But Weiner's piece made me think about something that's been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while: Eminem, gayness, and Dr. Dre. Eminem has a deservedly unsavory reputation for the ways he talks about women and gay people, and that reputation led me to avoid his music for quite some time. But whether in "My Dad's Gone Crazy," where Em raps "I'm out the closet, I been lying my ass off / All this time, me and Dre been fucking with hats off," or in "Just Lose It," when Eminem goes to a bar looking to blow off steam and ends up hitting on Dre ("DRE! / Beer Goggles! Blind! / I'm just tryin' to unwind."), his ability to play with people's perceptions of that relationship has always seemed interesting to me.
Those lyrics aren't actually a declaration of sexual orientation. For what it's worth, I think Eminem probably is straight: no one would go so much drama with his ex-wife if it was just a sham marriage. But I'm not sure he likes women very much. These lyrics always place the implication of sexual contact between Eminem and Dr. Dre in the context of some kind of derangement: he's gone mad, he's drunk. But Eminem's identity in his songs always exists in a complicated web of false identities, double-negatives, lies, truths, myths. He might be lying when he says he was lying about his heterosexuality, but he might not. He might only have hit on Dre because he's drunk, but maybe when he's drunk when he's doing what he really wants in the first place. "No homo" denies the possibility of same-sex sexual contact altogether, while Eminem toys with the idea, creates scenarios, denies them with a wink. He's one hell of a strange, conflicted messenger. But I'm more interested in the way he explores the idea of his own sexual orientation in some of his songs, than in Lil' Wayne's use of "no homo" to extend a rhyme.