Been there. Catholic upbringing and all. As a queer man, these visuals and Tony's belting tones had me feeling spiritually nourished. A man of apparent Italian and Latino heritage. Red lips. Full moustache. Hairy chest out. The leotard doing the bare legal minimum over the nipples. This was not fashion. This was camp theology.

Naturally, I slid into his DMs. Not in a thirsty way. Keep it clean. This was the modest, artisanal era, the Tony and the Kiki 30K follower days. I pitched a digital interview for Brownstone Cowboys socials. Some stills. A conversation. Drop it live. Clean. Elegant. The kind of plan the universe immediately decides to sabotage.

Scheduling got slippery. Time zones misbehaved. Meanwhile, Tony’s algorithm was not just working on me. The internet clocked him. Hard. Overnight, it seemed, he picked up another 200K followers on Instagram and clocked more than two million likes on TikTok. What the actual fuck. This Freddie Mercury, Cher, Dolly Parton, Prince hybrid wonder child was lighting up the global feed with something genuinely rare. Unfiltered queer joy. No apology. No safety rails. Glam rock dragged out of storage, dusted off and set on fire.

I sent him straight to our creative director, Heathermary Jackson, with a single instruction. He needs to be in print. A confident moment when a question was not required.

We finally meet for coffee in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Tony’s teenage stomping ground, which feels cosmically correct. And here’s the thing. The glam is not a costume.

There is no off switch. No before and after. Tony is the same over coffee as he is under stage lights. Effervescent. Electric. Unmistakably himself.

He is the kind of person you want success to happen to. Deeply kind. Open. Warm. With a voice that can split walls and still hold you gently by the collar. For those who have not yet fallen into their algorithm, here is the compression.

Tony is Anthony Alfaro, Queens-born, LaGuardia High School and Boston Conservatory-trained vocalist, actor and songwriter. Before founding the band, Alfaro toured with On Your Feet! as part of the Miami Sound Machine, worked with Lin-Manuel Miranda on Netflix’s Big Mouth, performed at Lincoln Center, Paper Mill Playhouse and the Public Theater, and sang alongside Brian Newman, Lady Gaga’s longtime bandleader, in his After Dark residency at the Box.

The Kiki is Rodney Bush. Berklee College of Music graduate. Juilliard-trained in advanced composition. Currently developing a musical centred on Bram Stoker and the origins of Dracula for London’s West End.

Friends for over a decade, they officially formed Tony & the Kiki in 2021 and built it into a glam-rock, disco-funk, psychedelic powder keg. The project has drawn support from Lady Gaga, Cyndi Lauper and Tiffany, amassed nearly 300K Instagram followers, more than two million TikTok likes and secured a label deal with Tomboi Records. They will tour the US with Lords of Acid in April/May and are featured on the band’s forthcoming album Acid Reign.

Their 2025 EP FUCQ (Vol. 1), Fornication Under Consent of Queens, fuses CBGB-era grit with Studio 54 dancefloor excess. Clash called it “ridiculously fun”. Queerty compared Alfaro’s vocals to Chris Cornell and his style to Dee Snider at his most unhinged. PopMatters described the band’s arrival as a return of androgyny and people of colour to rock music.

I would simply call it church. They are a glam-rock cult, whether the industry is ready or not.

As the political world collapses into performative outrage and algorithmic despair, in the middle of that noise is this person. Moustache. Sequins. Platform boots. A voice like a cathedral on fire. Not asking permission to exist.

I told Tony that stumbling across his videos felt like surfacing for air in a feed designed to suffocate. Amused, we landed on the same conclusion. In a culture that treats joy like a moral failure, someone has to model it without apology.

ON QUEER INTUITION AND NAVIGATING SPACES

BJ I think a lot of queer men grow up hyper-aware of how they affect a space. It’s a survival skill, learning to read a room before it reads you. Is that something you recognise in yourself? 

TK Totally. One thousand percent. And I was in all of these very masculine spaces, kindergarten through eighth grade. And even going to performing arts high school, it’s still high school. There are bros. Drama bros, but bros... is that a thing? It is now.




ON FINDING FREEDOM IN NEW YORK

BJ New York is unforgiving. It demands something from you all day, every day. How do you carve out freedom and joy inside a city like that? 

TK I find pockets of freedom in New York through community. New York is a hard place, but I think friendship is something that was ingrained in me. My parents had best friends – “that’s my aunt, that’s my uncle”. So friendship has been the most bolstering thing in terms of pursuing my art. My friends, from a young age, were like, “No, you’re amazing. You have this special thing.” 

Because the thing is that a lot of kids are talented in New York. Everyone wants to be on Broadway, be a pop star. I always kind of felt like a small fish. I’d be like, “Well, no, they’re the real deal.” But friends who were coming up with me were like, “No, it’s different with you.” They could see it before I could.





ON WHAT MUSIC REALLY MEANS

BJ Beyond the lipstick and the outfit and the Tony persona we get to see on screen – at an intimate level, what does music mean to you? Why do you do it, beyond being on stage?

TK At an intimate level, music is like an escape. But more than that, as a kid growing up, once I started going into the city, that’s when I encountered that 
brutality you mentioned. The iPod came out and my relationship to music really formed during my teenage years while I was constantly in transit. Being an awkward teenager, being queer, not feeling comfortable in your body – music was like an armour that I put on. I was in a music video in my head. All of the people looking at me weirdly, “Oh, I’m fat,” “I’m gay” – all of that would just disappear, because I’d just be in the world with the music. It’d be me and Adele, or me and Beyoncé, or whoever it was at the time.

So I do it for that kid. And for other kids who need that. I remember in 2018, even before doing Tony and The Kiki, I was a part of a show, and something bad happened. A performance was taken away from me. But that night I had a show to do. So I got myself together and did that show. And afterwards, there were these three or four queer kids who came up, and they were like, “We’re from the queer club at our high school, and you’re so amazing.” And in that moment it’s like – oh my God, it’s so much beyond the diva stuff and the lipstick. There’s someone who sees what I do, and they’re like: “My whole experience is validated.” 

On the day we shot Tony, it was his birthday. Thirty-four. He blew out the candle like he was launching a rocket, which, given the year he has had, felt appropriate. The conversation kept spilling past the recording, past the shoot, past the point where any functional professional would have wrapped it. Neither of us wanted to stop. There is a line from the interview that has stayed lodged in my chest. Tony's mother, watching what the world did to her brother Jimmy, decided this: if there is a gay baby that needs to be born, let me have it. That is not tolerance. It is not even acceptance. That is a woman volunteering herself for the frontline of someone else’s war because she had already seen what the shrapnel does. She chose to be the shelter. The fact that Tony exists as he does, loud, glittering, unafraid, is evidence that it worked. 



What surprised me most, sitting across from him, was the gentleness. The internet gives you the sequins and the scream and the hairy chest and the boots, and all of that is real. But underneath it is someone who talks about friendship the way other people talk about oxygen. Someone who credits community before talent. Someone who still thinks of himself as a small fish in a big pond, even now, even after millions of people have told him otherwise. That gap, between how the world sees Tony and how Tony sees himself, is where the music lives. It is why it connects. 



I have thought a lot about why his videos stopped me mid-scroll when nothing else could. It was not the outfit. It was not the voice, though the voice is staggering. It was sincerity. In a feed engineered to make you feel worse about everything, here was a person who appeared to be having the time of his life and meant it. Not ironically. Not as a content strategy. Not as a brand. Just a man in a leotard on a New York sidewalk who had decided, apparently permanently, that joy was non-negotiable. In 2026, that is the most radical thing I have seen anyone do. 

In his words, life is doable and life is fabulous. That is what he wants you to leave with.