Homo

Short for homosexual: a slur for a gay man since at least 1923, later a general insult for anyone weak, and a word gay men now use with irony.

Homo is short for homosexual, and it has spent a century as a dead-simple insult for a gay man. It sounds almost clinical, a clipped piece of a medical word, and that is part of its sting: it turns you into a category. Among gay men it is also a cheerful, self-mocking word, the way you might call your friends a bunch of homos on the way to brunch.

It is milder than fag or faggot, but not by much when it is yelled across a street. Tone is everything.

Where it comes from

Homo is a clipping of homosexual. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds it for a gay man in 1923, in Nels Anderson's study The Hobo, about the men who rode the American rails, and again in the 1930s and 1940s in American and New Zealand writing, often as a taunt. It carried the doctor's label into the street.

From the 1960s it also became a general insult for anyone weak or lame, with no sexuality implied, especially in American campus slang. That double use, gay man and loser, is exactly why it hurt: the word said they were the same thing.

No homo

The best-known modern spin is "no homo", tacked onto a sentence to cancel any hint of gayness: "I love you, man, no homo." It is mostly a straight-guy reflex, and it says a lot about how much work some men put into not seeming gay. Gay men tend to answer it with an eye roll, or with "full homo", which is the reclaimed, campy reply.

Taking it back and where it still hurts

Like queer and fag, homo has been partly reclaimed: gay men use it about themselves with irony and affection, and in a group of friends it can feel almost cozy. But it is still a common slur, and it still lands as one when a straight man says it with a sneer. Its use as a word for anything weak also keeps the old idea alive: that being gay is the opposite of being a man. That is why many of us flinch when we hear it from outside, and laugh when we say it to each other.

Close relatives are fag, the British poof, and older words like fairy.

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