class closet

(..) it doesn's seem exaggerated to assert that my coming out of the sexual closet, my desire to assume and assert my homosexuality, coincied within my personal trajectory with my shutting myself up inside what I might call a calss closet. I mean by this that I took on the constrainst imposed by a different kind of dissimulation; I took on a different kind of dissociative personality or double consciousness (with the same kinds of mechaisms familiar from the sexual closet: various subterfuges to cover one's tracks, a very small set of friends who know the truth but keep it secret, the taking up of different registers of discourse in different situations and with different interlocutors, a constant self-surveillance as regards one's gestures, one's intonation, manners of speech, so that nothing untoward slots out so that ne never betrays oneself, and so on). 

- Retruning to Reims, Didier Eribon (2009)