Question 1

What does “no homo” mean?

Accepted Answer

A disclaimer added to something you just said, stating that you did not mean it as sexual interest in another man.

Question 2

Where does “no homo” come from?

Accepted Answer

East Harlem, New York, reported in oral currency from the early 1990s and carried into wide circulation by the Harlem rapper Cam'ron and the Diplomats crew in the early 2000s. Jonah Weiner traced it to East Harlem in Slate in 2009; Joshua Brown, writing in the Journal of Homosexuality in 2011, situates it in hip-hop lyrics of the 1990s and reads it as a defensive move inside a competitive verbal culture built on signifying, where an inadvertently gay line is material for an opponent. It is not internet slang, though the internet is where it spread furthest and where it eventually became a joke about itself. The in-group and out-group uses came apart quickly: among the men who originated it, it was a housekeeping phrase attached to ordinary warmth; once it left, it was widely used as a way to say something about gay people while claiming not to have. The critique — that the phrase treats homosexuality as a hazard to be disclaimed, and that a man who needs the tag is admitting how narrow his permitted range is — is well established and is part of the record. Gay speakers have used it too, sometimes to defuse a compliment paid to a straight man, sometimes ironically at the phrase's own expense.