John Waters Says Eminem Isn’t Homophobic, Cites the Rapper’s NSFW Wedding Gift to Elton John

Eminem has spent much of his career fielding criticism over homophobic lyrics, but John Waters is making a point of separating the person from the persona.

On Wednesday, May 13, Waters appeared on the Las Culturistas podcast with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang and brought up one of the stranger celebrity gift exchanges in recent memory: the wedding present Eminem gave Elton John and David Furnish.

“He’s not homophobic,” Waters, who has openly spoken about his own sexuality, said of Em. “He gave Elton John and David Furnish matching gold c–k rings for their wedding.”

That image alone is enough to stop you for a second. Elton and Furnish married in December 2014, and the gift clearly stuck with John. In 2019, he told The Guardian that the rings “sit there, like the crown jewels, in this beautiful box on satin cushions,” adding, “They’re wonderful to look at. … They’re kind of sacrosanct. The fact they came from Eminem makes it even better.”

The relationship between Eminem and Elton goes back to their surprise pairing on “Stan” at the 2001 Grammy Awards, a performance that helped reframe how some listeners understood Eminem’s public image. He later told MTV in 2004 that he did not know John was gay when they first met. “I didn’t know anything about his personal life. I didn’t really care,” he said. “But being that he was gay and he had my back, I think it made a statement in itself saying that he understood where I was coming from.”

That distinction between Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers has long been part of the conversation around Eminem, especially when his lyrics drew criticism. In 2013, after backlash over “Rap God,” he told Rolling Stone: “Well, look, I’ve been doing this s–t for, what, 14 years now? And I think people know my personal stance on things and the personas that I create in my music. And if someone doesn’t understand that by now, I don’t think there’s anything I can do to change their mind about it.”

Still, as his career has gone on, the line has not always felt so clean. Eminem later said he regretted using a homophobic slur while dissing Tyler, The Creator on Kamikaze‘s “The Fall,” where he called the Grammy-winning rapper a “f—t, b—h” in 2018.

Speaking to Sway in a YouTube interview, he said, “I think the word that I called him on that song was one of the things where I felt like, ‘This might be too far.’ Because in my quest to hurt him, I realized that I was hurting a lot of other people by saying it. It was one of the things that I kept going back to and going, ‘I don’t feel right with this.’”