Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
to come out as gay

to come out as gay

2 6.0
Tell other people that you are gay
  • phrasal verb
translation icon : salir del armario
  • When I was 17, I finally decided to come out as gay to my friends and family.
  • star came out as gay

What were some of the challenges, What were some of the lessons about love, about life that you learn from coming out as gay?

Examples

  • In January 2009, Kurek came out as gay to everyone in his life: friends, family, and church.

    Blog text (4)

  • And then I, too, had some high school friends come out as gay, and I really started to wonder about things.

    Blog text (1)

  • But yeah, basically I came out as gay when I was in my last year of high school.

  • His son had come out as gay.

    Fiction book (1997)

  • I came out as gay last semester.

    Blog text (30)

  • He's like, Your song was the song that helped me come out as gay, and I listen to it every single morning.

  • He also came out as gay.

    Blog text (24)

  • He came out as gay when he was in high school, and he said that he has long been open about his sexuality.

    Blog text (3)

  • Ryan Andresen had completed the requirements to earn his Eagle Scout award, but his father, Eric, said the Scoutmaster told him his son wouldn't get it because he recently came out as gay.

    Blog text (7)

  • So explains Wade Davis, a former NFL cornerback who came out as gay last year after playing with the Tennessee Titans, and later with the Seattle Seahawks and the Washington Redskins, from 2000-2004.

    Blog text (1)

Synonyms

to come out
vsto come out as gay
217 6.5

To tell people you are gay, lesbian, or transgender

is limited to revealing homosexuality rather than including gender identity
to come out of the closet
vsto come out as gay
26 7.1

To tell people you are gay, lesbian, or bisexual

often reveals sexual orientation publicly for the first time rather than after hiding it

How Public

to reveal
∞ 2.3
to come out as gay
2 6.0

Surface Forms

come out as gay infinitive
came out as gay past
come out as gay past participle
coming out as gay present participle
comes out as gay third person singular

Morphology

come + out + as + gay

The components 'come' + 'out' + 'as' + 'gay' hint at revealing an identity (come out = reveal; as gay = in the role of being gay), so part of the meaning is inferable from the parts. However, 'come out' is a conventionalized phrasal verb with sociocultural and idiomatic nuance (and 'out' as 'to expose' is not an obvious verb sense for all learners), so the full pragmatic meaning may not be fully predictable to a B1 learner without prior exposure.

Etymology

Come out as gay comes from the picture of someone leaving a private place: to come out of a 'closet' where they kept their true self hidden. So, saying someone came out as gay means 'to publicly reveal that one is homosexual'.