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NOW. It is important that you know Green Day was primarily a 90s band. This is important because it means they came of age in a time period where we were trying to reclaim “faggot,” and among the counterculture—which, again, was Green Day, they were a pop/punk fusion—it WAS within-the-community reclaimed. If you read a lot of queer zines from this period you’ll see it used routinely. Dan Savage’s advice column originally ran under the name “Hey, Faggot,” which he himself had chosen. There’s a section in the musical RENT where the characters refer to themselves as “faggots, lezzies, dykes, cross-dressers too,” and while Jon Larson himself was straight he was writing as someone who was in daily contact with these cultures. Pride parades from the time often have it on at least one sign. This was not unusual language.

This is part of the background from which American Idiot was born. It came out in 2004, and while the queer movement was losing a little steam in the counterculture direction at that point (although not as badly as it has today, good lord), this was still an ongoing thing. I was hearing it as late as 2009.

This was, indeed, Billie Joe challenging the mainstream that had come to love Green Day: maybe I’M the faggot, did you think of that? We haven’t just supported queer artists, I AM a queer artist. Fuck you.

This whole album is political commentary. It’s practically a time capsule of Everything Wrong With The Bush Years, including Bush’s attempt to put “marriage is one man and one woman” in the Constitution. (This is why, as a Jew, I don’t object to the lyric “seig heil to President Gas Man.” It’s a pretty succinct takedown of the Islamophobia he stoked as a way to justify war with Iraq.)

So SING that “faggot,” and do it with your whole chest. It’s a word of anger and protest and taking back autonomy with your own two bloody hands.

I grew up in the late 80s and the 90s and I can absolutely remember gay men calling themselves fags and faggots, as well as fairy faggots and other combinations. It was not uncommon, though I'm still uncomfortable with it myself due to how it was weaponized against a friend.