The Queer Normalcy of Green Day’s Dookie 30 Years Later

Throughout the year, Paste will be looking at the most important album releases from 1994 as they turn 30, from Hole to Nas to Elliott Smith and beyond. This is 1994, She’s in Your Bones, a column of essays dedicated to one of the best years in rock ‘n’ roll history.

I don’t always remember the first time I fell in love with a band, but I do remember the first time I discovered Green Day. It was Christmas Day at my aunt’s house, and my folks gifted my cousin a copy of the recently released American Idiot on CD. I was only six, not yet indoctrinated into a world colored by foul-mouthed punk rock. But I was immediately drawn to the cherry-red grenade shaped like a heart on the cover, and I was even more entranced by the parental advisory sticker slapped at the bottom like some cosmic barrier I was forbidden from crossing. I wasn’t allowed to be in the room while my cousin broke the album in for the first time, but I watched him from the doorway and marveled at his marveling, how it seemed like, in an instant, his life had changed. Some years later, he’d pass his copy of International Superhits! to me and I would discover a 21-track haven spanning from 1994 until 2000.

The first five songs on International Superhits!—“Longview,” “Welcome to Paradise,” “Basket Case,” “When I Come Around” and “She”—were pulled from an album called Dookie, but of course I didn’t know that then. It wouldn’t be until later, when I discovered a living, breathing archive of music exploration for a teenager who couldn’t stop writing band names on their zipper three-ring binder in class: Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list (the 2012 version, that is). Dookie came in at #193—nestled neatly between the Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of the Sun and Lou Reed’s Transformer—and I’d recognized the Green Day name but not the cover art. There were never Dookie shirts on Hot Topic or FYE walls, because those shops preferred to keep the garb to band logos mostly. At long last, I was able to associate those songs with their real origin, not just the tracklist of a greatest hits collection.

Green Day put Dookie out at the dawn of February 1994, following a fresh blueprint laid out for them by their new label, Reprise Records. They’d found some success a few years prior with their debut, 39/Smooth, in 1990 and its follow-up, Kerplunk, in 1991—both put out by the now-defunct Lookout! Records. The latter is frontman, vocalist and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong’s favorite album he’s made and, through a grassroots effort on the East Coast, it sold more than 50,000 copies and caught the eyes of major industry suits. Billie Joe, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool recorded Dookie with producer Rob Cavallo at Fantasy Studios and, once and for all, moved out of their shared basement at UC Berkeley and were becoming critically acclaimed and in-demand, as they’d soon share bills with bands like Hole, Weezer, Rancid and the Smashing Pumpkins.

But unknowingly, I actually came to Dookie like most kids my age—through the power of pre-2010s YouTube, which I’d spend hours upon hours scouring. This was the era when lyric videos made with Windows Movie Maker were almost as popular as the Vevo releases they aimed to undermine, looking back on it is like stepping into a time capsule that wasn’t so timeless. But, even now, there’s some kind of charm attached to that period in my life, where anonymous users uploaded their own reference points for the rest of us—so we could physically feel and love the music, not just become overstimulated by the endless abundance of music videos at our immediate disposal. I remember the “Basket Case” music video, though I believe I first saw clips of it on one of those VH1 ranking specials—or maybe it was a clip of a blue-haired Billie Joe locked in a bloody mud fight with the crowd at Woodstock ‘94. I think it was the former, and I believe it was featured on the 1994 installment of I Love the ‘90s.

Back then, Dookie sounded great (and still does, for the record). I wasn’t much caught up in the hoopla of the lyrics, nor was I reading between the lines of any music at that point (I’d learn how to critically consider lyricism eventually, I promise). Admittedly, Green Day existed in the same orbit back then, for me, as blink-182—a band the former paved the way for—because of the accessibility of their work. While the stories Billie Joe was telling were no doubt revelatory for their era, I was knee-deep in the hooks. Considering how downright obsessed with power-pop I am now, it’s easy to trace that enjoyment back about 15, 16 years to those Green Day melodies that channeled their ferocity into a sublime, ageless vessel that was, sometimes, sugar-sweet and supremely singable. Billie Joe, Dirnt and Cool could pull any demographic into their music, but there’s no overlooking just how crucial an album like Dookie was for teenagers of the 1990s and ever since.

Reflecting on my own teenagerdom, it’s especially fascinating that, 20 years after Dookie came out, I got stoked on it after going through a mercilessly feverish Nirvana phase—eerily mirroring the timeline rock ‘n’ roll was on in the mid-1990s. I was obsessed with grunge, worshipped Kurt Cobain’s journals and studied every Pearl Jam interview ever. And soon, as is the case with most interests, it came and went, paving the way for an obsession with punk rock and skate punk—despite me not knowing how to skate nor having ever been to a basement show. I wasn’t yet in a place where I was formidably chuffed by the pleasures of the Clash, Minor Threat and the Dead Kennedys. No, I was much more adaptable to the palatable vibrancy of mainstream, melodic punk rock that was commercially viable, catchy and would soon be rendered cringe by its own saturated marketability (though Green Day would attempt to shed that boilerplate pathos on Insomniac a year later).

Dookie was different, though. For all of the reasons Green Day have made some of the most cookie-cutter, middling rock records over the last 15 or so years, they made an album that, no matter what, most audiences can agree was a landmark release and has stood the test of time. Dookie became a signpost for sellout culture of its own era, too, as Bay Area punk traditionalists lambasted Green Day for abandoning Lookout! in favor of Reprise, a polished, radio-friendly sound, a #2 spot on the Billboard 200, heavy rotation on MTV, a Diamond certification from the RIAA and, in 1995, a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album. They would go on to make records that, across different checkpoints of my lifetime, I have argued are better—especially Insomniac and Nimrod—but there’s no denying that few bands have ever had a better six-year run than Green Day, even if you’re still on your high-horse about whether or not they should’ve ditched Lookout! when the money, resources and precipice of fame came a-knocking.

I do wish I had better understood Dookie’s world when I was 17, though, because I don’t think I could have ever needed it more. Billie Joe wrote about panic attacks, poverty, smoking pot, masturbation and rage minimized by boredom and sexual frustration just as he’d experienced them and, every time I tap into the record now, I hear my own neutered coming-of-age in all 38 minutes of it. I was the man at the heart of Dookie until I wasn’t. I suppose it helps that Billie Joe was 22 when Dookie came out, not yet far enough removed from his own adolescence for the 15 songs to seem novel or lacking nuance or, dare I say it, outdated and uncomfortably sung by adults. For all of the ways a record like blink-182’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket has aged poorly—as the men who first performed it continue to do so well into their 40s, and the sentiment is sometimes washed away by groveling embarrassment—Dookie stands as tall as ever, perhaps simply because it was the first album to properly engage with Gen X’s fatigue from ordinary and familiar gloom by merging humor and chagrin. It was an equation that could only be solved in earnest once, and Green Day heeded the call so distinctively shaped for them only.

But what gets lost is how those fixtures of mundanity and despair are not truly married to one generation or the other. I, a Zoomer, was, once upon a time, also a kid in a family straddling class lines, jerking off far too much, feeling suicidal from a cocktail of puberty, trauma pouring through the cracks of a seemingly stable home life and an angst that is still so often romanticized into cliché yet remains just as modern and just as brutal. Many albums have tried to capitalize on similar leitmotifs and mimic Green Day’s anti-sensationalist style (the entire pop-punk genre since 1997, honestly), but none have figured out how to break the code without hawking pivotal bullet points from the OG—nor has any band really figured out how to write about the archetypical spectrum of teenage/young adult emotions in ways that aren’t aggrandizing. But Dookie was one-in-a-million.

When I was at my most passionate mark of Dookie spirituality, I hadn’t yet connected the dots that a song like “Longview” was about masturbating while home alone, or that a song like “Coming Clean” was an autobiographical song about Billie Joe’s bisexuality, or that my life was so deeply woven into a place stationed somewhere between those cosmic bookends. What I had done was, in my video production class, recreate the “When I Come Around” music video with my friends because, when you’re 17 and a not-yet-out queer kid in a place aching to make certain you never make it all the way there anyways, a line like “Secrets collecting dust but never forget skeletons come to life in my closet” doesn’t always rupture the guard of denial you’ve propped up for yourself.

But there are Easter eggs about queerness all over Dookie. When Billie Joe sings about visiting a sex worker in “Basket Case,” it’s a man. The “Where did all the little kid go?” lyric in “Emenius Sleepus” arrives like a bayonet aimed at a lost innocence too many of us are achingly inured with. On “She,” the line “Are you locked up in a world that’s been planned out for you?” jumps out at me more than ever, especially when I think of my body in the wake of coming out as non-binary. A later remark that goes “She’s figured out all her doubts were someone else’s point of view” singlehandedly glows over and over when I stand in the mirror and remember how every part of my visible body (except my head and neck) is covered in tattoos, as I’ve attempted to color the gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia away.

Corporate music magazines weren’t clamoring to write extensively about “Coming Clean” and Dookie’s all-encompassing queerness, either, even if Green Day spent most of the months after the album’s release touring across the United States with one of the greatest gay punk bands of all time, Pansy Division—who Billie Joe called a band that is “honest about their sexuality, and that saves lives” and “the future of rock ‘n’ roll” in an interview with The Advocate back in 1995. Even though you won’t find a pull quote from Rolling Stone about “Coming Clean”—as mainstream magazines weren’t yet willing to touch such a polarizing cultural subject in a positive sense—queer punks still found safety in Dookie and were at Green Day’s shows, moshing with all the straight folk and ensconcing themselves in a sobering resonance that, over the course of each set, was blown to smithereens by a raucous, chaotic and purposeful manifestation of energy.

But that Advocate interview remains the only real documentation of Billie Joe’s explicit queerness from that era beyond Dookie itself. “I think I’ve always been bisexual,” he said. “I mean, it’s something that I’ve always been interested in. I think everybody kind of fantasizes about the same sex. I think people are born bisexual, and it’s just that our parents and society kind of veer us off into this feeling of Oh, I can’t. They say it’s taboo. It’s ingrained in our heads that it’s bad, when it’s not bad at all. It’s a very beautiful thing.” He plays around with that idea a few years later on Nimrod when, in the song “King For a Day,” he sings from the POV of a four-year-old going into his mother’s closet and wearing her clothes, calling himself the “king for a day, princess by dawn.”

While Billie Joe was being cheeky on Nimrod, he was being sincere in The Advocate, speaking briefly about the trials of having to present as masculine in high school, and how gruesome a struggle appeasing gender norms can be for people coming of age in America. It’s a familiar feeling. When I was in 11th grade, I started dressing with more intentionality—tucking my shirt in, donning denim jackets adorned with pro-LGBTQIA+ pins I stole from stores in the mall. I quaffed my hair like Morrissey and had the NOH8 app on my phone (this was around the time The Hunger Games hit theaters, shoutout to straight king Josh Hutcherson)—and got hit with slurs no matter how many women I dated. I hadn’t yet really come to terms with being the faggot everyone told me I was, and I was still nearly a lifetime away from even considering making a they/them pronoun set my own or carving any sense of joy out of it.

But even if he told Out in 2010 that, after being married to a woman for so long, he is uncertain whether or not he’d call himself bisexual anymore (“But I’d never say that I’m not,” he quickly asserted), Dookie remains a triumph of Billie Joe Armstrong’s honesty. For all of the reasons he boasted about his allegiance to “faggot America” on American Idiot in 2004, he came out to all of us first in 1994—and during his band’s major make-or-break moment, no less. And it wasn’t done in a way that felt like a caricature or an embellishment. Just like how a poet—whose work has guided my own for a long time—told me that any poem I write will be an intersex poem because I wrote it, Dookie will always be a queer album because a queer person wrote it. Green Day made being queer feel so terminally normal and, goodness, when I finally made sense of that, I wasn’t just queer in my head anymore. I was queer everywhere and, now, I am alive and these songs, they are still ours like they always have been.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.