even if billie joe was straight (he’s not) teenagers getting offended he used the word faggot in american idiot 16 years after the fact would still be some of the goofiest discourse i have yet to see on this website. if you were young and gay in 2004 that shit rocked your world bc we were living through one of the most powerful resurgences of blind american patriotism and anti-gay evangelical bullshit of the last three decades. i dont think most of yall understand how radical that song, that album, and green day’s overall anti-bush pro-gay stance was for the time. even though we were at the cusp of bush becoming unpopular by the time it was released, american idiot saw a fairly mainstream rock band condemning not just him, but the bigoted, ignorant american culture which created him. to remove all of this context from the song and act like green day was just throwing around homophobic slurs for the hell of it is exactly why people joke nobody has reading comprehension on this website lmao. he’s not weaponizing the term; he’s using it to identify with an alternative american society.

The lyric is:

Well maybe I'm the faggot America

I'm not a part of a redneck agenda

I don't know how to explain to kids these days what it was like to be young and queer in those days. People think I call myself queer because I've never lived in a small and homophobic town, never experienced violence or discrimination, don't know what it's like to have those words thrown at me with anger and hatred.

And it's hard to reach through the pain of those memories and say: there were no words for us that weren't slurs when I was your age.

I was 17 when this song came out. "Gay" was what the boys in my high school called anything they didn't like. "Pop quiz? That's so gay!" A (straight) girl in the drama club shaved her head for cancer and people started calling her a dyke. Her car got egged in the school parking lot and the eggs stayed there long enough to wreck the paint but somehow "nobody saw". The teachers and principal of my Catholic school didn't do anything about that, or about the abuse my gay friend put up with in the halls and every class except drama, because intervening would be "endorsing homosexuality." My gay friend got shipped off to conversion therapy by his family and I never saw him again. Conservative classmates tried to get the drama teacher fired, because she "wasn't supportive of Catholic values."

The only story I knew about gay people in a town like mine was The Laramie Project, about Matthew Sheppard's murder for being gay in a small town in Wyoming. That was the year I started but couldn't finish a play titled "The Lemon Tree" about two girls whose love for each other couldn't survive the homophobia of a town like mine, the same way a lemon tree planted there would be killed stone dead by its harsh winters. It was the year I decided to convert to Catholicism, because I had sincere faith and yes the Church was homophobic but having a real relationship with a woman was never going to be possible for me anyway so it wasn't like I was losing anything, right?

I didn't have access to the gay community or gay media, except through online slash fandom. A year later I found a second depiction of gay people in a town like mine: Brokeback Mountain, about two men whose love was smothered by society's homophobia until one of them was murdered for being gay.

(Now I know that kd lang and Tegan and Sara were openly gay in the 90s and come from my part of the world, although they all had to leave to be successful. Nobody mentioned kd lang's sexuality, and Tegan and Sara didn't get radio play here when I was young.)

And yes, "faggot" was worse than "gay". "Gay" just meant, you know, "bad", but "faggot" meant gay and soft and weak and about to get an ass-kicking.

So I remember those lines and when I first heard them all those years ago. I remember that I was cleaning my room and listening to the radio, and the DJ talked about Green Day's anger at cable news and the war in Iraq and played the song, and those two lines hit me, so hard I was incredulous and couldn't believe that for once somebody was on my side.

Green Day's image was tough and angry and loud, and it's an angry song—not unexpected, basically anyone left-leaning was angry about politics then—and them saying "maybe I'm the faggot" was them saying Come and get me. You can't scare me. This thing you throw out as an insult and a threat? Yeah, I'll own it, and I'll use it to lure you into punching range. You're wrong and I can fight you and win.

It was like a transmission from an alien planet. This was someone so much braver than I could ever imagine being. What that song said to me was that somebody was willing to stand up for me. I had viewed homophobia as an all-powerful cultural force I could either submit to or escape by hiding until I found a safe community, but pro-LGBT punk rock was what taught me that I also had the option to fight.

The Fellowship of the Ring

whenever i see a girl complaining abt her shitty boyfriend and she says that “guys are just like that!” i’m always so sad, because i know girls that are in happy and healthy romantic relationships with men! having a crappy, horrible boyfriend is not something that’s inevitable if you like men. if a man isn’t fulfilling your needs or if he’s simply just a piece of crap, you don’t have to stay in a relationship with him. not to be cliché, but not all men are like that!!! if your man ain’t shit, find a better one!!! it’ll all be alright, please realise and admit to yourself that you deserve better, and that better is out there!!! you need to put yourself first.

or you can just find a girl instead hadhdjh,,

I’m bisexual. This post is about men.

The idea that women who don’t date women should, what, remain single or just accept the idea that men will treat them poorly isn’t a cute gay mood tbh, it’s abuse apologism and deeply misogynistic.

my hobby is setting games on ‘easy’ and still getting my fucking ass kicked

not to sound like a boomer but having internet access at a young age fucked a lot of us over and continues to fuck over younger kids even more

*goes to hot topic and walks out with arms full of regular groceries*

I…you…is that even remotely possible?

no, thats why its a joke. thanks

rihanna could do hey jude but the beatles couldnt do S&M

i think we all peaked on the 21st of october 2014

school is weird cus its such a big part of ur life nad then suddenly it is not. its like. ten+ years with roughly the same people and then one day its like ok. see you guys never i guess. and then you never see each other again except for bumping into one of the three people who stayed in your town at the super market every few years and realizing you’ve already completely forgotten the names of all your classmates even though ‘it wasnt that long ago’ but it kind of was that long ago. anyways. see you never i guess

hot take to end all hot takes:

objective quality of a media (show/game/anime/etc) has almost zero meaning compared to: what you go in expecting, what you need emotionally in that period of your life, and how you see it through the lens of resonant thematic elements specific to you as an individual.

invite me to your discord server so i can immediately become overwhelmed, mute it, and never interact with any of you ever again