian George Chauncey, a specialist in LGBT history, explains, for them “coming out” did not mean declaring their sexual orientation to the four winds. There were some brave people who did, like the German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1864, but it was at the cost of risking going to prison.
Furthermore, they called what Ulrichs did self-denouncement. Among homosexuals, “coming out” meant joining a homosexual group, necessarily clandestine and marginal, but at the same time a space for liberation. Basically, it is a revision of the concept of coming-out parties in a burlesque sense. In Barcelona, the place to do it was the narrow streets of Chinatown and its theaters and small bars.
This is how things stood in 1969, when a raid on a New York pub led to riots that are considered the first Pride March in history, as it had a domino effect in other Western capitals. In Spain, the first took place in 1977 in Barcelona.
It was then that the expression “to come out” was joined to “skeleton in the closet,” an old English metaphor that indicates that someone is keeping an unspeakable secret.
That is to say, it was no longer about “entering” the closet to live one's sexuality in secret, but rather about opening it wide so that everyone could see the skeleton. Popular language adapted to a change in the moral paradigm, a change that involved rejecting social stigma and the lack of rights.
It was translated into almost all languages, including Spanish, gaining prominence starting in the 1990s. What's more, it has been used so much that it is already undergoing another metamorphosis, and today it is beginning to be used to indicate the desire to confess something that shame keeps hidden.
