An Old Person’s Guide to “No Homo”

One of my favorite things about hiphop
Is our everlasting love of language
One of my least favorite things about hiphop
Is our everlasting fear of being gay
So I guess I shouldn't be suprised that one of our favorite slang terms
Combines our tremendous passion for word play with our tremendous insecurity about sexuality
"NO HOMO"
The no homo phenomenon is an old thing
A sad
Old thing
But it's still a new thing to a lot of old people
So as a public service
I will now present a brief history of no homo
The phrase no homo which traces back to an earlier slang word 'pause'
Is a defense mechanism utilized by young men who are not only afraid of being gay or looking gay
They're actually afraid that the words they speak might sound linguistically gay

[Comment: Timm See]
It's basically when someone says something that could be even vaguely construed as being homo-erotic or homosexual
Someone will put no homo either before or after the phrase

No homo was first popularized by New York's Dipset crew
Led by the rapper Cam'ron
Who was known for being clever with words
And also for wearing a lot of pink
And wanted to be absolutely certain that nobody inferred anything from that

And since Dipset's fanbase is made up largely of hip hop bloggers like myself
Who also tend to love playing with words while feeling insecure about our geekiness
The blog world quickly fell in love with no homo
And turned it into a never-ending contest to see who could use it the most often and in the most outlandish ways
And at this point a lot of people who who didn't intend to be homophobic
Were still attracted to the comedic device and the absurdity of it
And they felt like they could use no homo without being anti-gay

[Comment: Mazzi]
It's just a juvenile game we play
It's no disrespect to anybody at all

[Comment: Timm See]
It's like so absurd and stupid
That it's mad funny

And some people argue that when they take it to such a silly extreme
They're really critiquing and satirizing homophobia instead of promoting it
So the question is how do you decide when if ever it's okay to play the no homo game
Me personally
I've always been in the anti no homo camp
It felt like it was offensive no matter how you said it
But even I have to admit that whenever I have a conversation about it
I always get tempted to start playing the game
Even when I'm in the middle of rejecting and denouncing it
And I tell myself that I'm only saying it to make fun of people who really say it
And I'm with my friends and I know that they know that I don't mean it like that
So it's just harmless fun
But then once you start
It gets really hard to stop
And you find yourself saying it every 10 seconds for the rest of the night
And you don't really remember why you started saying it
And even though you tell yourself that you can stop anytime
The truth is
You are now a no homo addict
Don't let this happen to you
I'm not gonna to say that nobody should ever say it
Cause just like with any other word you really got to judge on a case-by-case basis
But as a general rule
If you are not the original target of an insult
You can't be the one to reclaim it
And nine times out of 10
If you are not sure whether you should use it
You probably shouldn't
Plus, it's like 5 years old and it's kind of played out
So if you never heard of no homo before you saw this video
Just forget I brought it up
Forget that it came out of my mouth
I'm not gonna say it