OK, thanks. I did a quick search after the topic sprang up, and I got nothing. (Not that I dug into it with any sort of determination.)
The affluent Western democracies have gotten very accepting of homosexuality, and even transsexuality to some degree. But this is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it's isolated to a fairly small number of "enlightened" countries. Such deviations from the hetero norm have been frowned upon as a general rule. Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions reject it outright. The "closet" has been pretty much a practical necessity in the past, and still is in many places. I think we are so used to this acceptance here now that we don't realize just how much it offends the sensibilities of more traditionalist or oppressive societies.