Billie Joe Armstrong says “it’s fucking cool” to be a bisexual icon
Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong has opened up about being a generation’s bisexual icon in a new interview, explaining that it feels “fucking cool”.
The singer, whose new album Saviors dropped on January 19th, 2024, opened up about his sexuality and discussed being an icon for a new surge of music fans.
“I like it,” he explained in an interview with PEOPLE, “I think it’s fucking cool that someone calls me a bisexual icon. I’ve seen that before. I’m like, ‘Fuck, yeah!'”.
Publicly acknowledged his bisexuality for the first time in 1995, Armstrong expressed in the interview his optimism in witnessing the positive evolution of conversations surrounding sexuality over nearly three decades.
“Being a Gen X-er, I feel like there was a seed that got planted where it was the era in the 1990s that we came up, where men were discovering more of being with other men and being more bisexual, and coming out with that, whether it was someone like Kurt Cobain or what I was saying,” Armstrong said.
Continuing, he added: “It’s way more complex now, as far as sexuality. You’re like, ‘Wow, we’ve really come a long way.’ Even though it’s still kind of looked at as being taboo, I think people now are a lot more brave than they’ve ever been. I think people are way more open now”.
The singer also discussed how his relationship with his wife, Adrienne, impacts his allyship with the LGBTQ+ community. He said: “Sexuality is always so much more than what the standard, nuclear-family type of way of looking at things”.
Adding: “But I have been married — there’s this other side of me that’s very conventional when it comes to my 30-year marriage to my wife. But I just look at sexuality: It’s not one way or the other. And if anybody ever tries to say that, I don’t think they’re really being honest with themselves”.
Armstrong recently went into detail about ‘Bobby Sox’, one of the songs on the new album Saviors, in a separate interview. He explained that it’s more “common for kids to be LGBTQ” because “there’s more support,” adding that for people like him, it was “the beginning of when people were able to openly say things like that”.
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