Songfacts®:

• "Wish You Were Gay" was inspired by real-life events. Billie Eilish penned the song about a crush who made it clear he wasn't interested in her, which made her feel horrible. She was able to come to grips with feeling unwanted by imagining he was gay.
  
  To spare my pride
  To give your lack of interest an explanation
  I'm not your type
  Maybe I'm not your preferred gender orientation
  
  Eilish got her wish: She recalled in a 2018 video that there is a twist as the boy in question did later come out to her as gay.
• Eilish counts down the ways her crush won't reciprocate her feelings, going from six to one in the first verse and then from twelve to six in the second verse. It was the singer's brother and co-writer Finneas who came up with the idea. He recalled in A Snippet into Billie's Mind – Wish You Were Gay:
  
  "We had that whole number sequence that I thought would be a funny interesting way… like, you need twelve steps to quit somebody or get over them. Like stop being addicted to a person."
• Some of Eilish's LGBTQ fans took issue with the song, accusing the singer of gay-baiting her audience with its title then using queer men as props for its lyrical content.
  
  The singer responded to the backlash in an interview with Pop Buzz during which she said that the song has been misinterpreted and she'd tried hard not to make it offensive. Eilish added: "The whole idea of the song is, it's kind of a joke. It's kind of like, 'I'm an ass and you don't love me.' And you don't love me because you don't love me and that's the only reason and I wish you didn't love me because you didn't love girls."
  
  The singer went on to say she could have written the song the opposite way and it would have had the same meaning. "It could be a girl interested in a girl and maybe that girl likes girls also but she doesn't like her back," Eilish said. "And then it's like, 'Well damn. I wish you were straight!' You know what I'm saying, it could be exactly the other way. I wish you were straight because you didn't like me because you like boys."
• Another Billie - Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, is a big fan of this one. "That's just a rad song," he told Rolling Stone. "I think it saves lives."