Billie Joe Armstrong is ‘f**king cool’ with being your Gen X bisexual icon

Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong is thrilled at being called a bisexual icon and we love to see it.

Speaking with PEOPLE on Sunday (21 January), the 51-year-old singer said: “I like it. I think it’s f**king cool that someone calls me a bisexual icon. I’ve seen that before. I’m like, ‘F**k, yeah!'”

Armstrong, who came out as bisexual in an interview with The Advocate back in 1995, said conversations have evolved greatly in the nearly three decades since he came out.

“Being a Gen X-er, I feel like there was a seed that got planted where it was the era in the ’90s 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 told PEOPLE.

“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.”

Armstrong has never been shy about his support for the wider queer community and recently defended trans kids against “close-minded” bigots.

Discussing the track ‘Bobby Sox’ with the LA Times on Monday (15 January) – which he described as “a queer singalong” – Armstrong said:

“Nowadays it’s more common for kids to be LGBTQ, and there’s more support,” he said.

“But for us, back in the day, that was like the beginning of when people were able to openly say things like that.”

The frontman and his bandmates were asked about what they thought of the current moral panic around trans folks – particularly trans kids – he said: “I just think they’re f**king close-minded. It’s like people are afraid of their children. Why would you be afraid? Why don’t you let your kid just be the kid that they are?”

Green Day, which has just released their 14th album Saviors, also sent conservatives into fits of fury in December when they performed their iconic track “American Idiot” on updated their lyric that protests President George Bush’s “redneck agenda” to Trump’s “MAGA agenda”.

Right-wingers were, unsurprisingly, outraged by the lyric change – with X owner Elon Musk expressing his own ire about it.