Stumbled over this thing a couple days ago, and it has the sort of horrible fascination that people mean when they say something is like a train wreck.

No Homophobes dot com scans Twitter for phrases like “no homo”, “faggot”, “that’s so gay”, “dyke” and several variations. In an attempt to be a “social mirror”, it tallies them in those four basic categories and displays the tweets below the counts.

Reading the tweets is really depressing. I have to keep reminding myself that its parameters select for some of the worst, so as a mirror it’s a bit warped, but still…

“Faggot” is the most popular, seems to get around 25-30 thousand hits per day. But it’s the “no homo” one that really strikes me. I guess I don’t run in the right social circles to be familiar with this turn of phrase, but apparently there are people so staggeringly terrified of being perceived as gay that they feel a need to point out they aren’t any time they show the slightest affection or even so much as compliment someone of the same sex.

I actually saw someone append “no homo” to a tweet saying he missed his brother. What the fuck is wrong here?

The stated goal of this project is to display how common casual homophobia is in popular language, and in my case at least it’s succeeded extremely well. Of course, now I don’t want to live on this planet anymore, but I suppose that’s not too big a deal since I seem to find a new reason to feel like that every day.