Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong has been out as bisexual since long before it was remotely socially acceptable for a male celebrity (and even today, whether or not that’s “socially acceptable” is debatable). He’s also not afraid to speak up for trans kids, as the singer did in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times.
This Friday the pop-punk band releases Saviors, their 14th studio album and first album in four years. In a conversation with the Times, Armstrong spoke to the ways that he’s still weaving his queerness into his songwriting. Naturally, the newspaper asked him about Green Day’s opinions on the moral panic over trans youth, to which the frontman responded, “I just think they’re fucking close-minded.”
“It’s like people are afraid of their children,” he told the newspaper. “Why would you be afraid? Why don’t you let your kid just be the kid that they are?”
Unlike most interviews in which a journalist inexplicably asks an aging rock star about his opinions on trans people, this was actually kind of relevant to the conversation at hand. Armstrong had been speaking about a song on the new album, “Bobby Sox,” which is an ode to evenings at home watching TV with his wife. The first verse includes one of Armstrong’s sweet nothings to his wife: “Do you wanna be my girlfriend?”
“But then in the next verse, I thought I should flip the script,” the singer told the Times. “I’m kind of playing the character of the woman, but it also felt really liberating to sing, ‘Do you wanna be my boyfriend?’” he added, saying that the song “became more of a queer singalong.”
Armstrong also told the Times about a recent experience he’d had playing “Bobby Sox” for a friend around the same age as him, where the second verse “brought a tear to his eye.”
“Nowadays it’s more common for kids to be LGBTQ+, and there’s more support,” he said. “But for us, back in the day, that was like the beginning of when people were able to openly say things like that.”
That didn’t stop the frontman from alluding to his bisexuality in his lyrics, though. Dookie, the album that launched the band to fame and which turns 30 this year, was a watershed moment for dirtbag bisexual representation in music. “Basket Case,” which remains Green Day’s most streamed song on Spotify, similarly features a subversive pronoun switch-up in the second verse, with Armstrong singing, “I went to a whore / He said my life’s a bore.” On the same album, there’s “Coming Clean,” which the singer wrote about coming out of the closet.
Although the queerness of Green Day lyrics might have been overlooked back in the day, we’re so glad we live in a day and age where Billie Joe can get the credit he’s due as a bicon.
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