Coming out of the closet

 


According to the Cambridge Dictionary, "come out of the closet" is a phrase used to tell people that you are gay after previously keeping this secret. But where does this phrase actually come from?  Some said it is related to the idiom "skeleton in the closet", which means someone hidding a human body (a secret) in the closet so long that the it had decomposed to the bone. Thus, skeleton out of the closet means revealing the secret that you hid for a long time and it slowly evolved into the term "come out of the closet". It carriers a negative narrative that a homosexual/bisexual person is not accepted by the mainstream value and he/she has to hide the sexual orientation from the outside world. Surprisingly, according to wikipedia, the expression "coming out" is way more positive with empowering. Instead of saying "coming out of the closet", it was rather "coming into" a homosexual society that is not so small, isolated, nor hidden as what we thought. It borrows the idea of young upper-class ladies in the early 20th century who have reached an adult age and would present themselves to society formally that they are eligible for marriage. Thus, being an LGBT was not so hidding as closet implies.

The LGBT community used to be misunderstood and treated unfairly. However, after years of fighting against discrimination and as modern society becomes more open-minded, people with different sexual orientation are more accepted and treated equally as others. For example, it has been possible to have same-sex marriage in the Netherlands since 2001. The LGBT community is also more open to let other people know their sexual orientations and be pround of themselves, as seen as annual pride parades in many countries. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Organ regeneration/regrowth

Image
  Living things are magical when it comes to the ability to repair and regrow. We need this ability to maintain the healthy functioning of our bodies so as to increase the chance of survival. Some animals have better regeneration ability than human, here is a video to show how salamander regenerates its limb: The salamander is known for its regeneration capacity. They can regrow the limb, heart, tail, brain, eye tissues, kidney and spinal cord. To understand how they do it, let's look at what stem cells are. Stem cells Our body is made up of different types of cell. Most cells have a specific function, such as red blood cells, nerve cells, and heart cells. Stem cells provide new cells for the body and replace lost or damaged cells. They can divide into new stem cells or specialised cells that made up other body parts. Image credit: Genome Research Limited There are 3 types of stem cell:  embryonic ,  adult , and  induced pluripotent  stem cells.  Embryonic ...
Read more

The Olympic Rings

Image
  The Tokyo 2020 Olympics finally starts after postponing for a year due to the pandemic. I realise that I do not know the meaning of the Olympic rings so I made a quick search on the internet. I thought each colour represents an element/value of the Olympic game, such as courage, braveness, respect etc.  The answer was simple: “The Olympic symbol expresses the activity of the Olympic Movement and represents the union of the five continents and the meeting of athletes from throughout the world at the Olympic Games.” (Olympic Charter, Rule 8) The rings were designed by Pierre de Coubertin in 1913. He is a French historian and the founder of the Olympic Movement . The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world, by educating youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind and mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play. It brings the world's athletes together at the sports festivals. Olympi...
Read more

Paper sizes

Image
My boyfriend and I went to a printing shop last month and saw a poster with different paper sizes, from A0 to A8. What do these numbers mean and how are they defined? Definition of A-series paper sizes The A-series paper follows the ISO 216 standard of writing paper and certain classes of printed matter. There are three main requirements: The length divided by the width (aspect ratio) is 1.4142 (√2). The A0 size has an area of 1 square meter. Each subsequent size is defined as the previous size cuts in half parallel to its shorter side. For instance, A1 has half of the area of A0 and it can be created by folding an A0 paper parallel to its shorter side. The dimension of an A0 paper is 841 mm x 1,189 mm to the nearest millimetre. An A1 paper has a  dimension of 594 mm x 841 mm. The image below compares different paper sizes in the A series. Image from Wikipedia The magic root 2 An advantage of the A-series paper is that it can be up/down scaled to other A-series sizes without any di...
Read more