2004 Was So Gay is Them’s look back at a pivotal year for queer history and pop culture. Read more from the series here.
Calling oneself a Green Day fan in the present day is bound to raise some eyebrows. Skepticism isn’t unwarranted; the pop-punk trio’s 2020 album Father of All Motherfuckers garnered such profound hostility that not even a solid return to form on this year’s Saviors could wash out the taste of those damn billboards.
But of course, that’s not the whole picture. Father may have been a letdown on a massive scale, but it was made even worse by fans’ knowledge of what came before. Just as Tre Cool, Mike Dirnt, and Billie Joe Armstrong struggled for years to match audience expectations after their smash-hit 1994 record Dookie, every Green Day album since 2004 has carried with it an implicit comparison, one that no millennial fan can help but make: “Is it as good as American Idiot?”
Green Day released their now-seminal punk rock opera the September I entered high school, and its mere existence has required that I include them among my favorite bands when asked for the two decades since. Looking back 20 years later, I’m still shocked by how well it captured my mood at the time and aspects of myself I wouldn’t consciously understand until well into adulthood. Angry, aimless, and alienated, American Idiot put into power chords what I was scrawling into my journal each night – and crucially, many things I left out, because I was afraid of what they might mean.
Growing up in rural New York, my access to popular culture was largely limited to what my parents allowed. We weren’t a cable TV household, so signals skipped from peak to peak over our home deep in the Genesee Valley; our internet connection, still dial-up AOL, was usually reserved for my father’s bookselling business. I adopted my parents’ tastes and was often wildly out of touch with my classmates, though I listened closely so I’d at least appear to know about cool shit like The Simpsons and video games.
Rarely, however, those two worlds overlapped. A few months before my 14th birthday, I mentioned to my father I’d heard people in my class raving about Green Day. The next day, he presented me with a CD of Dookie, which, he proudly told me, he had picked up after their performance at the infamous Woodstock ’94 festival. I was hooked. The record immediately shot to the top of my personal rotation: Billie Joe cursed a lot, which I thought was very cool, but there was also a driven complexity to their musical arrangements underneath the themes of jerking off and burning out. And there were subtle hints of queerness that even I could pick up on in songs like “Basket Case,” in which Armstrong uses both “he” and “her” pronouns for a sex worker; I wouldn’t find out for many years afterward, but Armstrong had actually come out as bisexual in the mid-1990s — when such an admission was considered career-ending — and wrote about his struggle to accept himself on the Dookie track “Coming Clean.”
Later that summer, I stumbled across Fat Wreck Chords’ compilation album Rock Against Bush Vol. 2, featuring the brand-new Green Day song “Favorite Son.” It was the band’s first time overtly calling out then-President George W. Bush – much to my glee, as a liberally-minded kid living in a deep-red farming town where Confederate flags weren’t uncommon decor. For once, I knew what was really cool. Imagine my desperation, then, when I found out that the band would be stopping an hour north in Rochester while touring for their new, heavily political album.
That November night at the Blue Cross Arena would turn out to be my first experience with American Idiot. Somehow, I managed to convince my father to chaperone me to the show, my first stadium concert. Even though I knew none of the words and got elbowed in the face so hard I broke my glasses, prompting my father to rescue me from the mosh pit just a few minutes into “Jesus of Suburbia,” that night still ranks among the most euphoric of my life. I was enthralled by Billie Joe’s onstage antics (using squirt guns on the crowd, faking an orgasm — the usual). And I was swept away by the album itself, especially the ringing anti-imperialist message of “Holiday,” which trashed the U.S. government’s authoritarianism and greed for oil that had resulted in a brutal assault on Iraq under false pretenses just a year ago. My actual knowledge of world events may have been limited, but I knew I hated the president and his party, while the majority of adults in my world were cheering him on. This town sucked, and just like American Idiot’s “Jesus,” I wanted out, wherever that led me.
Presidential politics weren’t the whole reason I loved American Idiot, though. In the song’s second verse, Armstrong yells: “Well, maybe I’m the faggot America / I’m not a part of a redneck agenda.” The second half was easy enough to swallow, since I already defined myself in opposition to my own “redneck” surroundings. Deep down, though, I knew when Armstrong said “faggot America,” he was talking about people like me.
For a long time, I knew I was some flavor of queer, but had no context for that identity outside of the cruelty of others. I had tried to make being “odd” into my personality in middle school, but I couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge exactly what schoolyard bullies saw in me. That line in “American Idiot” traced precisely the extent to which I was willing to admit who I was: For just a moment, singing along in my room, maybe there was some pride to be found in that epithet. The lyric held a challenge against anyone who’d throw that slur with intent to wound, one I didn’t yet have the courage to project on my own. Yeah, maybe I am a faggot. What are you gonna do about it?
American Idiot’s plot line is impressionistic, allowing listeners to come to their own conclusions about what really happened. Fans have sorted out the broad strokes based on lyrics and vibes: “Jesus of Suburbia” leaves quiet desperation behind for the big city and spirals into the drug-addicted revolutionary persona of “St. Jimmy” but is rescued from total self-destruction by the loving influence of “Whatsername” before returning home and eventually losing track of his own story. It’s a melancholy, frustrating arc, but one fitting the album’s emotional core, and one I followed myself – up to a point. I moved to New York City after college, desperate to make it as a writer, but by 2015 all the queerness I’d been trying to bury caught up with me. On the brink of burning down everything in my life, I went back home to my parents’ house to reflect and make up my mind if I should really transition. A lot had happened since high school – my father died, for one, giving me another personal connection to Armstrong through the grief-stricken “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Unlike the mock-triumphant drum cadence of “Homecoming,” though, my own retreat turned out to be an earnest reunion with who I was and a reconciliation with who I could be. I saw a therapist for the first time, read Kate Bornstein, shaved my legs, and crawled out of my shell.
I soon grew to understand how intensely I’d repressed myself and my dissatisfaction with being a “boy,” especially in high school. Back then, “faggot” was such a popular insult among teenaged boys that it was practically punctuation; much of my childhood was spent (unsuccessfully) dodging its brand. Even in my punk-positive household, I was yet unaware of punk rock’s queer history or what worlds that might open for me. What I could access was Green Day, firmly entering their “mall goth” era of mass appeal amid a sea of black, white, and red Hot Topic T-shirts.
To older punks (not to mention the transsexual ’90s radicals I didn’t yet recognize as my siblings), Green Day in the 2000s may already have sounded watered-down, just another cog in the pop-punk merchandising machine. But for me, they were a three-man lifeline, tossed my way as I flailed to keep from drowning in my conservative hometown. If Green Day was passé or “safe,” you could have fooled me — all I felt when listening to their records was the dizzying euphoria of being known.
American Idiot didn’t make me a weird queer tgirl, but it was one of many pieces of art I clung to in my teens and early twenties that helped me make sense of myself and my place – or my lack of one – in the world. I knew in my gut I wasn’t safe yet to truly be myself, but American Idiot was a cultural moment that gave me a sliver of hope: If Green Day said it was punk rock to be a faggot, maybe someday I could be one, too.
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