Magazine Article	Articles Archive

As Laura Schlessinger's new television talk show flopped and efforts to suppress her homophobic broadcast rants began to fade, recording artist Eminem seemed poised to succeed "Dr. Laura" as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination's chief bęte noire. When the membership of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences nominated his feisty, triple-platinum Marshall Mathers LP for four Grammy awards, Eminem's place at the top of GLAAD's hit list was assured.

On February 22, the day after the 2001 Grammy presentations, the gay watchdog organization issued a press release headlined "GLAAD Puts Hate Lyrics Debate Center Stage at the Grammys." In fact, the Grammy producers had largely sidestepped that debate. Inside L.A.'s Staples Center, the "hate lyrics" issue was like a semi-acknowledged elephant obstructing one end of a very large parlor. The only place where it took full possession of the stage was across the street, at an underattended protest rally vilifying Eminem's purportedly misogynistic, anti-gay, violent output.

View our poll archive

By the time Eminem performed his song "Stan"-- with guest vocals by the openly gay Sir Elton John-- few demonstrators remained outside. The Marshall Mathers LP captured three Grammys, but the GLAAD-fueled furor may have cost Eminem the prize for Album of the Year, which went to Steely Dan's less controversial Two Against Nature. For his support of Eminem, Elton John-- recipient last year of GLAAD's Vito Russo humanitarian award for his efforts on behalf of gay rights-- was denounced as a traitor.

The lyrics that had stirred up a hornet's nest of censorious acrimony were scattered throughout The Marshall Mathers LP, but particularly concentrated in two of his angriest tracks. "Kill You," an enraged response to his detractors, includes the lines, "You faggots keep eggin' me on/Till I have you at knifepoint, then you beg me to stop?" In "Criminal," speaking as his dark alter ego Slim Shady, he gay-baits:

My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge/That'll stab you in the head/Whether you're a fag or lez/Or the homosex, hermaph or trans-a-vest/Pants or dress-- Hate fags? The answer's yes./Homophobic? Nah, you're just heterophobic,/Starin' at my jeans, watchin' my genitals bulgin' (Ooh!)/That's my motherfuckin' balls, you better let go of 'em;/They belong in my scrotum, you'll never get hold of 'em./Hey, it's me, Versace,/Whoops, somebody shot me!/And I was just checkin' the mail/Get it? Checkin' the "male..."?

His follow-up remark, "Relax, I like gay men," is eclipsed by this diatribe. "He's all about pushing buttons," bassist Chris Freeman of the queercore band Pansy Division points out. "His mystique is, you don't know if he's telling the truth or not."

Eminem's homophobic riffs are inseparable from the homoeroticism that runs through his work. In the online magazine nerve.com, Mark Simpson observes, "...the rather important point that the protestors appear to have overlooked is, Sure, Eminem's music is violently homophobic. It also happens to be violently homosexual. The two facts are not necessarily in contradiction.... Actually, in the world beyond the Care Bear sexuality of GLAAD, they're inseparable. It might even be the case that the Grammy didn't go to Em precisely because his lyrics are too queer."

In fact, if the frequently shirtless, crotch-grabbing, bleached-blond, 28-year-old rapper auditioned for work as a dancer at the Gaiety Burlesque, he would be hired on the spot. In photographs illustrating his book Angry Blonde-- whose odd title, as Simpson notes, employs the feminine form of blond-- Eminem appears in Catholic schoolgirl drag, and in the smoldering come-fuck-me poses of an East Village hustler. "He's very pretty," Boy George recently told Wall of Sound. "Maybe that's why he's so paranoid."

The Marshall Mathers album opens with the salvo: "Slim Shady doesn't give a fuck what you think, and if you don't like it, you can suck his fucking cock." In Eminem's lyrics, explicit references to gay sex are common; blunt descriptions of straight sex, apart from a warped fantasy about raping his mother, are rare. A sketch intended to ridicule Connecticut rapper Ken Kaniff features orgiastic gay fellatio. "Stan," a song about a fan's obsession with his idol, powerfully depicts one man's unrequited love for another.

Elton John is not the only gay or gay-friendly artist willing to defend Eminem. New York-based singer Christine Donnelly, who has worked in gay clubs and appeared in the long-running queer musical serial Hot Keys, calls Eminem "incredibly gifted." Chris Freeman says, "I think Eminem is a genius. He really has a handle on what he's doing and he's done it superbly. I don't how involved he is in the actual production of his albums-- but his records are amazing."

Underclass growls

Eminem, whose professional name reflects his initials, started out as Marshall Mathers III of Kansas City and Detroit, a talented white kid from the wrong side of the tracks. He dropped out of high school in 1989 and had one child by his now-estranged wife. While holding down menial jobs, he became an emcee in Detroit hip-hop clubs.

In 1998 he won Source magazine's Unsigned Hype award, and was discovered by rap impresario Dr. Dre, a former member of the now-defunct NWA (Niggaz With Attitude), who produced his second and third albums. Responding to Mathers's explosive combination of verbal facility and performance élan, Dre surrounded him with production values and sophisticated backup, and groomed his public persona into a package whose appeal cuts across race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Some queers appear to want to be Eminem. Thousands of young gay men from all social strata cultivate his repertoire of hip-hop fashion conventions: baggy pants slung down to crotch level, oversized track jerseys, hooded jackets, chunky sneakers, backward baseball caps, wool watch caps pulled low on the forehead. (This "thug" look has been described as "convenience-store-stickup chic.") At New York's gay hip-hop venues, Marshall Mathers himself would be hard to distinguish from the Eminem lookalikes cruising the premises.

Products of African-American culture, hip-hop and its music have always attracted white fans and performers. In Hip-Hop America, Nelson George recalls, "The first rap hit, 'Rapper's Delight' [by Sugar Hill Gang, 1979] was voted single-of-the-year by the National Association of Record Merchandisers, hardly a collective interested in celebrating singles sold just to black teenagers." It would be a mistake to assume that hip-hop buyers, white and black, are exclusively straight.

Gay hip-hop fans now have their own clubs and DJs. Queer rap artists include Houston's Miss Money, New York's Morplay, and San Francisco's Rainbow Flava; gay rap groups exist in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Austria. The international hip-hop scene's support system includes gay sound technicians, record producers, managers, designers, and roadies (some of whom serve homophobic artists). On the Internet, websites like gayhiphop.com and phatfamily.org proliferate. In a probably authentic 1997 interview published by One Nut magazine, an anonymous black rap star discussed his homosexuality; speculation about his identity has pointed toward almost every major black rapper.

Rap is political music. Its appeal to queer communities echoes its appeal to non-white audiences. "It's music for, about, and by disenfranchised people... people trying to rise above prejudice and other disadvantages," says bisexual journalist Jayelle Lukash. "Hip-hip offers us models of people who take what they need for themselves, and don't debase themselves begging for permission."

Many of those who protest Eminem's music most vehemently have scarcely listened to it, and have given no thought to its actual message. Hip-hop culture, gay and straight, black and white, is proletarian; its music is a conduit for underclass rage. On his Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers LPs, Eminem paints an apocalyptic picture of Detroit, a industrial wasteland where "we don't do drivebys, we park in front of houses and shoot." Songs like "Amityville" expose social conditions that are not supposed to exist in America.

Rappers' expressions of anger and defiance do, on occasion, veer toward scapegoating. "Eminem is documenting inequities, but he's siding with the bullies," contends Pansy Division founder Jon Ginoli.

In pop music at large, such tendencies are hardly new. In the '80s, the kick-ass, hard-rock Gun 'n' Roses-- a band with a powerful working-class sensibility-- offended racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities with their "One in a Million." In one notorious passage, lead singer Axl Rose growled:

Immigrants and faggots
They make no sense to me
They come to our country
And think they'll do as they please
Like start some mini-Iran
Or spread some fuckin' disease...

"I wasn't coming down on gays," Rose disingenuously explained to Rolling Stone, "I was coming down on an element of gays... I've had my share of dealings with aggressive gays, and I was bothered by it."

Gay indignation has not always been justified. In 1985, some activists called for a broadcast boycott of the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms because, in the song "Money for Nothing," a fictional appliance salesman sees a rock musician performing on MTV and sneers, "See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup..../That little faggot, he's a millionaire." The fact that the song targeted the character's ignorance was lost on many who heard the word faggot but were deaf to its context.

But in the straight hip-hop world, the word is seldom used benignly. Faggot or fag is the all-purpose insult of choice. Whenever a rapper wants to insult a rival artist, a disrespectful acquaintance, or a errant business associate, he reaches for the f-word. When Eminem disparages white rap groups such as New Kids on the Block ("they sucked a lot of dick") in homophobic terms, he is following the lead of Mike Tyson accusing LL Cool J of acting like a "homo," or NWA members ragging one another after the group's breakup.

In "No Vaseline," Ice Cube sings of his former NWA colleagues: "Eazy's dick is smellin' like MC Ren's shit.../You little maggot; Eazy E turned faggot...." Eazy E, in turn, calls Dr. Dre a "fag" in 1994's "187um Dre It's On," provoking him with "Back in '86 you wore pumps and mascara... once a bitch, always a bitch...." This is the homophobia of uptight young men adopting public postures of sexual disavowal.

Racial hot button

GLAAD has never targeted African-American rappers in the fierce and splashy way it has targeted Eminem. Anti-gay slurs by black artists range from mild, wry put-downs of gays by performers like Public Enemy's Chuck D ("from what I know, the parts don't fit") to homophobic tirades by truculent "gangsta" rappers. Perhaps the nastiest and most obsessively anti-gay rap group is DMX, whose hatred pours out in songs like "Get Me a Dog:" "Rrrrrr arf arf, what the deal/Well, in the back wit ya faggot ass face down./Lucky that you breathin', but you dead from the waist down...."

In a 1994 op-ed piece in the New York Times, Michael Eric Dyson of the Afro-American studies program at Brown University condemned the failure of most black leaders to address the homophobia of gangsta rap. "'Fags' and 'dykes' are prominent in the genre's vocabulary of rage," he noted, "and black leaders' failure to make this an issue only reinforces the inferior, invisible status of gay men and lesbians in black cultural institutions, including the church.... This music has embarrassed black bourgeois culture and exposed its polite sexism and its disregard for gay men and lesbians."

In the early '90s, homophobic bigotry in pop lyrics may have reached its nadir. Jamaican dancehall artist Buju Banton (Mark Myrie), whose music fused reggae with hip-hop, was 17 when he recorded "Boom Bye Bye," a song about the joys of blowing away gay men-- "batty boys" in Jamaica talk. ("Faggots have to run/Or get a bullet in the head./Get an automatic, or an Uzi instead;/Shoot them now, let us shoot them.") When Banton sings, "Dem haffi dead" ("They have to die"), gunshots appear in the sound mix.

Advocates of content regulation quickly discovered that "Boom Bye Bye" lent credibility to their cause. Many retailers refused to stock the record. After Details magazine quoted a defense of Banton by fellow Jamaican artist Shabba Ranks ("In Jamaica, if a homosexual is being found in the community, we stone him to death"), the manager of a Philadelphia branch of the normally anti-censorship Tower Records refused to carry Ranks's new single. Some gay free-speech advocates reassessed their First Amendment absolutism and decided Banton and Ranks had overstepped the boundaries of freedom of expression.

The current chief lobbyist of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a lesbian, Hilary Rosen, whose partner is the Human Rights Campaign's executive director Elizabeth Birch. While Rosen professes to oppose censorship (and described Eminem as "a legitimate artist" in a recent Advocate interview), she told a US Senate subcommittee in 1997 that she supports "efforts to have retailers restrict sales of albums to consumers under the age of 17." She has steadily defended the Parental Advisory labels affixed to records deemed to contain problematic language.

But such labels are the record industry's sop to Congress, a diversion created in 1986 to avoid government interference and placate Tipper Gore's moral rearmament lobby, the Parents Music Resource Center. Beginning as stickers slapped onto records and tapes bound for retail shelves, they are now printed directly on album covers. These labels are purely voluntary and represent no industry standard of age-appropriateness. Their application is wildly inconsistent. Upon their introduction in 1986, they quickly engendered unofficial blacklists and official censorship initiatives.

Calls for a more codified parental warning system have recently gathered intensity, as politicians have sought to blame phenomena like school shootings on violent imagery and hate speech in popular culture. On June 12, the opening day of New York's 2001 Hip-Hop Summit, Congressman Earl Hillard (D.-Alabama) proposed that the RIAA adopt music ratings based on the MPAA' s movie rating system. The scheme is being touted as an alternative to censors' interventions, though the MPAA ratings have had the effect of encouraging censorship. Speaking for the RIAA, Hilary Rosen says, "We regard [the proposed ratings] as unnecessary and impractical," and calls Parental Advisory labels "a rating system we are satisfied with."

At Congressional hearings held during the 2000 Presidential campaign, Democratic Senator and Vice-Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman described popular entertainment as "the culture of carnage." Lynne Cheney, the wife of George W. Bush's running mate, turned up at the same session to read lyrics from Eminem's "Kill You." Lieberman had previously joined forces with right-wing homophobe William Bennett to present a series of "Silver Sewer" awards to various media outlets (CBS, Fox TV) for achievements in "cultural pollution." Cheney, who has grudgingly acknowledged having a lesbian daughter, is almost unique among Republican voices in condemning Eminem's homophobia as strongly as his scabrous imagery.

In campaigning against Eminem and others, Lynne Cheney and executive director Joan Garry of GLAAD use similar rhetoric. Both deplore government censorship while demanding that record labels like Eminem's Interscope drop certain performers and avoid signing others; that record producers muzzle their artists; and that broadcast media and concert venues deny certain music airplay and performance exposure. Both favor industry-operated ratings schemes tailored to their personal biases. "I certainly understand the benefits of the existing ratings system," Garry said in 1999 of rocky efforts to impose such a system on TV-- before going on to denounce a proposed Homosexual Content rating.

"Corporate censorship is just as effective as governmental censorship, really," says Jayelle Lukash. "If you're a teen in a small town and GLAAD's pressured the one decent local radio station to stop playing most everything that's interesting, and the only place you can go for CDs is WalMart, which censors records, well, you don't have much access to media."

Ms. Garry, who has picketed the MTV Video Music Awards, was a founding staff member of MTV and later an employee of Showtime Networks; her principal qualification for leadership of GLAAD was her media background. Officially, GLAAD's mission is "promoting and ensuring fair, accurate, and inclusive representation of individuals and events in all media...." The organization makes gestures toward education and debate. Its most visible actions, however, are steeped in corporate celebrity culture: giving awards to good celebrities (Ellen DeGeneres, Harvey Fierstein); casting bad celebrities (Eminem, Laura Schlessinger) into the outer darkness; and bullying people into compliance with an affluent liberal's vision of tolerance that brushes aside such inconvenient categories as class.

In their perception of Marshall Mathers as a nasty prole, many of his critics half-consciously sense what he is really about. "Eminem's trying to reflect what he sees as middle America," says Chris Freeman. "He's saying this is middle America-- like it or not." Much of middle America doesn't like it. But it's often difficult to tell which end of middle America the voices of condemnation-- like those whose complaints about airplay of "The Real Slim Shady" led the FCC to penalize radio stations in Wisconsin and Colorado-- are coming from.

Jon Ginoli, whose assessment of Eminem is less favorable than that of fellow Pansy Division member Chris Freeman, believes the rapper's critics have taken the wrong approach. "As much as I hate Eminem," Ginoli insists, "I believe censorship is absolutely the wrong response. I think it's right to protest and write letters to the editor; I don't think it's right to prevent him from performing or to prevent radio stations from playing his songs. Persuasion always works better than censorship."

Jayelle Lukash, who is active in the Florida hip-hop scene, has been waging a "Hip-Hoppers Against Homophobia" lavender-ribbon campaign on the Internet, stressing that peer pressure and dedication to queer expression are the best answers to bigotry. As gay free-speech advocate Jonathan Rauch states in his book The Kindly Inquisitors, proactive responses to hatred are far more useful than attempts to punish speech. "No hypothesis," he writes, "has been laid to rest by suppressing it. The only way to kill a bad idea is by exposing it and supplanting it with better ones."

In 1985, when disco diva Donna Summer made public statements that revealed her homophobia, some people demanded a ban on her songs. Gay British rockers Jimmy Somerville and Marc Almond simply joined forces to record a cover of her classic "I Feel Love," giving her material a queer subversive spin. Sometimes tribute is the best revenge.