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Just… ugh. That’s how I felt when I saw the numbers laid out in front of me on this website called NoHomophobes.com. The site is keeping track of how often the terms “so gay,” “faggot,” “dyke” and “no homo” are used on Twitter. It counts them in real time, also having the tweets pop up in a feed at the bottom.

You can look at today, last week, or all time. I can’t even really report a concrete number to you for today, because as I write it, it just keeps climbing. Combined for all the terms, there are so far more than 20,000 tweets of these today – and it’s barely the afternoon.

If you feel uncomfortable reading those numbers and tweets, well frankly, I think you should. The fact that this is happening literally every few seconds is pretty staggering.

Consider the fact that this is only looking at only four derogatory terms on only one social networking site… I can only imagine how many similar things people saying across not only other social media platforms, but also in spoken conversations. I mean, there’s no way to measure that but we can only imagine that those already big numbers keep multiplying.

It reminded me of some PSAs from ThinkB4YouSpeak.com from a couple years ago. If you remember, they had celebs like Hilary Duff and Wanda Sykes speaking up when people were using the term “That’s so gay” as a substitute for stupid or weird.

NoHomophobes.com takes a similar approach, summing up their mission as such: “This website is designed as a social mirror to show the prevalence of casual homophobia in our society.” Just as the site points out that sometimes people use these terms without really thinking, I’m going to hope that a lot of these users aren’t thinking about the implications of their language. Maybe they didn’t intend those words to be used as a direct attack, but the fact is that even saying things like that in casual conversation speaks to cultural attitudes toward people because of sexual orientation.

Let this remind you to not only to be mindful of what you say, but to be aware of how much these words are still widely used. Everyone has the right to be respected and free to be themselves without judgment, but when we have a society where these kinds of phrases are the norm, that’s not cool. You can definitely speak up to take conversations in a different direction away from homophobia. The website is asking people to use the hashtag #NoHomophobes if they want to talk about it on Twitter.

There are so many creative words to use to express how you’re feeling. Don’t use ones that marginalize a person. Agreed? Okay, good.

Are you surprised by how often these terms are used on Twitters? Do you ever speak up about people using terms like this? Tell me in the comments!

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