AMERICAN ORIGINAL: BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG

The year was 1994. Married at 22 and a father at 23, Billie Joe Armstrong describes himself back then as “very impulsive.”

That year, he and his Green Day bandmates, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool, released their third album, Dookie, which sold a brain-exploding 10 million copies.

Thirty years on, Armstrong remains married to his wife, Adrienne; the couple now have two grown sons, Joey, 29, and Jakob, 25. Both are musicians like their dad.

At the same time, the artist-songwriter has publicly ruminated about his sexual fluidity since 1995, when he told the national gay magazine The Advocate, “I think I’ve always been bisexual. I mean, it’s something that I’ve always been interested in. I think people are born bisexual.” He and the band have been outspoken in their opposition to homophobia and all other forms of intolerance, and their new music celebrates all manner of sexual identities, possibilities and yes, impulses.

Released in January, the video for Green Day’s “Bobby Sox,” the first single from the band’s 14th album, Saviors (Reprise), is a celebratory, pansexual love-in. Couples of all genders and races are kissing and embracing as Armstrong sings, “Won’t you be my girlfriend?/ Won’t you be my boyfriend?”

Green Day has just embarked on an international stadium tour that will take them across Europe (including a Wembley Stadium date that sold out in three days) and then hits the U.S. on 7/29 in Washington, D.C., a fitting first stop on the 20th anniversary of the release of American Idiot, an irony that’s not lost on Billie Joe in this cuckoo’s nest of an election year. The band will be performing Dookie and American Idiot in their entirety on the trek.

Before hitting the road, Billie Joe Armstrong sat down with HITS to share his carefully considered thoughts—not impulses—about Pride, homophobia, the Supreme Court and “He Who Cannot Be Named.”

In 1995, you told The Advocate that “people are born bisexual.” Do you still hold that view?

Yeah! In the last thirty years, what identity means to different people has changed so much. But I think that there is a spectrum, I really do. And if you’re on the spectrum of being bisexual or gay or trans, I think that society and religion make the decision for you by persecution, which isn’t fair.

After Dookie was released, you got letters from people that must have moved you a lot because you gave them a sense of connection. Do you remember that and how it felt?

We had the song “Coming Clean,” which is probably the most important song on the whole record. It’s about whatever you identify as being, gay or bisexual. I did get a lot of letters from young people that talked about the song and how much it meant to them. And that led us to ask the band Pansy Division to come with us on tour, which back then, even the Green Day fans that I thought were the most accepting and most inclusive—they were not. Pansy Division would just lay it all out there. I remember one time, they were playing. And the crowd slowly started tilting their heads, like, “Wait a minute; what are they singing?” And then Chris Freeman, the bass player, gets on the microphone and goes, “So have you guys figured out we’re a bunch of fags yet?” It was like Wow. This is the most punk-rock thing ever!

Didn’t you at one point stop a show and talk to the crowd about how they were behaving?

I did that multiple times. It gives people something to remember, and that’s the most important part. It takes them aback, but I think to this day it’s been effective.

[In at least one instance, the audience started flipping off Pansy Division when they realized the band was gay. During Green Day’s set afterward, Armstrong told the crowd, “You’re all fucking pathetic.”]

You went to Woodstock ’94 when you were newly successful. There were around 350,000 people there, most of them throwing mud. What was that experience like?

It was amazing. We were not used to playing to anything over a couple thousand people. We started our set and I couldn’t tell if we were going over or not. Then the mud started happening. And it’s like, well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That goes back to when we would play [Berkeley’s all-ages foundation/club 924] Gilman Street and in between songs, people would start yelling just obnoxious shit. But I think that prepared us to play Woodstock. All of a sudden it was this melee of people on stage. I just saw a couple photos where everyone is covered in mud and there’s fans on stage with us, and it just was like, Oh my God. This is a beautiful moment!

You mooned the crowd at some point, right?

Oh yeah. I don’t think my mother was too pleased at that part.

A lot of people don’t understand how hard it is to do what a musician does. You’ve said you got your work ethic from your mom. Is that still how you view it?

Yeah. My mom was a waitress, and she was constantly moving. She loved her job. It was part of her social life, when the regulars would come in. Then she would come home from work and jog two miles. She’s 92 years old now and still constantly on the move, whether it’s gardening or cooking or walking her dogs. She still wears tight jeans. She’s become a hero for me. If I ever had any kind of mother-son conflict with her, it’s just gone out the door because I admire her so much.

Your sons have grown up in this era. How do you see the society they’re living in now, through their eyes?

I came from a really small town where everybody knew each other. It was pretty conservative, but it was also very diverse. I remember going to school with Mexican, Filipino, Black kids. If I showed you a picture of my class, it would be like, “It’s a Small World After All.” But even compared to that, the friends and education that my sons have had are just really accepting. I remember there was a transgender couple at my sons’ preschool, and they were letting their child determine on their own whether they wanted to be a boy or girl. That was a big deal. That was something new for me and my wife to see, but for the boys it was normalized. And it’s never been a stigma or any kind of taboo, compared to what was going on last century.

The reason identity becomes so important is oppression. Do you think it’s important now for the queer community, particularly as they’re getting picked off one group at a time, to identify as part of a community?

That’s a really good point. I’ve never really thought about it in terms of community and how communities are needed for people to feel safe and included. The Pride Parade in San Francisco has been going on my whole life. I’ve always been aware of it. It was a moment for people to just be themselves without any fear. I think it’s important to support these communities so it’s not just about their own community but that we see ourselves as part of the collective human race.

Have you ever been to a Pride Parade?

Yeah!

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, you said, “I’m out of here.” How is this year different? Are we at an inflection point?

The way that the Supreme Court is stacked is really frightening to me. There’s Don’t Say Gay. There are book burnings. There’s a part of America that wants to literally go backwards. So this could be the most important election that we’ve ever had to make sure that everyone has a say, so their rights aren’t fucked with by a Supreme Court that is staunchly religious and conservative and doesn’t believe that people should be able to make their own decisions.

I just watched the Ken Burns documentary about America and the Holocaust and how Hitler’s first shot at a coup didn’t take form. But it was just the first step forward. No one thought that he would go through with it. The next thing you know, he’s exterminating 6 million Jews. So maybe it starts with drag queens, but it becomes much more extreme than that. That’s the part that scares me.

Not only were Jews part of this, but homosexuals were forced to wear pink triangles. Do you see a situation in this country where queer people are going to have their rights taken away?

Yeah. I can see it. You see it with getting rid of Roe v. Wade and suddenly these states, whether it’s Texas or Arizona, outlawing a woman’s right to choose. There was a time in America where being gay or queer was illegal. And that was, what, 50 years ago?

In 1960, every state had an anti-sodomy law. A number of states still had them until the Lawrence v. Texas decision in 2003.

Right. And you have the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. The gay bars and hangouts where people thought that they were safe? They weren’t. You had people going undercover to look at these places and then go in and bust them. What’s really interesting, and this is sort of off-topic, but my Uncle Stoney…

Stonewall Jackson!

Stonewall Jackson, yeah. Having him in our lives was really important to me. His name really was Stonewall Jackson. It’s almost got two meanings. We called him Uncle Stoney. He was gay. He had twelve brothers and sisters, and my mother and Aunt Polly were the only ones that accepted him. When he got AIDS, he came to California. We rented the house right across the street and my mom took care of him every day when he started getting really sick.

He was a great uncle. He was so funny. He would take a book and dig out the inside of it and then make compilation tapes for me. So I think I’m getting a book but then it had these cassettes inside. And then he gave me a card for my birthday. I opened it up and all it said was, “My Autograph. Uncle Stoney.” As a little kid, five years old, it was really important to have this family member who was gay, and who really meant a lot to me and my family.

I love the lyrics to “King for a Day” What inspired that song?

I had three older sisters. And they had a little brother that they could dress up and put make-up on. I was like their Barbie doll.

You were also singing at that time. When you were five years old, you recorded your first song, “Look for Love.” Did you always know this was what you were going to do?

Music has always been in my life. When I made that record, everyone where I lived was like, “Oh my gosh, you actually made a record! A 45!” It’s something that always stuck with me. I think about it now more than ever. Even the message of the song, “Look for Love,” I feel like it’s a kindred spirit with a song like “Bobby Sox” in a lot of ways. “Bobby Sox” is a universal love song. And “Look for Love” is exactly the same.

The “Bobby Sox” music video is pretty stunning because there is so much love in it. Straight, gay, every mix of people. That was intentional, right?

Ryan Baxley directed that video. He felt it was not only an important song in terms of “Do you want to be my boyfriend/ Do you want to be my girlfriend,” but it also comes post-pandemic and how people want to be together again. We recorded that video at a backyard party. We ended up playing a small set and then we did the video after that. It is one of my favorite videos we’ve ever made because it just felt very real. It didn’t feel like we were standing around a bunch of cameras.

Tell me about the band White Trash Debutantes.

We played a couple shows with them at Gilman. Ginger Coyote, the singer, she’s a real tough individual. I remember she came up to me and said, “I know you’re drawing all the people here tonight, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna get paid!” And I was like, “You’re gonna get paid! It’s Gilman. Everybody gets paid equally.” She was kind of taken aback and said, “Oh. Okay. That’s cool.” I think she was looking for a fight.

I would be remiss not to mention Kurt Cobain. Did you know him?

No, I never met him. I saw him live in San Francisco once. I was leaning up against the wall backstage and I looked over and he was leaning right next to me. This is before Dookie came out. I really wanted to say something to him. But I just thought, Oh, he’s got so many people bugging him. I’d read all the stuff about how hard it was for him to be a rock star. He was one of the first people that openly came out and said they were wearing dresses. I was used to seeing people cross-dressing and queer people at Gilman Street. But to see this on a huge level, I think, opened up a lot of kids’ minds. It also reflected what a lot of people were already thinking in the early ’90s.

Since you started out, music has become largely fragmented. But you, Mike and Tré haven’t stopped making albums. Why is that important to you?

I’ve always been a fan of albums. I don’t want to write songs to be a part of an algorithm, but I want to make art. I don’t want to sound pretentious or anything, but our goal is to make great albums, and we’ve been that way going back to 39/Smooth, 1,000 Hours. I think that comes from being around my family that always had great record collections, whether it’s a record like Tim by The Replacements or Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. It was just important to have one solid, great album.

People are saying shit now that they’ve been given permission to by a certain American Idiot. Do you see a greater toxicity in the country than in previous times?

The thing that scares me are these militia groups. They want to take the country’s “values” back to the 1950s, where it’s about the nuclear family, a woman has her place, the man has his place, and there’s no room for anything in between. They’re being recruited right out of the military, so they’re trained to be killers. Then you add on this crazy ideology and the algorithm that comes with it on social media and Q-Anon and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world. It’s really frightening. It’s almost like you can’t believe it. But I think that’s such a natural reaction. Even, I would say, what’s going on in Gaza—it’s like you’re so far removed from it geographically that you can’t believe it’s happening, but it is. And so as these groups rise up, I do have a lot of fear for the LGBTQ community that their rights are going to be taken away by these militant groups that are basically in charge of the Republican Party.

As we celebrate Pride, a lot of people are going to come out, come together and share their strength and their unity. You’re going out on the road at this inflection point in America, and you’re going to a lot of places where this message of community, not just the queer community, is going to matter. Is that on your mind?

How could it not be? We see it every single day on the news. And the thing that I fear is He Who Cannot Be Named just gets so much airtime on television because he started out as a celebrity. That’s what happened in 2016. This guy became a cult of personality. And we allowed it. We pushed that narrative. People bought in and he fucking won. When he announced he was going to run for president for the first time, it was 2015. Here we are in 2024, still dealing with this shit. So I think the tour, especially on the 20th anniversary of American Idiot, is really going to resonate. Songs like “Holiday,” especially. Instead of throwing out a tweet or something, I like to let my songs do the talking because I can give it thought, and I can reflect. So it’s really important to actually go out and try to create community. That’s probably a bigger deal now than it’s ever been.