Once it acquired a name, the phenomenon now known as “the closet” could be studied and understood. If homosexuals in the age of the black and women’s liberation movements were beginning to see that they, too, were an oppressed minority, they also understood that there were significant differences between the ways girls or members of minority communities grow up and the way gay children grow up. Girls—most of them—learn about being a woman from a mother. A black child can learn how to cope with racism from parents and community. But most gay children are born into heterosexual families, and
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