Definition of "closeted"

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.

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

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

1971, Cynthia Ozick, “The Pagan Rabbi”, in Collected Stories, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, published 2006, page 12

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

1982, Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Penguin, published 1988, page 45

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.

2022 September 12, “Exploring the SCP Foundation: SCP-7000 - The Loser” (10:38 from the start), in The Exploring Series‎, retrieved 25 March 2023

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.

1766, Oliver Goldsmith, chapter X, in The Vicar of Wakefield‎, London: J.C. Nimmo, published 1886, page 68

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.

1920, Edith Wharton, chapter XI, in The Age of Innocence‎, New York: D. Appleton & Co., page 94

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

1924, Herman Melville, chapter 17, in Billy Budd‎, London: Constable & Co.

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

1985 January 25, Charles Irving, Hansard