closeted

adj

1. (informal)Not 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,”

   “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.”

2. (broadly)Not open about some aspect of one's identity, tendency, or fondness; secret.

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

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

   “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.”

3. (not-comparable)Confined.

   “He's spent all day closeted in his room.”

   “After they had been closeted up with the fortune-teller for some time, I knew by their looks, upon their returning, that they had been promised something great.”

   “It was a winter evening of transparent clearness, with an innocent young moon above the house-tops; and he wanted to fill his soul's lungs with the pure radiance, and not exchange a word with any one till he and Mr. Letterblair were closeted together after dinner.”

   “Now when the Foretopman found himself closeted there, as it were, in the cabin with the Captain and Claggart, he was surprised enough.”

4. (not-comparable)sheltered; protected.

   “In my salubrious constituency of Cheltenham and in the leafy lanes of Gloucestershire, we are perhaps somewhat closeted from these unpleasant and harsh realities of the urban world of London, Plymouth, Birmingham and other major cities”

verb

1. (form-of, participle, past)simple past and past participle of closet