Benson Boone, a Showy Male Pop Star for This American Moment

If you asked a social media executive to design a pop star with maximum virality in mind, they might show you someone like Benson Boone.

The 23-year-old Utah native satisfies at least four different internet niches: He is a belter, and has mastered the pained expression of singers dramatically straining for the high notes. He flips — you already know this, of course — often enough that he has his own acrobatic video compilations. He is patriotic in a vague, pseudo-apolitical way; his second album, released last week, is called “American Heart,” and its cover features Boone holding an American flag while covered in soot and grime, as if recently returned from the battlefield. And he is a sexual showboat, donning revealing outfits and grabbing his crotch onstage; he also possesses what British GQ described last year as a “sexy little dirtbag mustache,” the facial hair du jour for Gen Z celebrities.

But Boone is also something rare in 2025: a successful white male pop star. Pop music has been a woman’s game for much of the 21st century, but the disparity has been even more stark during the 2020s. The male stars on the charts right now who aren’t named Bruno Mars either come from the worlds of country (Morgan Wallen, Shaboozey) or rap (Drake, Kendrick Lamar) or both (Post Malone). Aside from Harry Styles, who hasn’t released new music in over three years, very few male stars — artists who can sell out arenas or stadiums like their female counterparts — are playing in the pure pop space. (The TikTok prankster-turned-Christian rocker Alex Warren, whose execrable wedding song “Ordinary” tops the Hot 100 right now, feels like the product of every media ecosystem other than the pop industry.)

Toying with gender and sexuality has been a big part of Styles’s performance and appeal: He’s both explicitly embraced femininity — wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue, painting his nails — and tapped into hoary rock star tropes with songs like “Kiwi,” about the fear that you’ve gotten a fan pregnant. Boone has done his own version of blurring the lines. While he dates the actress and social media personality Maggie Thurmon and acknowledges that most of his fans are young women, he saves his sweetest, most intense love songs for the men in his life (like his father and his best friend, Eric). And in terms of presentation and stage panache, he explicitly nods to a queer forebear: the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. The two share a penchant for cat suits, mustaches, even an imperious stage presence. But where Mercury covertly gestured at gay subculture, Boone seems to imagine an alternate history.

Boone was born in a small town in Washington and raised Mormon. A competitive diver from a young age, he only began singing in his late teens, then started posting videos of himself on TikTok. He had grown up a voracious fan of acts like One Direction and Justin Bieber — he and his pal Eric, he has said, would watch their videos for hours. At 18, he auditioned for “American Idol” and wowed a panel of judges including Katy Perry, who predicted the world would “swoon over Benson Boone.”