Offerings #17: Altar Boys of the Year

These are boys who defined 2025 for me and for the Altar Boys-extended universe.¹ Things work a little differently around here: they are not the boys who defined 2025 in culture. For a boy to define culture, he escaped containment. It’s hard to nurture a personal connection with someone nurturing a connection with the lowest common denominator, certain pop stars are the exception to this rule.

Let these boys be a reminder that you can still become life-alteringly obsessed with something as a full-grown adult. And how beautiful is that?! And please let me know who your personal boys of the year are!!

MY ALTAR BOYS OF THE YEAR

You will find a theme to my Altar Boys of the Year. They are two musicians whose breakout records came out last year and quickly became beloved by men. It’s actually very chic to discover them a year later after some of the noise died down. Oh yeah, and they play guitar…

MK.GEE

The first week of summer Chloe took the day off work and went to the Jersey Shore to see an artist by the name of Mk.gee perform. Later that same week she saw him perform again at Gov Ball. Focused on starting my new job and dressing like Catherine Keener in Walking & Talking, I looked on with curiosity.

I had already tried to listen to Mk.gee, but I did not hear him. Instead, I heard garbled noise coming out of my laptop speakers. I easily decided he was not for me. 

But I could not escape him in my home or on my phone. Hell Gate and the New Yorker wrote about one of the shows Chloe attended and little details began to add up — Hell Gate noted that Timothée Chalamet’s SNL performance “visibly pilfered the white boy swag Mk.gee had brought to the stage just months before.” Amanda Petrusich’s description of his song Rockman in the New Yorker sent me over the edge: “Rockman begins to feel as if it’s actually about pining, or the act of slowly annihilating yourself for a person who’s hovering slightly out of reach.”

On that line alone, I revisited Two Star & The Dream Police. I thought I could never hear music the way I did as a teenager again. But I heard music for the first time again. 

It’s a testament to the unique feelings — some might say never-experienced-before feelings — evoked by his music that he’s achieved the esteemed honor of Altar Boy of the Year. Because an attachment to Mk.gee is an attachment to his skill, his distorted voice, his sound.

Michael Gordon, the guitar hero behind Mk.gee, resists modern stardom reliant on access and identification. His music speaks for itself. 

He rarely speaks to the press and little is known about him. In one of the few profiles of Mk.gee he said, “I don’t want to be related to. I don’t feel like you at all — I feel like an alien.”

He hides behind long greasy hair and a uniform of vintage Carhartt jackets, big pants, and workman’s boots. His persona is a studied performance of repressed masculinity. On stage he hardly smiles and is prone to stomping. The Mk.gee I know is an image carefully honed alongside his sound. 

Three weeks ago on a freezing night I saw Dijon, Mk.gee’s frequent collaborator and soulmate, perform at Terminal 5. Halfway through the show a greasy head made familiar by my search history popped out of stage left accompanied by his singular guitar sound. Listening to Mk.gee’s guitar accompany a handful of Dijon songs, I realized a hole existed in every song I’d ever heard — and in my heart — that only Mk.gee could fill.

MJ LENDERMAN

If Mk.gee is an alien, MJ Lenderman is a guy you know. 

He’s awkward in a way that makes him seem unguarded, performs in tall Ugg boots or clogs, looks exhausted, and is exactly my age. He’s at a level of fame and success where he doesn’t need to feign normalcy. He’s still normal. 

For months I joked about becoming a fan of MJ Lenderman — can I call him Jake? Then it happened to me. 

I first became enamoured with Jake’s speaking voice and personality before promptly listening to and becoming enamoured with his music. Yeah, I became obsessed with a guy by listening to a podcast; What every guy who goes on a podcast dreams of. 

His personality uniquely shines through his music. All his songs start with something that made him laugh and he thinks sadness and humor are the same thing. He writes lyrics like, “We sat under a half-mast McDonald’s flag,” in a song inspired by an episode of the Hulk animated series. And he dedicated an entire song to game 5 of the 1997 NBA finals. Are you guys getting it? He’s the ultimate boy. 

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Benito Skinner, Ben Marshall, and Romy Mars.

CHLOE’S ALTAR BOY OF THE YEAR

2025 was the year I for reasons genuinely unbeknownst to me became obsessed with white men with blank faces and small but defined mouths: Mk.gee, a guy I went on two dates with over the summer whose first name is synonymous with the word "purse," and actor Lewis Pullman.

Lewis Pullman first entered my lexicon in February of this year by way of a Deuxmoi Instagram post depicting him resting his hand on the back of Kaia Gerber’s (jean-covered) thigh. The photo I’m referencing, which doesn't even include Pullman’s face – just his large hand – was so affecting, intimate, and perplexing that I immediately texted my sister "wait not bill pullman's son dating kaia gerber???" all the while knowing nothing else about the 32 year-old nepo baby.

The thing about a guy with a blank face and a small but defined mouth who's also an actor (and the son of Bill Pullman, who plays The Ideal Man in While You Were Sleeping) is that he's either going to be great at acting or terribly bad at it, and I’d like to think Lewis is very much the former. In The Starling Girl, my first foray into Lewis’s filmography, he plays a 28 year-old married youth pastor who has an illicit relationship with a sexually-repressed 17 year-old girl from his church – in short, he plays a disgusting monster – and so well that I had to stop the movie at the halfway point and (bravely) finish it the next day. In Thunderbolts*, he's undoubtedly the breakout star, giving Bob Reynolds AKA Sentry AKA The Void the emotional depth and complexity even a role in a Marvel movie calls for (yes, I know), weaving between the goofiness, darkness, and mental instability of all three personas seamlessly. 

@marvel

Rizz Guardian, aka @ItzTheRizzler, met Lewis Pullman last night at the Marvel Studios’ #Thunderbolts* NY Special Screening.

I like to think that movie press tours are the perfect place for actors to show how good they are at acting because they're (hopefully) being themselves in interviews and junkets, which is usually (hopefully) vastly different from the characters they’re playing on-screen. During the Thunderbolts* press tour, Lewis takes full advantage of his lack of media training and general need to be weird (affectionate), proving not only that he’s a good actor but A Guy I’d Be Obsessed With too. When he’s not claiming to be “shy,” he’s either clueless or bewildered or impulsively overcompensating for all of the above with ironically cringey dance moves and facial expressions, typically accompanied by this antiquated hand gesture. Yes, he’s good at acting and has a hot, blank face, but I love whatever’s wrong with him most of all.

-Chloe L.

TWO ALTAR BOYS THAN WON OVER MOMS THIS YEAR

Watch out Niall Horan, two divas came for your crown of beloved by moms this year. 

ROLE MODEL

Emma Chamberlain’s singing, formerly rapping, ex-boyfriend had his star-making moment this year when he released, “Sally, When The Wine Runs Out.” It’s a song so catchy that your mom turns it up in the car. He traded in his eyeliner for a cowboy hat and in turn became a lot more friendly to a powerful demographic. He even directly courted his new audience by bringing his own mom out to be a “Sally diva” before it became a whole thing. 

DJO / JOE KEERY / “STEVE”

Are you all familiar with a little show called Stranger Things? What about an unknown track, “End of Beginning”? After this year of Joe Keery world domination, you can be sure that your mom knows about him and his enviable hair. But she might keep referring to him as his Stranger Things character name, Steve Harrington, for eternity. 

I WATCHED HUDON WILLIAMS’S SKIN CARE ROUTINE SO YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO

So there are these 19 minutes of my life I am never going to get back. Hudson Williams, star of Heated Rivalry, the gay hockey show gripping the nation, recorded his skincare routine for The Cut. How does Mr. Williams start the nearly sitcom-length video? With the greeting, “gang, gang,” of course. 

The ensuing video is a bizarre display of male insecurity that involves an entirely unnecessary removal of Williams' shirt. If he doesn’t pack a headband to put his hair back for his skincare routine he wears a backwards cap. That’s something I know now! Safe to say, there’s a new poster boy for the male beauty epidemic. 

INDULGENCES: MY ALTAR BOYS

Former Skins cast members, anyone Irish, British actors whose breakout role was “playing gay,” rappers from Kentucky, and men in Ocean’s Eleven (and their codependent best friends) are all fair game.

JOE ALWYN, the only blonde man ever, is being charming again! This time within the confines of the clip economy. Ignoring that he played a silly game to promote a movie about a mother’s grief at the loss of her child, in Elle’s “Where’s the Lie” his reading aloud voice is oh so pleasant and his personality shines through. He even throws his head back with a guttural, “Come on!”

MATT DAMON is taking the long way home in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The first trailer for the blockbuster dropped this week and Boston’s favorite guy — sorry, Ben! — is looking absolutely shredded. This film will be a huge topic for Altar Boys 2026, so watch this space. But in the meantime check out this TikTok predicting Matt’s take on Odysseus.

I’m off to see Marty Supreme with my family, so maybe I’ll eat my words and have to issue an apology to Timothée Chalamet for ragging on him to my 40 newsletter subscribers. Stay tuned!

1  AKA my roommate and dear friend and a vibe I’ve been picking up from moms everywhere.