Ho Yay

"I've never understood this infatuation with Patrick Swayze."

"That's unfair. I appreciate the man's work. The wild, animal Swayze of Road House. The sensitive, vulnerable Swayze of Ghost. Or that Dirty Dancing bad-apple my father forbids me to see."

"That went to kind of a weird place."

- Tycho, Gabe, Penny Arcade - Purge 2: The Purgeoning.

So, you have two very close male (or female, in rare cases) friends who do everything together and are generally pretty chummy.

Too chummy.

Ho Yay is short for Homoeroticism, Yay!, a concept that argues that there must be a subtext behind any platonic male or female friendship - or, in some cases, just in one character. These characters aren't gay, but the script, the acting, and the music, among other things, help make it seem that way...

More prominent Ho Yays include Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, Dr. Gregory House and Dr. James Wilson, Captain Kirk and Spock of Star Trek, Mohinder Suresh and Sylar/Mohinder Suresh and Matt Parkman on Heroes, J.D. and Turk on Scrubs, any movie in which Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play the main role, pretty much any character in the Harry Potter canon, Denny Crane and Alan Shore, Horatio Hornblower and Archie Kennedy, Naruto and Sasuke, Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert, Merlin and Arthur of the BBC's Merlin, Jay and Silent Bob of Kevin Smith's View Askewniverse (and, come to think of it, several other pairs of characters in those movies - Bartleby and Loki may or may not fall under this heading because they technically have no gender), and, disturbingly, Dean and Sam Winchester (Supernatural).

Yeah, it's common.

A very common cliche exploited by slashfic writers.

Ho Nay!
A less-common reversal of the Ho Yay phenomenon, Ho Nay supporters use it to argue against slash pairings, under the theory that any canon character without a demonstrated same-sex love interest must be heterosexual. Unfortunately, this is also used to argue against the sexuality of characters who are demonstrably homosexual or bisexual in canon, under the guise of "Oh, that's just good buddy stuff."