The Unsung Queerness of Green Day Lyrics

This is Everyone Is Gay, a column by Niko Stratis on gender and sexuality in nineties music—and how pop culture failed to talk about it at the time.

I had been stashing every cent and dollar bill that came my way, saving them in an old peanut butter jar hidden behind a stack of books on my headboard. It was the spring of 1994, in Whitehorse, my small hometown isolated away in the southern Yukon. I was a twelve-year-old on the verge of young adulthood, quiet and insular in a way that teetered between shy child and desperate loner. The Yukon is an endless wilderness and I preferred to spend my days lost in it, riding my bike into the hills behind my house with my Walkman clipped to my gray Champion sweatpants. Disappearing into the woods felt like the only chance I had to enact any agency on inevitably aging. I knew that puberty was right around the corner and, soon, everything would change, which most precipitously of all meant me. I hated the prospect, and as I careened toward those changes, angst was a welcome copilot. I felt alone, alienated, and afraid of who I was and who I might be.

Years earlier I had realized there was something broken in me, or maybe it was that I had been delivered defective. I was a boy in the clinical sense of the word but felt a lifelong disconnect from that reality. I grew up jealous of my sister as she seamlessly moved through the world as the gender I knew, in my heart, I wanted to be. The language didn’t seem to exist for the things I knew to be true about myself, but I thought if I left myself open to the possibilities, they would appear.

I was saving all my money so I could bike downtown and buy a cassette tape—one that I knew would anchor my unmoored frustration and speak my language: Green Day’s Dookie.

Dookie was Green Day’s breakout record, their first on a major label after jumping ship from the legendary California indie punk label Lookout! Records. Released in February of 1994, Dookie was an overnight sensation. Music videos for breakout singles like “Basket Case” and “When I Come Around” were all the rage on MuchMusic countdowns (Canada’s equivalent of MTV). On occasion, if you were lucky, you would hear the last minute of “When I Come Around” while scanning the dials for the rare local radio station that played music made in the last decade.

When I finally got my hands on the tape, I unwrapped it and immediately sequestered myself in the family computer room to play it on my little Sanyo cassette/radio player. I hit play and braced myself, waiting those endless seconds after the three-tone chime at the start of every cassette tape’s side A. From the opening beats of “Burnout,” the first song on Dookie, I was enraptured. The drums were heavy, swift, and unrelenting. Bass notes were hard to hear on cassette, so when they were there you paid attention. But the center, the driving force, was lead guitar player and vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong. His voice swirled around me, the tone a healthy blend of indifference and absolution. He seemed less like the singer in a band and more like a character I wanted to emulate, if only to feel his easy, tossed-off confidence for just a moment.

The language didn’t seem to exist for the things I knew to be true about myself.

Dookie is a quintessential teen-angst record. Lyrics like “I want to take you through a wasteland I like to call my home” and “I’m burning up and out and growing bored, in my smoked-out boring room” set the scene—the record explores the anxiety of youth, struggles with depression and isolation, and, often, masturbation. It was a record that spoke to me in such a specific voice, I had to wonder if my subconscious hadn’t written it in a fugue state. When I first bought the album, Green Day was a complete mystery to me. It was as if they had appeared on MTV out of nowhere, right when I needed them. Once that tape entered my cassette player, it rarely left. I pulled out the J card and spread open its many folds, poring over lyrics in my never-ending quest for some secret knowledge, something that could resolve the boiling feeling inside me that everything was about to change.

*

At school, I watched as the older boys in my class went through changes, embellishing the various ways in which they had ceased to be boys and were in fact men now. They bragged about hair and muscles and forced their voices lower than they were, strutting around displaying their newfound masculinities like cavemen or peacocks. I wanted no part of this game, despite very special episodes of daytime TV telling me this was the way things went for people born the way I was. You become a man, you find a woman. You get married and have 2.5 children and die mundanely, the way that you lived.

“She,” the first song on side B of Dookie, is about a woman fighting to be heard over the expectations others impose on her. The first line of the chorus, “Are you locked up in a world that’s been planned out for you?” responded to my concerns of a conventional future. The more I replayed it, the more I associated with the main character. I was She, and as Billie Joe sang “She’s figured out, all her doubts were someone else’s point of view,” my consciousness started to piece together the puzzle of my transness. In my head, I would visualize myself as the heroine of Billie Joe’s story, and the confusion that plagued my waking life fell away. In my head, I saw myself as trans for the first time, despite not having the words for it.

It’s on the song “Coming Clean” that Billie Joe Armstrong really lays his cards on the table. “I finally figured out myself for the first time,” he sings, continuing, “now Mom and Dad will never understand / what’s happening to me.” Billie Joe was saying what I was thinking—what I hoped and imagined so many of us were thinking: that we’re all queers. Though I didn’t think I’d unlocked some secret code hidden in the lyrics, surely there must have been others, like me, who recognized themselves in these words. I found these hints in the songs partly because I needed to find them but also because they were right there for me, and for anyone like me, to see. That feeling of being broken made sense when I realized it was queerness trying to break the normative walls that had been built around me, the societal expectation that all good kids grow up to be cis and heterosexual.

In the ensuing weeks and months of my obsession with the record, I would pick up glossy magazines with Green Day on the cover and watch interviews, waiting for some music journalist to ask the question that seemed so obvious to me after hearing the tape. When were they going to ask about being queer? It’s all over Dookie; it was right there in the lyrics printed on the J card. But no one, not Rolling Stone, not SPIN or NME or MuchMusic or even MTV, MuchMusic’s little American cousin, ever asked.

As the album cycle came and went, the conversation I expected never came. Even when Green Day brought Pansy Division, an openly queer punk rock band, as their opener on their first major tour in support of Dookie, the conversation never came. Mainstream culture critics in the nineties, especially in music, wouldn’t really touch on the idea of queerness as a movement. Gay was a word your mom would whisper, even when there was no one else around, lest it gain too much popularity. Despite artists trying to engage in these arenas, we only talked about queers when it was bad, like George Michael being busted for solicitation.

When were they going to ask about being queer? It’s all over Dookie.

It takes a trip to the internet archives to find a 1995 interview with Billie Joe Armstrong, in The Advocate, where he says outright that “Coming Clean” is a song about being a teenager and realizing that he was bisexual. Billie Joe Armstrong: bisexual icon. Not that you would have known. No mainstream media touched the topic in the midnineties, maybe due to the casual homophobia permeating all media, maybe due to the lack of queers writing about music in 1995. Maybe people didn’t want to see this short king wearing eyeliner onstage as anything but a paragon of some new kind of heterosexuality.

*

Eventually, the media cycle moved on from Dookie. Green Day followed it up with Insomniac, an underrated album in their oeuvre which contains very few queer-coded songs. Maybe the diminishing reaction from the hints in Dookie left the band wanting.

Billie Joe revisited the subject in 1997, on the album Nimrod. The song “King For a Day” is about a kid who “puts the drag in drag queen.” It’s a celebration of sneaking clothes from closets you’re not supposed to be in, of letting your queerness supersede your parents’ desires for you—“King for a day, princess by dawn” chants the chorus. At this point, they were all but hitting me over the head with it. Three years after Dookie, puberty was in the rearview mirror. My transness and queerness were an ever-present internal struggle, and Nimrod was the CD that spun in the background as I snuck women’s clothes into the bathroom to try on in secret. As Billie Joe sang, “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

But the song’s queerness was treated as a joke. “King for a Day” is deliberately whimsical, its boisterous horn section bordering on clownish. It’s almost vaudevillian, letting slapstick tell the story Billie Joe had previously tried to tell with a straight face.

But still, widespread silence. The closest I got to a conversation about queerness in Green Day’s work was a friend telling me they were no longer punk enough because they had, according to him, “gone faggot.” By this time, Billie Joe was wearing eyeliner fairly regularly in press photos, which led to a shameful period in our collective past where eyeliner became “guyliner” if a man was wearing it.

Billie Joe would continue to wink at queerness here and there. On American Idiot, the album that heralded their return to being multiplatinum-selling artists, he sings about being part of the “faggot America.” Shockingly, no one ever asked him what that meant. Even though the conversation around queerness looked very different, mainstream music press seemed to lack the desire to engage with the obvious.

Billie Joe wouldn’t be asked again about his sexuality until the 2010s, when he was profiled by Out magazine. “After almost 16 years of monogamous marriage to the same woman—a minor rock ’n’ roll miracle itself—he says he’s not sure if he’d still call himself bisexual,” writes Shana Naomi Krochmal. “‘But I’d never say that I’m not,’ he quickly adds.” In his backpedaling, he mentions that he’s married now, and “when it comes to sex, there are parts of me that are very shy and conservative.” An interesting word choice for someone writing staunchly liberal political punk rock music, but nonetheless, the question was dodged.

I guess I understood this disowning of past queerness. As I grew up with Green Day, I rode the highs of excitement when queerness would appear in songs, and I crashed under the dizzying lows when I assumed I was the only one who heard the references. If more people weren’t talking about these things, then maybe we weren’t supposed to talk about them at all. Despite feeling queer and trans inside my head, I didn’t feel I had the words to discuss them. So I would avoid it too—as I grew older I started to tell myself it had been a phase, or a joke.

Mainstream media outlets delighted in talking about Green Day as a product of being disaffected nineties youths. When I needed structure for the frustration in my head, Dookie was there. But when I needed more, when all the closeted queers across the spectrum of 1990s teen subgenres needed more, we weren’t opening those doors. Despite the writing on the walls, and in the J cards of cassette cases, pop culture failed to breach the topic. Like Billie Joe Armstrong said in “Coming Clean,” I finally figured out myself for the first time—it’s just that no one was hearing me.

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