He goes on to explain that in the period before World War II, gay people “did not speak of coming out of what we call ‘the gay closet’ but rather of coming out into what they called homosexual society or the gay world, a world neither so small nor so isolated, nor, often, so hidden as closet implies.” Chauncey draws on an example from a 1931 headline in the newspaper the Baltimore Afro-American, which announced “the coming out of new debutantes into homosexual society” at a ball referred to as a “frolic of the pansies.”
