Courtesy Grindr
Meg Stalter isn’t joking about her music. Except when she is.
Dry, satirical, willfully uncomfortable but never cruel, Stalter’s outside-the-box comedy is undeniably her own. From her viral “Hi, gay!” clips to costarring in the Emmy-winning Hacks to starring in Broadway’s Oh, Mary! from July through September, Stalter’s career is an unusual negotiation between queer niche and mainstream appeal. Her music follows suit. The Cleveland-born comedian-actor’s debut album, Crave, is layered with satire and social commentary, but it also serves up some genuinely delightful electropop camp.
Last Thursday (Oct. 22) in Manhattan, Stalter performed at the Grindr Pleasure Ball. A sci-fi-themed fete attended by Adam Lambert, Dominique Jackson, Christian Siriano, Susanne Bartsch, Joey Arias and Anna Delvey, the invite-only event boasted a Halloween costume contest hosted by the irrepressible Dashaun Wesley and judged by Bartsch, Siriano, Kelly Cutrone and Grindr’s Tristan Pineiro.
Bopping around the stage in an astronaut suit, Stalter sang “Prettiest Girl in America,” “Famous Me,” “Gay” and more Crave tracks while ribbing the glitter-and-paint-covered crowd. She repeatedly stopped one song to demand people make FaceTime calls during her set; at another point, she (jokingly) dressing down an Aladdin Sane look-alike for talking while she was singing.
“Gay people live for a diva. They really do. That’s why people love the show I was on, Hacks,” Stalter told Billboard backstage prior to her performance, which followed her live musical debut at WeHo Pride Street Fair in June. Yes, Stalter the pop star is playing up the diva antics for comedy, but she’s also singing exactly the kind of dance-pop you hear bumping out of queer nightclubs from coast to coast — and having a blast doing it. “I think there’s something about really being yourself … Truthfully, I think gay and queer people like to see someone being exactly who they are. When I’m on stage, I am who I really am — I feel the closest to my inner child. I’m up there being silly or doing very serious music because I’m having so much fun.”
While it’s hard to shake the feeling that any and everything Stalter does is a bit, she told Billboard there’s an empathetic element to “Famous Me,” a Crave song about rich but unhappy pop stars. “No one feels bad for pop stars or famous people because they seem to have the world,” she explained. “When you hear it, a lot of people might think I’m joking but I’m not. I do feel bad for pop stars for people don’t feel bad for.”
Queer audiences have always loved a diva — from Judy Garland to Britney Spears — for what they’ve been through, not in spite of, but because of their downs. Lucky for Stalter, the only Downs in her life is Paul, the Hacks costar — with whom she shares an awkward, hysterical chemistry — who joined her at the 2026 AMAs in May and on Watch What Happens Live in August. From DIY social clips to HBO Max, Stalter’s last decade has been pretty stellar. “I do feel like I pretty much have it all, because I have an amazing girlfriend I’m in love with. I’m a gay Christian, so I have God and my family.”
Lest you assume otherwise, Stalter’s Christianity is another thing she insists has nothing to do with her quirky character work. “I’m never joking when I talk about God and Jesus,” she assured us. “I think it’s really important for queer people who are spiritual to talk about it, because so many times they’re told they can’t have God. And it just doesn’t make sense, because God loves gay people. It hurts me to think some people feel like God’s not for them.”
She also appreciates seeing other artists talk about their faith. “We saw the Ella Langley concert the other night,” Stalter mentioned. “There’s a really sweet song about God that I love that she sings. It made me cry,” she said of “Speaking Terms,” the Langley ballad about a strayed faithful trying to reconnect with God. “The lyrics are quite beautiful. She’s incredibly talented.” As a Dolly Parton devotee who scored a Kacey Musgraves cameo on her Crave track “Leave a Message at the… Interlude,” Stalter teased there might be more where that came from. “I’m a huge country music fan — hint, maybe for the next album.”
A pivot from faux-sleazy electropop to country music? Usually, it’s the other way around. If Stalter does take a Nashville detour, how much of it would be in earnest and how much tongue-in-cheek? We may have to wait and see — and even then, we might not know. In conversation, Stalter is as poker-faced when talking about real-life details (such as nannying throughout her 20s before going viral) as she is riffing on her astronaut costume. “We’re going to the moon for the first time — the first time for real,” she joked when asked about her outfit. “The other ones, the government lied to us.” When prodded about the possibility of finding moon cheese, she deadpanned, “I’m looking into that.”
Interplanetary travel aside, the comedian-actor-singer is strikingly grounded for someone who has enjoyed an enviable ascent on their own terms over the past decade. When I asked how she would describe her personal story, Stalter summed up it swiftly and succinctly: “It’s about a country bumpkin who has big dreams and has accomplished basically all of them.”
