I would not say that I was a Green Day fan growing up, though not because I wasn’t a Green Day fan, not exactly. In my teens (and, honestly, still) my relationship to music was too erratic to really be a “fan” of any specific group — save for the occasional artist who’d I’d get super obsessed with (in the 1990s, Ani, because of course), most musicians just kind of existed in this space of “I am loosely aware of them and some of their songs are nice.”
Which was, roughly, my stance on Green Day. I knew “Good Riddance” — was it possible to not know “Good Riddance” if you were an American teenager in the 1990s? — and a few other songs, but I didn’t have strong feelings about Green Day or its members aside from “Billie Joe Armstrong looks good in eyeliner.”
Indeed it was only about a year and a half ago that I developed a deeper interest in Green Day (and really just Billie Joe himself) when I came across this essay about Armstrong’s underdiscussed of oft ignored queerness, and more specifically his bisexuality. I’m not saying that I’m only interested in celebrities if they’re bi, but learning that Armstrong had been openly bi — that the man who sang the song that defines the finale to Seinfeld of all things had not been shy about weaving queerness into his work — grabbed my interest. How had I not known? How had no one told me this? I was in a queer youth group in the 1990s, why weren’t we talking about Billie Joe the way we talked about Ani and Ellen????
I don’t really have an answer to that, aside from the usually suspects: male bisexuality is erased and ignored. Armstrong was married to a woman (is still married to a woman) and thus assumed to be engaging more in a “bisexual chic” than the real thing. And, of course, Green Day was the kind of dude rock that simply wasn’t assumed to be a queer genre, regardless of how much queerness may have been laced into their work.
But. Times have changed, guys! Green Day has a new song out and their doing press and the headline — the headline — of People.com’s little teaser is about Bille Joe Armstrong being a bicon. And look, I could be jaded about it. I could say that it’s just using bisexuality as bait, that it’s using Armstrong’s sexuality to generate clicks, but honestly? I cannot do that.
Because the story itself — which talks about Billie Joe finding it “fucking cool” that he has been referred to as a bisexual icon (by whom, I’m not sure, but let’s pretend that People read Billie Joe this essay where I don’t explicitly call him a bi icon but don’t not do that, either) — is just so sweet. It is some real bisexual feel good content. The erased queer, the “formerly bi,” is now in People being called a bisexual icon. I love that for him.
I love that for us.
PS In other bicon news: this wasn’t worth a whole essay but I needed to let you know that there is now a bisexual Oreo. You can purchase a box of them here.
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