Lukas Gage Speaks on Kit Connor’s Coming Out Ordeal
Actor Lukas Gage recently told Attitude magazine how he empathizes with fellow actor Kit Connor for being forced to come out as LGBTQ.
Lukas Gage recently spoke out about being pressured to come out as gay.
The Smile 2 star, who came out publicly in 2023, noted how he experienced a backlash in 2021 from viewers of The White Lotus, who mistakenly believed that Gage was a straight actor taking a gay role.
“When I did [come out], my friends and family knew I wanted to keep [it] sacred for myself. I felt like I didn’t need to prove anything to anyone,” Gage told Attitude magazine. “But I was also dealing with people coming for me, being like, ‘Why is he stealing a gay role? He’s just a straight guy, how dare he, blah blah blah.'”
Gage — who grabbed headlines after his character, Dillon, was part of an eyebrow-raising sex scene with Murray Bartlett’s character, Armond, in The White Lotus — is torn about the idea of straight actors playing gay roles.
“I’m in the camp where there’s of course certain scenarios,” he said. “It’s an injustice to not cast with diversity and inclusion, to tell the most authentic story. In other less specific cases, it’s important to remember it is acting, and we should be free to play as many different kinds of roles as possible.
“But it’s tricky, because there has to be grace and generosity. I don’t like it when people do a witch hunt for people for doing it. Trying to take them down.”
Gage told the magazine that he connected with Heartstopper actor Kit Connor, who received similar scrutiny for his role in the Netflix show. The actor eventually came out as bisexual after being accused of “queerbaiting.”
The scrutiny and criticism were so intense that Connor briefly quit X for a period before returning to the platform to acknowledge his sexual orientation.
“There’s a grey area with sexuality,” Gage said, reflecting on the public’s demands to know everything about actors’ private lives. “Nuances. To be demanding receipts… I remember, it was the same time people were coming for me, they were coming for Kit. Feeling bullied into coming out at 18 years old? That area where public and private intersect is so confusing to me.
“I want to have visibility, to be a role model. I want little kids to see me and think, ‘He’s doing it — I could do it too,'” he said. “But it’s also the thing Tina Fey said, ‘Authenticity is expensive.’ Things that are private and sacred to you are valuable. You don’t want it all out there.”
Gage said he hasn’t met Connor in person, but would love to one day, feeling a degree of empathy for his fellow actor.
“I felt for him,” he said. “With my experience in that situation, I felt like I reached a point where it just became like… It was a big fuck you to everybody. I was like, ‘All right. I’m going to be completely out there. Be in-your-face annoying about it.'”
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