The connotations of homophobic insults have explicit negative meanings. Though, if those insults are not read or perceived as homophobic, then the discrimination they spread – although comdemned by actual society’s (legal) standards - can not be counter. How does the sign avoid this reading while still producing oppression ? At stake here is what gets in the definition of homophobia and how this confers power to the language. Summering up the work of Bastien-Charlebois, we first see the limits of the term “homophobia” itself. Secondly, we look at a situation where the interpretation failed to identify the negative aspects of the meaning. Then we use Barthes’s concept of myth and Butler’s performativity to extrapolate on the power of the words.