Once, at a screening at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, I saw the noir classic The Big Combo, directed in 1955 by Joseph H. Lewis.  “Combo” in the title means the same as the Syndicate or the Outfit, i.e., a big criminal organization, and in the film two of the Combo’s low-ranking hoods are noticeably attached to each other. They sleep in the same bedroom (in separate beds), they invariably act together, and the younger man, Mingo, obviously depends emotionally on the older man, Fante.   Sometimes they reach out hands to each other almost caressingly, or at least reassuringly.  The two need reassurance because they have gunned down a witness and are on the run from the cops; the big boss has stashed them away in a hotel basement.  You can watch the whole film on Youtube (and should do so: it’s excellent).  At the Museum screening I was struck by something Fante says an hour and fifteen minutes into the film:

The line “What I’m worried about is gettin’ out of this hotel. The cops ’ll be lookin’ for us in every closet” produced a big laugh from the knowing New York City audience, who took it for granted that Fante and Mingo were homosexual lovers and that “closet” was a covert allusion to their sexuality.

Could this be true?  Were the meanings we now attach to “in the closet” and “out of the closet” current in 1955?  The answer is a resounding “maybe.”  “Closet” itself is a very old word.  Before it denominated the tiny cupboardish room not big enough for all your clothes it meant any small private chamber, especially one devoted to prayer or study. People used to talk about plays written “for the closet,” that is, written to be read privately, not performed onstage.  The OED traces the phrase “skeleton in the closet,” meaning a secret hidden away but bound to come out sooner or later, to the mid-nineteenth century, and from there it’s but a short step to “closet” referring to hidden homosexuality.  The OED cites both “in the closet” and “out of the closet” in quotations from the mid 1960s.  Perhaps The Big Combo supplies a slightly earlier instance.

As a matter of sociological fact, were there pairs of criminals who were also homosexual lovers?  The answer here is a definite “yes.” Often the pair consisted of an older and a younger man, as with Fante and Mingo, and the younger man, especially when really young, had a special name, “gunsel.” The word sounds like it comes from having or using a gun, but this folk etymology, though plausible, is wrong, as folk etymologies nearly always are.  “Gunsel” actually derives from the Yiddish genzel and the German Gänslein (“little goose”), and American tramps and criminals have been using the word for more than a hundred years, alternating it with the closely related term “punk.” Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep features a youth of this type, called there a “punk,” and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon has another one.  “Keep that gunsel away from me,” Hammett’s private eye Sam Spade says angrily, “. . . I’ll kill him. I don’t like him . . . I’ll kill him the first time he gets in my way.”  Here’s what the scene looks and sounds like in John Huston’s 1941 film version:

Hard-boiled types like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Hammett’s Spade are far from being in the closet with their homophobia, and they react to gunsels with a knee-jerk, instinctive, violent antipathy that nowadays is hard to take.