A queer reading of Blink-182 may almost be too obvious to make, too easy for anyone who grew up watching MTV around Y2K. On posters, on album covers, and on the streets of Los Angeles in the video for their hit song “What’s My Age Again?” the trio for a time seemed to be naked, together, constantly. The band members have said this was, in part, a marketing strategy. It made them into pinups of a sort never quite seen before or since: more overtly sexual and yet down to earth than either the spandex-clad rockers of a decade earlier, or the boy bands on the airwaves at the time, or their present-day analogue Five Seconds of Summer (who, in pointed contrast to Blink, cut cameras at the moment of trouser drop).

Stripping down wasn't just savvy business, though. In a 2000 Entertainment Weekly feature story titled “Nude Sensation,” producer Jerry Finn said that the guys really just hung out that way: “I saw them naked more than I ever care to see anyone naked. In the mastering studio—pretty much anywhere.'' That unselfconscious locker-room intimacy is, in a historical context, pretty normal. But in modern Western society that often sees queerness as a pathology, it gives rise to sexual suspicion. And so it is that in that same EW article, Delonge dropped the g-word when talking about his friendship with Hoppus: “It sounds stupid and gay, but the first time we sat down and played together, it was just magical.” The thing is, to some people it would sound kind of gay, and the guys' camaraderie is part of what inspires "shipping" blogs and slash fanfiction and fake religious-right screeds about the band.

Faced with the options of acknowledging how their friendship might be perceived or repressing it, Blink-182 dove with glee into “acknowledge,” and the result was winking butt-grabs and boxer-clad photoshoots and songs about prison rape. This was, counterintuitively, a macho performance. They even made fun of the repressed camp that characterized boy bands, with the parodic “All the Small Things” video showing way more skin than Brian Littrell and co. would have ever dared, implying that it was Blink's chart rivals who had something to hide. (Delonge on boy bands to Launch magazine: "They choreograph everything, including the sex they have with each other after the shows!")

As far as I can tell, gay-rights groups never seemed to much mind Blink’s antics. Feminists did, though, and rightly, given that the band regularly asked fans to flash their boobs and sang about wanting a "girl that I can train." Really listen to the music, though, and something other than the classic male-rocker-pig tropes of conquest comes to the fore. The guys seem to be jerking off more often than bedding women, which could just be a true-to-life depiction of straight male teenagedom were it not for songs like “What’s My Age Again,” in which Hoppus sings of turning on the TV in the middle of a blow job. As Claire Lobenfeld asked in a recent Wondering Sound reappraisal of Enema of the State, “What’s the possibility that not being interested in sex is the thing?”