#how can a phrase so bisexual have such shitty origins

[infestedguest]

I am legitimately devastated to learn that “women are my favorite guy” isn’t yet another phrase spawned by tumblr meme culture like I assumed it was, and that it actually originates from a song created by some cishet white guy named Kyle who has built an entire tiktok career off of making fun of neurodivergent people.

[ofchaoticminds]

Klaus Mikaelson task: 001.

BASICS

Name: Niklaus 'Klaus' Mikaelson

Nicknames they go by: Nik

Age: 25/1025+

Species: Original Hybrid

Sexuality: Bisexual

Pronouns: He/Him

Gender: Cisman

Family: Esther (Mother), Ansel (Father), Mikael (Step-Father), Kol, Finn, Henrik & Elijah (Brothers), Rebekah & Freya (Sisters), Hope Mikaelson (Daughter), Marcel Gerard (Son), Hayley Marshall (Honorary Mikaelson & mother of his child)

Likes: Art, good food, sometimes his family, when plans go his way, sex, challenges, drinking...

Dislikes: When plans don't go his way, all of his enemies, his parents, his aunt, currently at the moment - Marcel, canned veggies, being beaten, fish, Inadu, currently sleeping (because nightmares), this list can go on forever honestly.

QUESTIONNAIRE

What words or phrases do they overuse?

Bloody, he's British so it comes off the tongue without him noticing. Also murder is another one, and calling people love. Phrases would be Always and Forever.

Are they more optimistic or pessimistic?

Oh, he's very pessimistic.

Are they introverted, extroverted, or ambiverted?

Extroverted. Likes the attention.

What bad habits do they have?

Murdering people without just cause, being paranoid, murdering people in general really, pushing people away for their safety, not opening up to those who care for him/those he cares about because he doesn't want to appear weak.

What makes them laugh out loud?

People's incompetence.

How do they display affection?

It's very rare that he displays affection. But, when he does. It's usually in the form of listening to someone, having a heart to heart with someone, subtle hand grazes, physical touch, hugs - he loves hugs, a hand on the shoulder.

How do they see themselves?

Not in a bright light, but also he doesn't care about it. Powerful, the maker of most vampires, someone who could easily take life away, a father (a shitty one at that), a brother (also shitty).

Strongest character trait?

His fierceness.

Weakest character trait?

His paranoia.

How competitive are they?

Way too competitive.

What is their greatest fear?

Hope dying.

What quality do they most value in a friend?

Loyalty, trust and the ability to call him on his shit without being afraid to do so.

What are their pet peeves?

He has way too many to list, but a few prominent ones are; betrayal, people picking at their nails with their teeth and having to repeat himself.

If they could change one thing about themselves, what would it be?

All of the enemies he made vs. allies.

Why are they aligning with whoever they're aligning with?

Because it's his family, and even if they're in the wrong he'll stand by their side no matter what.

What are their goals here in New Orleans?

Currently, his goals are to not die via Inadu, kill Inadu, and have a relationship with his daughter.

[with-my-murder-flute]

Hi everybody, thanks for the asks letting me know I made the top of @yusuftiddies’ list of Homophobes in TOG Fandom, you can stop sending them now.

So.

I can make mistakes and fuck up and own that. I am serious about listening to marginalized people. But... in this case, while @yusufstiddies generally describes factual events that happened and factual posts that exist, I have to say that I can’t actually apologize for the things I’m called out for because I don’t think they’re homophobic. The things he criticizes me for are things that come from a lot of personal experience as a queer bisexual cis woman, as well as a lot of reflection, research, and study. I believe in them really strongly and stand by them.

I’m really sorry if this makes TOG fandom too hostile, because it is not my intention to make this place so unpleasant that anyone feels driven out. I understand if my stance means people no longer want to follow me/read my stuff/participate in projects I’m involved with (though I’d rather hand off the Research Hub to someone else than see it go down with me). I’m posting this so people can know where they stand before they decide whether to keep interacting with my blog, or “deplatform” me as @yusufstiddies recommends.

I would recommend, for anyone who doesn’t want to see my posts, using Tumblr’s new post content filtering feature. If you type a username (like star-anise or with-my-murder-flute) into it, Tumblr will hide all posts featuring that specific string of characters, and therefore any post or reblog of mine.

To address the accusations against me:

I am an anti-anti: Yes. I’ve reblogged posts of mine about this before. I care passionately about preventing child abuse, but I think there are better ways to prevent child abuse in fandom (like concrete harassment policies so predatory behaviour can be reported and stopped early, and education about digital consent and healthy relationships) than attacking people who write “bad ships,” not least because the first people it hurts are abuse survivors trying to work through their trauma, and because the research says you cannot actually tell who’s a sexual predator based on what they write about.  Fiction affects reality, but not on a 1:1 basis. My mainblog, @star-anise, has a really extensive archive of my writing on the subject.

I said cishet men aren’t more privileged than gay men: Kinda. What I actually did was question whether Every Single Cishet Man benefits from more privilege than Every Single Gay Man. If a man is cishet but gets beaten up because people perceive him as gay, he’s not exactly feeling the warm toasty glow of heterosexual privilege in that moment. Oppression is complicated and there are times when someone’s lack of privilege on one axis is way less important than someone else’s lack of privilege on another axis.

The post above also includes me reblogging someone else’s addition about how straight men can be included in the queer movement: I’m queer. @yusufstiddies has made it very clear that he isn’t comfortable with the word “queer” and doesn’t like it. Therefore I think it’s understandable that he might not understand that the queer community sees ourselves as a coalition of people dedicated to dismantling the structures of sex and gender that oppress us, not a demographic of people whose gender identities or sexual orientations can be neatly mapped. However, I would say that doesn’t make queer theory inherently homophobic.

There are also some related points @yusufstiddies didn’t level at me specifically, but I would like to address:

The constant focus on the unsafeness of cishet people:

I’m not cishet. I’m a bisexual woman who’s dated women. Sixth-light is a queer woman married to a woman. This is not an issue of non-LGBTQ+ people blundering their way into something they don’t experience the daily consequences of. This is an issue of people from WITHIN the LGBTQ+ community who sincerely disagree with @yusufstiddies about the pressures we experience and how best to deal with them. I think that even if @yusufstiddies were to filter his fiction input to only LGBT-written work about LGBT experiences, or even only trans-written work about trans people, he would still find a lot of things he finds upsetting or transphobic, because sexual and gender identities are really diverse and not everything will suit one person.

The contention that saying “’Queer is a slur’ is TERF propaganda” is transmisogyny because it dilutes the definition of “TERF”:

People who point out the phrase is TERF propaganda are not calling every person who says it a TERF, and we are not trying to argue that telling a queer person that queer is a slur is inherently equal to the kind of damage a TERF does when she attacks a trans woman out of transphobia. Queer people being able to use the word “queer” does not have the same importance as trans women being able to live, work, and survive in public. Rather, we are literally saying, “This is a thing TERFs say when they take a break from attacking trans women and try to recruit new members to their group, so it’s in our best interests to not give it too wide a currency.”

Some people have experienced the word “queer” used as a hateful word hurled against them and don’t want to hear it ever again. I get that. It happens. Where I grew up, “gay” was a synonym for “shitty” and it took me a lot of years out of high school before the word “gay” wouldn’t shoot my blood pressure through the roof.  I actually do understand that and think that’s valid (and again, support using post content filtering for that word).

One of the things I do at @star-anise is argue with young people who are headed into full-on transmisogynistic TERF territory, and work at reeling them back and deradicalizing them. I use a tag called “weedwhacking” so my followers can filter out the sometimes lengthy back-and-forths we get going.

Something I’ve learned, interacting with so many TERFs and proto-TERFs, is that one way they frequently get recruited into harassing trans people was through discourse around the word “queer”. For one, it encouraged them to want to distance themselves from any perception of LGBT people as “weird” or “not normal”, which led to seeing trans people as “weird” and “not normal” and therefore not good members of the “gay pride” community. For two, repeating “queer is a slur” predictably causes a lot of queer people to react in a defensive manner, so by teaching young or new people to say it, TERFs can set them up to feel alienated from the larger LGBTQ+ community and more open to TERF propaganda.

The next issue isn’t mentioned in the original callout post, but I think it’s key to this entire issue:

@yusufstiddies has made several posts about what cishet people should and shouldn’t write. For example, cishets shouldn’t write Nicky experiencing internalized homophobia.  Another is a detailed post of things cishets shouldn’t write about trans people, including which sexual positions only trans people are allowed to write. I would imagine that part of his frustration with fandom has been the lack of traction those posts have gotten. I know I very deliberately didn’t reblog them.

That isn’t because I don’t agree that the things he complains about are rarely handled well by cishet authors. I agree that there’s a lot of bad fic out there that contributes to negative stereotypes against LGBTQ+ people and is basically a microaggression to read.

I have two very deeply-seated reasons for my position:

LGBTQ+ identities are different from many other political identities because most people are not born identifiably LGBTQ+. It’s something we have to figure out about ourselves. And one really important way that we do that is using the safety of fiction to explore what an experience would be like, sometimes years before we ever admit that we fit the identity we’ve written about. So banning cishet authors from writing something is really likely to harm closeted and questioning LGBTQ+ people. It will lengthen the amount of time questioning people take before finding the identity that really fits them, and force closeted people to be even more closeted. 

There’s a lot of undeniably shitty stuff in fandom. However, I fundamentally believe that trying to target the people creating it and forcing them to stop doesn’t work very well, and has the serious byproduct of killing the creativity and enthusiasm of the rest of fandom and resulting in less of the actual thing you like being produced. I think that it is infinitely more productive to focus on improving the ratio of good stuff in fandom than trying to snuff out every bad thing.

Like I said: I understand if this means former followers, mutuals, or friends no longer want to interact with me. I’ll be saddened, but I’ve obviously chosen this path and can deal with the consequences. 

I wish this could have worked out differently.

[unloneliest]

hi i don’t think pan ppl are transphobic, just because bi ppl can be attracted to 2+ genders and pan are attracted to all doesn’t mean pan ppl or bi ppl are transphobic. i deal w panphobic things anytime anyone mentions pansexuality and i really thought your blog would be safe from that. i'm pan and don’t use bi bc i recognize i'd be attracted to someone regardless of gender identity as long as i find them attractive (and this has nothing to do w seeing trans ppl as a dif gender), if they're 1/

this is a long post & i want ppl to have the option 2 skip it so i’m putting it under a readmore; above all else i’m so thankful that you sent me these asks and deeply sorry that i rb’d something that made you feel unsafe on my blog. i agree with you; i don’t think bi or pan people are inherently transphobic and i’m really sorry i implied that with that post!

2/ if they ID as demiboy or demigirl, or genderfluid or anything else that isn't binary, then i really don’t care. i'm not saying bi ppl can’t feel the same since i said bi people are attracted to 2+ genders or all, but pan is rooted in the emphasis of all gender identities. yes theres a lot of overlap but just... i'm hurt that you'd rb smth like that, i understand the last line of its root in transphobia but being gay/straight and so many other things have issues that clash w other LGBT+ IDs

3/ if anything, i've dealt with internalized panphobia and homophobia, i just never felt comfortable with saying i was bi, not because it was "boring" or "binary" but bc everyone would just assume i was attracted to guys and women which was never the case and saying i was pan allowed for me to show that i knew that there are more than 2 gender identities and that i was attracted to all of them

hi its the 3 pt ask anon and its like i completely get why bi ppl would be upset w pan ppl but its just so hard when both are oppressed and one of the most common arguments is like: we aren't seen so we have to be seen first before you try to get into this too. i get why biphobia exists but the same biphobia exists for pan ppl. so many ppl say you're just straight bc of a het relationship or you're just bi then. or the whole theres only two genders argument. and its like i'm as open to dating

5?/ anyone. i genuinely do not care about whichever gender they ID as since i just find ppl attractive for being attractive. and bi ppl can be the same. there is a LOT of overlap and i'm not going to dismiss any worries or concerns. all i know is that the pan community i've surrounded myself with to find love in my sexuality and community have constantly explained that theres overlap but it depends to the person and neither sexuality is transphobic so i try to never overstep or invalidate either

but thank you for listening, so many ppl just invalidate pan voices who try to put both bi and pan ppl into view while acknowledging how theres overlap but theres a difference. its hard feeling invalidating when all i (and others) do is be as inclusive as possible and try to never overstep. i listen to others worries like you do and i've learned so much from your blog and your rbs which i appreciate. it was just hard seeing panphobia & biphobia when i've tagged both to filter the words out

8?? sorry i lost count/ ty again for listening

hi and again just. thank you, for sending me these. i’ve privated the post for now, because i don’t want to hurt anybody but i also don’t want to avoid accountability 4 hurtful actions; i’d most like to delete the post but probably only will if you’re ok with that. and if i ever rb something that includes biphobia or panphobia i’ll do my best to always tag them.

and again i’m so sorry to have rb’d a hurtful post especially bc that runs so opposite to what i want to be doing with this blog & i know that when i’ve found something hurtful shared in spaces i viewed as safe it’s somehow hurt a lot worse than when i’ve encountered hurtful attitudes in places i was expecting it. 

in retrospect the phrasing on that post was Not kind, & didn’t convey the nuance i read into it. my baseline assumption of both bi and pan people is that neither group is inherently transphobic; both identities have extremely similar experiences and my perspective on different lgbtq+ identities in general is that our strength is in solidarity and isolating/separating can be really dangerous to the lgbtq+ community’s ability to thrive and work on making the world better and safer for us all. 

i’m really glad that you’ve found love and support within the pan community and i have all the respect and admiration in the world for my bi and pan siblings in the lgbtq+ community! being able to find folks who share your identity and to find pride in yourself together is so healing and important and i’m so glad for the times i’ve experienced that in my life as well. 

you’re right that all communities do have issues with transphobia, and i normally wouldn’t join in on other identity’s in-community conversations; i thought about that when reblogging the post earlier but i do my best to rb posts asking people to examine if their beliefs and identity might be formed on transphobic assumptions when it comes to all labels and that’s why i did originally rb. i do my best to rb a lot of posts asking wlw to examine potentially transphobic ideas they might hold, because i’m an afab nonbinary wlw and so regardless of the fact that i’m not cis, i have a lot more privilege than trans women do in wlw spaces and i know i need to be doing what i can to make wlw spaces safe for trans women & girls.

and the post i rb’d did just have pretty shitty & confrontational wording, which i didn’t think about when rb’ing it. i’m sorry again for that! 

my reasoning in rb’ing that post was the same as when i rb posts asking wlw to examine their views; not that everyone of the groups in question are inherently shitty in some way, but that we all could use reminders to reflect sometimes and that occasionally people will be misinformed or have a shitty view/shitty views - but that that’s not the norm. i also felt more ok rb’ing this post bc i for a very long time id’d as bi, and my attraction as a lesbian still is to women and nonbinary people who don’t feel misgendered by the attraction of a lesbian; some people would call me bi for that, but it’s a common lesbian experience. i really relate to what you said about choosing pan because it really clearly sends the message that you’re attracted to people regardless of gender, bc i chose lesbian as a label bc it sends the message that i’m Not attracted to men! it’s about how i want people to see me.

my reading of the post was connected to experiences i had with some pretty shitty transphobic ex coworkers; they didn’t know i wasn’t cis, but a number of my coworkers at the time were bi. transphobia/biphobia tw for the rest of this paragraph/ the ex coworkers were pan and they adamantly told me/other coworkers that bisexuality was attraction to men and women whereas pansexuality was attraction to men, women, and trans people. my assumption based off of them wasn’t that pan people are transphobic/that pan as an identity is inherently transphobic, but that they as individuals sucked and were transphobic & biphobic?

that experience does touch on what the post was about though, i think. since the bi manifesto written in 1990 “official” definitions of bisexuality have been stating that bi doesn’t just mean attraction to men and women, and that there are more than 2 genders; it’s society’s biphobia that causes people to think that bisexuality isn’t inherently inclusive of more than 2 genders/inherently inclusive of trans people. its clear to me that you know there’s overlap in the communities and that you’re not transphobic and again that’s my baseline assumption of pan or bi people! ik that stinkers are always the exception in communities.

i rb’d the post because i think self reflection on internalized bs is good, and i didn’t realize how confrontational & potentially shitty the post was; i’m really sorry that i rb’d it and made my blog feel unsafe & i’m going to do my best to be more thoughtful in the future. i hope that me sharing why i rb’d it doesn’t come across as an excuse, either; i’m just hoping knowing my intentions might help w/ the experience. 

(if ppl must know, link to the post here )

[eevachu]

Healing Through Fandom

I originally posted this for deviantART’s Pride Month thing, but since it’s the 1 year anniversary of Ghostbusters, I thought I’d post it here too. 

Happy 1 year anniversary, everyone! And thanks to everyone for a great Holtzbert Week!  💖 💖 💖 ✨

So 2016 was... rough. I started out the year at probably the second lowest I've ever felt in my life. My cat, my best buddy in the whole world, who'd been with me for 7 years and who I was looking forward to having around into my 30s, died suddenly around Xmas 2015. I honestly don't remember most of the first couple months of 2016, I was in the pits. Luckily, it was my second time in the pits, so I knew from my stint in therapy how to deal. But I was still in a job I hated, that I felt I was much overqualified for and was constantly jerked around by. I didn't really have anything that got me excited to like... be alive? Other than the prospect of leaving for grad school to change careers, which to me was just kinda... giving up on my art career. And then came along Ghostbusters. I was really excited to work on the project, even if just in post-production, but it was 2016 and in the theme of my life: I only got to work on it for a couple days before I got moved off onto another project. I, of course, asked to pick up any work or overtime for it, but was denied because that's "just how things work." Looking back, it's really funny why I was first excited to work on it. I loved Melissa McCarthy because I was a Gilmore Girls kid and I loved seeing a woman get to do physical comedy, especially when that woman wasn't a size 0. And she got happy endings and she got the guy a lot, which was always nice to see. And then I saw early footage of Chris Hemsworth as Kevin with his shirtless saxophone headshots and I was like, "This is going to be a good movie." Oh, darling if I had only known. So I got launched on the project officially and that's when I saw Kate McKinnon as Jillian Holtzmann. And I remember gawking. Oh, girl. I was gawking and clutching my pearl necklace like a 50s housewife and thinking, "That woman is going to ruin my life and I'm going to love every minute of it." I had, at this point, no clue who Kate McKinnon was. I only caught the occasional SNL bit and I don't think I'd ever seen her in a movie, but I knew. I mean... I wasn't fucking psychic, I just had my gaydar on. But we'll get to that later... So film wraps. I sort of let it all go until release date. I go to see Ghostbusters, half in spite at the men making a fuss that girls were in their sandbox and half on the off-chance that my name was in the credits (ha!). Now... I don't remember when I first started liking girls. I can narrow it down to: I consciously started doing in highschool. I'm sure I was doing it subconsciously before (because Emma from elementary school, ooh that girl still haunt my dreams), but I started realizing that I wanted other girls to put their girl faces against my girl face around 14. After a brief failed stint with compulsive heterosexuality, I identified as bisexual (but picky!) and then pansexual (but homoromantic!) in college. What's my point? I don't really remember when I started liking girls. But I can now pinpoint the EXACT moment when I stopped liking boys. That moment was the night I saw Ghostbusters during Battle Of Times Square when Holtzmann licks that gun and stole my heart. It took into October for me to figure that out because I am slow with personal epiphanies, but I knew that night that no guy would ever make me feel the way it felt to see an openly lesbian woman wreck shop and not feel bad to be attracted to that. Kids, representation matters. You don't realize it. You might be 25 and think you know who you are, until you see someone be what you could be, if only you took the chance. I, of course, and embarrassingly so, went into a Kate McKinnon and Ghostbusters fan spiral, because I was now gay and hopeless. 2016 went on. Ghostbusters didn't do as well as predicted and it was hard to see how shitty bros were being because of it. Because I liked this little fandom I'd started hanging around. I still didn't like my job and was waffling between my options, but I was coping. And then the US election happened. And all that good self-confidence and self-discovery went out the window. It felt like crap. To see a woman, a smart, competent woman, lose to an 80s tv villain of a man; a vapid, transparently villainous white man, to boot. The politics of the election aside, what Hillary losing represented was that no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, I can still lose to the world's most incompetent man. That people would vote away the rights of trans people and gay people because they were even a little skeptical about a woman. That SUCKED to see. And I cried a lot around that point, because that is what I generally do when everything seems pointless. Until Kate McKinnon's cold open. Until I saw her hurting, until I saw how all of us were hurting. "I'm not giving up and neither should you." It's a phrase that I have taken to heart, cheesily enough. So I kinda picked myself up and I started writing about a thing that made me happy: Ghostbusters. And I started by taking requests from others who liked these two strong female scientists as much as I did. And everyone seemed to like it, which led to me writing and drawing more and eventually led to me planning Holtzbert Week. I look back on 2016 and tangentially, everything that picked me up when I felt like garbage connected back to Kate. So I'll always appreciate her for that. It led me to new friends and a whole community of people like me. I healed through this weird little fandom that I found through this quirky blonde in yellow glasses. And that's something that fandom is really good about, helping you heal. Helping you be happy when things kinda suck.

[wedgemccloud]

On that not all men post like I agree with you that it's not a valid excuse and is shitty but also??? You phrased is so apparently every guy is straight and every guy dates women which is quite homophobic so maybe don't phrase it like that?

I hope this is some sort of actual troll because this is the most idiotic thing I’ve ever had put in my inbox. “I agree with your point but it’s also homophobic” might be the absolutely most self-defeating thing I’ve ever seen.

You’re saying this because you know the point I’m trying to make but I didn’t account for every possible contingency? For every possible reader? Because I’m not directly saying gay men can be the same kind of shitty?

You agree with this point because you know the sort of men that need to be told this. You have to.

So you know those are the people I’m speaking to.

I have no idea if this is referring to my original post or to my addition late on, but in my first post, I made no assumption that every guy is straight or dates women. All I said was that ALL men benefit from how low the bar is set, and that bar is set by abusive and toxic behaviors in straight male relationships because they are still the role models for men’s behaviors in most contexts, with women or otherwise.

The same low bar set for men in their relationships with women affect their platonic relationships with women, and also reflect relationships with other men. I have literally heard the exact same “at least they didn’t hit you” excuse said to TWO gay men I have known who had trouble with their significant others.

The point is the privilege in the bar for acceptable being set by - and just above - abusers. That privilege exists whether you are dating women or men, or even not dating at all.

“Sure, he might be treating you different from his other co-workers because you’re a woman, but at least he isn’t calling you a slut.” It’s all the same thing.

In my addition to the post, I was responding to someone based on their perspective and the very likely place it comes from which is naturally a straight male. Because of that tone, I very much did assume this is coming from someone who is dating women, which I think was pretty reasonable and probably given a decade’s worth of experiences on the internet.

But even then, my response was STILL not even focusing on the aspect of dating, but on someone placing the blame on women “lowering their standards” when they been bombarded practically since birth with messages to do precisely that.

This entire topic is speaking about an extremely vague and broad statement many people make. That’s an unavoidable part of not just responding to but agreeing with a statement that starts with “all men”.

And whether you are straight, bisexual, homosexual, pansexual, asexual, or anything else, the point still stands.

All men benefit from the behavior of lazy, toxic, abusive straight men as long as society tells others that “at least” they aren’t stuck with them.

[ricardosousalemos]

Green Day: Dookie

When he was 10 years old, long before he sang about masturbation losing its fun, Billie Joe Armstrong lost himself in music. His father had just died of cancer, and in Rodeo, Calif., a smallish East Bay suburb next to an oil refinery, Armstrong retreated into MTV, the Beatles, Van Halen, and a Stratocaster knock-off he nicknamed Blue. He grew close to schoolmate Michael Pritchard, who had his own family grief and who introduced Armstrong to British heavy metal giants like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Pritchard later earned the sobriquet Mike Dirnt, for his constant dirnting on bass guitar.

In high school, Armstrong and Dirnt smoked pot and played in a band called Sweet Children, finding their tribe in a tiny clique of DIY punks. By 1988, Sweet Children had their first gig at 924 Gilman Street, the Berkeley punk mecca opened the previous year by Maximumrocknroll zine founder Tim Yohannan, and Armstrong told his waitress mother he wouldn’t be graduating. Sweet Children signed to Lookout Records!, changed their name to Green Day, and put out a pair of rough but promising EPs. They brought in Frank “Tré Cool” Wright, a drummer known equally for his musicianship and his mischievousness, and with their sharply improved LP Kerplunk!, Green Day arrived.

As Kerplunk! landed on shelves in December 1991, Nirvana’s Nevermind zoomed to the top of the album charts. A band with Green Day’s momentum and punk pedigree was obvious bait for the major labels. Still, it was Armstrong’s voice, sneering and congested, that initially put one A&R exec off of Green Day’s demo. Luckily, he passed it to his producing partner, Rob Cavallo, whose father had been Prince’s manager circa Purple Rain and who, despite signing respected L.A. pop-punks the Muffs, was sorely in need of a hit.

He found one. Co-produced by Cavallo and the band themselves, Green Day’s Dookie was released on February 1, 1994. To date, the band’s Warner/Reprise debut has sold more than 16 million copies worldwide. Most of those album buyers probably know nothing about its makers’ humble origins. But that story helps to explain the unique series of balances, between showmanship and disaffection, dogmatic punk ideals and romantic stadium dreams, sweetness and scatology, partying and pain, that have turned Dookie into one of the greatest teenage wasteland albums of any generation. Armstrong’s Dookie guitar? His childhood’s trusty old Blue.

What set Dookie apart from the grunge rock bellowers of its day was Armstrong’s voice, foggy and vaguely unplaceable. “I’m an American guy faking an English accent faking an American accent,” he teased at the time. Though Armstrong’s tone was bratty, his phrasing had that lackadaisical quality that left room for listeners to fill in their own interpretations. On Dookie, Armstrong channeled a lifetime of songcraft obsession into buzzing, hook-crammed tracks that acted like they didn’t give a shit—fashionably then, but also appealingly for the 12-year-old spirit within us all. Maybe they worked so well because, on a compositional and emotional level, they were actually gravely serious. Sometimes singing about the serious stuff in your life—desire, anxiety, identity—feels a lot more weightless done against the backdrop of a dogshit-bombarded illustration of your hometown by East Bay punk fixture Richie Bucher.

“Longview,” Dookie’s outstanding first single, smacks of the most extreme disengagement: a title taken from Longview, Washington, where it happened to be played live for the first time; a loping bass line supposedly concocted while Dirnt was tripping on acid; and a theme of shrugging boredom that placed it in the ne’er-do-well pantheon next to “Slack Motherfucker” to “Loser.” Adolescent interest may always be piqued by lyrical references to drugs and jerking off, the way a 5-year-old mainly laughs at the Calvin and Hobbes panels where Calvin is naked or calling Hobbes an “idiot.” But as beer-raising alt-rock goes, this is also exceptionally bleak, with the narrator’s couch-locked wank session transforming into a self-imposed prison where Armstrong semi-decipherably sings, per the liner notes, “You’re fucking breaking.” No motivation? For a high-school dropout hoping to succeed in music, that mental hell sounds like plenty of motivation.

The other singles mix Armstrong’s burgeoning songwriting chops with deceptively lighthearted takes on deeper topics. The opening line, “Do you have the time/To listen to me whine?” is endlessly quotable, but the self-mocking stoner paranoia of the irresistible “Basket Case” was inspired by Armstrong’s anxiety attacks. As late as 1992, Armstrong still had no fixed address, and “Welcome to Paradise” reaches back to those nights crashing at dodgy West Oakland warehouse spaces. It also brashly embodies punk’s trash-is-treasure aesthetic at its most American. But the closest Armstrong came to a pop standard, one that any guitarist who knows four power chords can play at a home and a more established star could likely have made an even bigger hit, was the midtempo “When I Come Around”—a smoldering devotion to the then-estranged lover who would become the mother of Armstrong’s two children. They’re still married.

Elsewhere, the bouncy, brief “Coming Clean” is from the perspective of a confused 17-year-old, uncovering secrets about manhood that his parents can’t fathom; Armstrong has forthrightly related the song to his own youthful questions about bisexuality. “Seventeen and coming clean for the first time/I finally figured out myself for the time,” he declares, in one particularly sublime bit of wordcraft. Teenage angst pays off well: Now he was bored and almost 22. Likewise, the rest of the album tracks often further showed what an accomplished songwriter Armstrong had become. “I declare I don’t care no more,” from breakneck slacker anthem “Burnout,” would be a classic first opener on any album, even though by now we know it contains an element of false bravado. The contrasts that made up the band’s identity also helped elevate Dookie above its shitty name, couching anti-social childishness in whip-smart melodic and lyrical turns. When, on the last proper track, the nuke-invoking “F.O.D.” (short for “fuck off and die”), Armstrong vents, “It’s real and it’s been fun/But was it all real fun,” it’s his Dookie-era way of saying he hopes you had the time of your life.   

Critics have been kind to Dookie, but not overwhelmingly so. It’s tempting to wonder how many of these lyrics could’ve been influenced by Robert Christgau’s two-word, two-star Village Voice review of Kerplunk!: “Beats masturbation.” Still, he gave Dookie an A-, and the album made it onto the Voice’s 1994 Pazz & Jop year-end critics’ poll at No. 12. But the backlash against Green Day in the pages of Maximumrocknroll was real and visceral. The June 1994 cover showed a man holding a gun in his mouth with the words, “Major labels: some of your friends are already this fucked,” with Yohannan sniffing inside, “I thought it was oh so touching that MTV decided to interrupt playing Green Day videos to overwhelm us with Nirvana videos on the day of Kobain’s [sic] death.” At Gilman, where major label acts were banned, graffiti on the wall proclaimed, “Billie Joe must die.” So it’s an album many people adore, but like loving the Beatles, proclaiming your adoration for it doesn’t necessarily win you any special recognition. Oh, you were in seventh grade and learned every word of a Green Day album? Duh.

Time has worked on Dookie in strange ways. Most blatantly, the post-grunge alt boom allowed an album like this to exist in the first place. Green Day were masters at pulling stoner humor out of malaise, and that is what the so-called alternative nation needed. One of Dookie’s great light-hearted touches, the image of Ernie from “Sesame Street” on the back cover, has been airbrushed away from later physical editions, ostensibly due to legal concerns. Among the many things streaming has ruined was the old ’90s trick of including hidden tracks on the album buried without notice at the end of the CD, so all digital releases treat Tré Cool’s novelty goof “All By Myself” as its own proper track. The unfortunate “Having a Blast,” about wanting to lash out with a suicide bombing, is understandably absent from most recent Green Day setlists.

Then again, so many of the fights that Dookie started have happily become moot. In 2015, Green Day played their first show at Gilman in 22 years. Whichever Maximumrocknroll readers were mad at Green Day for trying to make it out of their working-class suburban beginnings probably have more adult worries today (the zine, however, hasn’t forgotten). Though Green Day never quite embraced the term pop-punk and certainly didn’t invent it, they were pegged as its popularizers; you could hear their echoes several years ago in records like Wavves’ King of the Beach, but younger pop-punk torchbearers like Joyce Manor, Modern Baseball, or You Blew It! have been more likely to name-check the more tightly genre-fitting Blink-182. In interviews, Armstrong still claims the “punk” mantle, but over the years Green Day emerged as a classic arena-rock band, noted for their pyrotechnics.

These days, Armstrong knows how to fire up crowds by promising them they’ll have a good time. Fans are brought up on stage every night to take their instruments and play a song. A T-shirt cannon is somehow involved. Green Day have matured in all the ways the biggest bands usually mature, and that’s their right. Immature but crafty, punk but pop, American pretending to be English pretending to be, well, whatever, Dookie-era Green Day were, for a time, in a class alone. Call them pathetic, call them what you will. They were all by themselves, and everyone was looking.