Lukas Gage realised he was gay after hooking up with his neighbour

Dead Boy Detectives star Lukas Gage has opened up on how he realised he was gay – and it’s absolutely iconic.

While we’re all (perhaps too) familiar with Lukas Gage’s whirlwind engagement-marriage-divorce with Chris Appleton, the actor has rarely spoken about coming out as gay, having criticised public speculation about his sexuality before he publicly addressed it last year.

Appearing on the 7 May episode of the Seek Treatment podcast with Hacks writer Pat Regan and The Lovebirds actress Catherine Cohen, Gage revealed that he only realised he was gay while hooking up with his neighbour.

The story starts with Gage revealing that he auditioned for The Little Mermaid when Sofia Coppola was attached to direct a live action version of the flick. During the process, he was asked to tell a story in which he felt vulnerable, and the following tale ensued.

“I think I was still kind of closeted at the time that we interviewed,” he said. “[So] I was like, “I’m a little surfer stoner boy from San Diego. So the audition was like, you have to read a set of sides and then talk about a story,” he continued. “They [asked], ‘What was a vulnerable thing that happened to you? What was something that was hard for you, or a secret you were hiding?’

“I immediately start bawling, and I talk about how I’m sleeping with my neighbour and hiding it from everybody… my whole family. I was like 19, 20.”

Gage, who is arguably best known for being rimmed by Murray Bartlett in The White Lotus and being urinated on in You, explained he and his neighbour “would listen to records and play PlayStation together.”

“I just kept coming over to his apartment (…) and after like a month or two, he was like, ‘All right. Well, I’m going to kiss you now.’ And then we dated for three years.”

The star then recounted another story, adding that he “wished he knew [that he was gay] earlier”, but that a previous girlfriend helped him figure it out in a particularly iconic way.

“I kind of switched from really wanting attention and being an attention whore to also being deeply insecure and shy as well. It was like a weird thing for a long time. It was a back-and-forth,” he began, before explaining in full:

“I honestly… I swear I’m not making this up… I wish I knew earlier. But I had girlfriends that I was obsessed with till I was like 18 or 19, when I met my neighbor [laughs]. I loved them, oh my god. There was one in particular, she had a lower back tattoo that said ‘trust no b*tch.’ So iconic.

“She was like 15 and I was 16. ‘Trust no b*tch’ with a money sign after the b*tch. She was ahead of her time. She looked like Lindsay Lohan. (…) I did not deserve her. I was so obsessed with her.”

The girlfriend, Gage recounted, was the one that gave him a gentle nudge in the right direction.

“One time when we were having sex, she was like, ‘I think you might be gay,'” Gage recalled. “She was like, ‘You’re definitely bi, maybe gay.'”

Gage (infamously) married celebrity hair stylist Chris Appleton in a star-studded wedding featuring Kim Kardashian and Shania Twain in 2023, before divorcing six months later.