I too thought actor Lukas Gage – at age just 30, and with a considerable but not bumper list of projects on his filmography – was writing his memoir a little prematurely.
Sure, there’s a handful of sordid tales to spill from his six years of being properly in the biz – his marriage to hairstylist Chris Appleton, flanked at the ceremony by Kim Kardashian and Shania Twain; that toe-curling viral video of a director bitching about his apartment; his very online coming out; receiving annilingus in The White Lotus and a golden shower in You – but is there enough material to fill 300 memoir pages?
Yes, as it turns out, and then some. In I Wrote This For Attention, Gage doesn’t get to his starry ascent until the final quarter. His turbulent childhood and wayward teen years in Encinitas, California make the lives of those in HBO’s Euphoria, Gage’s breakout series, look peaceful.
There’s addictions (his brother to heroin; his mother to casinos); Gage’s own dabbling with getting high from age 12; family members’ imprisonment and friends’ deaths; the devastating sexual abuse he endured aged 11. His twenties brought fame, but not always good fortune: he faces abandonment; anxiety; a borderline personality disorder (BPD) diagnosis; catastrophic relationships.
The pages are thick with spiky humour – “In the morning, we’d gone nuclear: my dick was leaking toxic waste like Chernobyl,” he writes, fretting about an STI – but this is a frequently crushing read. How does he feel about it all being in the world?
“I think that that’s a constant battle. The battle I’ve had my whole life is: ‘Look at me, I want attention,’” – hence the title – “but then once I get it: ‘Don’t look at me! I’m scared. I want to run away and hide.’” Gage, speaking over Zoom on a “beautiful” early autumn morning in New York, didn’t consider how many prying eyes would be pawing through his childhood traumas while writing it. He’s coming round to the idea. “There’s something hot about owning your stuff,” he says, with a twinkly smile.
Lukas Gage became accustomed to the double-edged sword of getting attention at four-years-old. His memoir opens with him as a toddler dancing around his family home in lingerie and Playboy bunny ears, his parents’ friends all laughing and smiling. His father, a doctor, is embarrassed. “That’s my first memory: ‘He’s embarrassing me.’” Gage writes. His relationship with his father deteriorates as the book goes on.
Gage’s power to make people laugh left him feeling like he was “levitating” he writes, and watching a stuntman perform at acting camp awakened his desire to be a star. He moved to Los Angeles aged 18 to pursue the dream, but when the roles came, they were often queer. Not yet out publicly, in 2022, Gage got flack for being a “non- LGBTQIA+ actor” who took LGBTQ+ roles.
He was getting attention, but not always the good kind. It made him consider the parameters of “celebrity” – what it means to be someone whose job is to court attention. “I think that the public and private, the intersection of the two… you’re supposed to exist somewhere in the middle, but also you don’t want to give too much away and you want people to get lost in your character,” he says.
He responded to the “non-LGBTQIA+ actor” critics with a coy tweet in 2023: “u dont know my alphabet.” Did the noise affect how he felt about coming out publicly? “It wasn’t long after I was coming out to my own friends and family,” he says. “I’m still figuring out and still going through my own process privately and suddenly I just hit a breaking point where I wanted to rebel, and maybe be so in your face about it, and so loud and proud and maybe a bit annoying about it, that no one could come for me anymore.”
The rebellion manifested itself in his six-month marriage to Appleton in 2023; he writes in the book that during that time, he was “in and out of hypermanic episodes”, having been diagnosed with BPD a few years earlier.
Gage doesn’t discuss his sexuality in his memoir until beyond halfway through. He writes of being beaten unconscious for defending a gay friend, and of telling his grandma that he was gay when he was just four, but also of loving his teenage girlfriend Kaylee, their sex “feral and crazy,” he writes, like “two horny, rabid bunnies having epileptic episodes of copulation together.”
“There was a lot of confusion because there was love for the girls that I dated and the females that I was with, but there was always something inside that I couldn’t quite articulate or figure out,” Gage says. His first boyfriend, at age 19 – after some resistance – helped iron out his feelings. “I wish I could’ve figured it out earlier. It just felt very unclear for so long.” He agrees that had he had someone queer to talk about his feelings openly with, perhaps his teen years wouldn’t have been so unruly. “That energy that wasn’t put into conducive places ended up making me a little bit of a nightmare for a bit,” he smiles.
I think back to his opening chapter, of him being shamed by his father for wearing women’s underwear, dancing and singing. I wonder if that discouragement of self expression added to the mist around his sexuality.
“100 per cent,” he agrees. “I was having trouble with repressing these flamboyant parts of myself and trying to keep that suffocated. Anything sensitive or too artistic, I was taught at an early age that’s not how boys behave, and you shouldn’t do that.” It wasn’t just his father who impressed upon him that there was a “right or wrong way to be a man,” but kids at school who bullied him with rumours of him being gay and targeted him with airsoft guns. “For so long, that part of myself I just killed off and made silent.”
Does he label his sexuality more comfortably now? “It’s a great question,” he says, a little abashedly. Gage pulls off his typical character traits – dopey, warm-hearted, licentious, vulgar – with great confidence, but it’s clear that, despite his memoir’s title, the personal attention still feels odd.
“I think I’m queer? Gay 90 per cent, 10 per cent straight. Can I say that? I don’t know,” he says, turning to the publicists in the room with him. “Am I only with men? No. I don’t know exactly what the label is for that. But mostly gay. Is that a sexuality? We’ll go with mostly gay… You can say gay or mostly gay. Or queer. I accept it all.”
After enduring the “physical pain” of heartache when splitting from his first boyfriend, he writes of falling into a “deeply unhealthy and codependent relationship” with a man who looks AI generated (no, not Appleton). The relationship ended with infidelity on AI boyfriend’s part, and two STIs – gonorrhea and chlamydia – for Gage.
“That was important to me to be honest about,” he says. He now takes PrEP every day, and is an ambassador for HIV testing awareness campaign, HealthySexuals. “I think having an open conversation about it… is scary and vulnerable, but it’s also freeing and helps people not feel shameful if they’re going through the same thing.” Then, a characteristically cartoonish end to a serious talking point: “Fighting against HIV, baby!”
The latter part of Gage’s book is all about these adult revelations. He’s keen to crush the stigma of BPD, which his therapist helped him to understand was responsible for his impulsive and often reckless decisions and needy relationships, and he’s come to accept that he will probably “always be an attention whore”. Which is lucky really, given the trajectory of his career.
His book solidifies it, but his pop culture acumen was clear from that fateful video of his apartment being mocked. As the director remarked on his “tiny” home, Gage let out a slight, sympathetic wince, prophetically aware that the video would spark a social media feeding frenzy. But he is clearly keen to use his talents for more than internet infamy and slutty side roles. His acting repertoire is growing, including roles as a gay robot ingénu in this year’s horror Companion, and in Prime Video college comedy Overcompensating. He’s loved writing the book, and is now writing screenplays.
“The cool thing about this book is like, I’m still so much at the beginning of my career,” he says. “I’m well aware that I’m just starting and I’m excited for all the new things to come.”
I Wrote This for Attention is out now.
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