2021 was quite the year for boundary pushing television, sexually speaking, from Bridgerton‘s steamy Regency era sex scenes to Sex/Life‘s full-frontal display of particularly well-endowed male nudity. But if there’s one thing Lukas Gage, star of HBO’s The White Lotus, would like to see more of on TV this year, it’s rimming.
Gage starred in one of the most talked-about television moments of the year, a scene in which his White Lotus character is caught having his ass eaten out. The scene, which premiered in August, quickly stole the show from Sex/Life‘s big penis moment to become the most jaw-dropping onscreen display of the summer, as well as TV’s first notable rimming scene since Marnie had her butt motorboated in the season four premiere of Girls back in 2015.
While some might assume appearing on the receiving end of analingus in a major HBO drama would be an awkward moment in any actor’s career, it turns out Gage was all for the infamous rimming scene. In fact, he says it was his idea.
During a recent appearance on Watch What Happens Live, Gage revealed he was the mastermind behind the salad toss scene heard round the internet, upgrading what was originally meant to be a more standard sex scene.
“It was my idea, yeah. I thought we should normalize rimming,” Gage told host Andy Cohen. “I think that, like, ass eating needs to be talked about more. In the script, it was sex [and I said,] ‘We’ve seen sex on TV. Let’s have some ass eating.’”
Let’s have some ass eating, indeed. While anal sex in general has certainly become more mainstream over the past decade or so, certain forms of butt play (particularly analingus) still maintain something of a taboo, especially on TV. Prior to White Lotus, it had been six years since HBO last graced us with a rimming scene of this magnitude, and the impact was the same. If you knew nothing else about White Lotus, you still knew about the rimming scene.
Of course, this lingering taboo surrounding mouth to anus activity is precisely why the scene made such an impact, and Gage and White Lotus have this residual prudishness to thank. If we ever truly “normalized” onscreen ass eating, Gage’s scene surely wouldn’t attract the kind of attention it commanded all last summer, which only makes the actor’s call to normalize rimming all the more valiant. So, in honor of Gage and his call to anal action, let’s all have some ass eating, shall we?
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