Dove Cameron
Is Making A Pop — And Personal — Breakthrough
Dove Cameron realizes you might not believe her when she says “Boyfriend” — her seductive, overtly queer and currently inescapable pop anthem — was a “total fucking accident.” But, she promises, it really was.
“It took on a life of its own,” she says. “We’ve basically been on a three-and-a-half-month train that just has not stopped. It’s the song that kind of took over my whole universe.”
Happy accident or not, “Boyfriend” has redefined Cameron’s career. It’s her highest-charting single yet on the Billboard
Hot 100 (peaking at No. 31 in May), a commercial breakthrough driven by TikTok — where, on the advice of her label, Disruptor Records, Cameron posted various demo clips and watched “Boyfriend” blow up, accumulating over 700,000 videos to date using its sound.
It’s also a breakthrough for Cameron personally. The 26-year-old
rose to fame acting in Disney franchises like Liv and Maddie and Descendants.
And though she rejects the “Disney girlgone-bad” narrative, Cameron says she’s experiencing a transformation all the same, coming into her own as a queer pop star.
“Going from being this performatively feminine, blond girl next door who started out on a children’s network, [I’m often asked], ‘What happened to the blond girl who used to wear pink?’ ” she says. “And I’m like, ‘That was never it. That was never who I actually was.’ ”
Even so, watching a song “so intrinsically linked to my sexuality” become a hit (the lyric “I could be a better boyfriend than him” is directed at a female love interest) has felt “a little confusing,” Cameron admits. Though she has openly identified as queer for the last few years, she says she still struggles with the “dysphoria” of owning her status as a publicly queer person.
“There’s suddenly this big, capital Q on my chest,” she explains. “It’s massively encouraging and wonderfully moving and I’m so privileged that I am in a space where I can be who I am publicly, but there’s also suddenly a lot of expectations publicly. It is weird to navigate all of these intricacies before you even really know where your own lines between personal and public are.”
Figuring that out has meant shedding elements of her past. Shortly after releasing “Boyfriend,” Cameron deleted her previous, non-Disney work from all digital service providers, including singles like “Waste,” “Bloodshot” and “LazyBaby.” Its removal disappointed many fans, but Cameron is clear about her intentions. “It’s important to me that everybody understands that this was not a business decision,” she says with a sigh. “My old stuff was so not representative of the person that I am inside. It was kind of disruptive to what I’m trying to do now.”
That means looking forward: prepping her debut studio album — a set of jazz-infused, dance-ready pop songs much like “Boyfriend” — while defining queer stardom on her own terms. “I do not have to make myself ‘queerer’ or use some kind of preapproved LGBTQ ‘lens.’ My lens is queer. Period,” she says — a stance she hopes more queer artists will take up, too. “Nobody knows better than you, even if they’ve been in the industry 10 times as long. Listen to other people when they offer you advice on branding and distribution. But educate yourself so that you can make those choices yourself.”