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Tyler Seguin apologizes after ‘no homo’ tweet

You know how it is. You're sitting in your bed, it's late at night, you listen to a friend's track. You think it's good -- so good it gives you goosebumps. So that's what you tweet.

Buuuuuut just in case something thinks the goosebumps are because you're totally gay for your friend, you tag it with "no homo", which should cover that assumption just fine.

Or maybe you don't do that, because that's really not okay.

It's a lesson that Tyler Seguin learned Monday night. After retweeting a friend's song, he tweeted (and then quickly deleted) the following:

Again, that's an actual tweet from Tyler Seguin, and no, unfortunately, he isn't a member of The Lonely Island.

For the uninitiated (you lucky people, you), the phrase "No Homo" has been around since the early 90s, mainly in street slang and hip hop. It is, as you can imagine, tacked onto the end of sentences to quickly establish that no homosexual intent was meant by whatever was expressed.

It implies that whatever you said in advance of "no homo" is somehow inherently a gay thing to say (seriously, goosebumps?), and that there's something wrong with that. The phrase is rooted in creating a needless distinction between the homosexual (icky!) and the heterosexual (acceptable!). It's a jittery, instant disclaimer that that exposes a childish fear of being seen as a closeted homosexual. Unless you're espousing your preference for 1% milk, "no homo", it's a little homophobic.

That in mind, Seguin was blasted for the tweet almost immediately, which is why it was gone so soon after it appeared in his timeline.

Not long after, the 21-year-old -- and his age is probably worth keeping in mind amongst all this -- sent out the apology the misstep called for.

Good call. Apologizing is a whole lot easier than making the subversive claim that the term is actually a way to challenge outmoded standards of masculinity. Tough to fit that nuanced argument in a tweet.

On the bright side, Seguin probably just provided a little material for those You Can Play rookie seminars.

And really, like we needed to be reassured that Tyler Seguin likes women.