Pageboy by Elliot Page
To all those who came before
Author’s Note
Writing a book has come up a few times over the years, but it never felt right and, quite frankly, it didn’t feel possible. I could barely sit down, let alone be still long enough to complete such a task. My brain’s energy was being wasted, a ceaseless drip attempting to conceal and control my discomfort. But now is different. New. At last, I can sit with myself, in this body, present—typing for hours, my dog, Mo, lounging in the sun, my back straighter, my mind quieter. This previously unimaginable contentment wouldn’t have arrived without the health care I’ve received, and as attacks against gender-affirming care increase, along with efforts to silence us, it feels like the right time to put words on a page.
So here I am, grateful and terrified, writing directly to you. Trans people face increasing physical violence, and our humanity is regularly “debated” in the media. And, when we are given the opportunity to tell our stories ourselves, queer narratives are all too often picked apart or, worse, universalized—one person becomes a standin for all. There are an infinite number of ways to be queer and trans, and my story speaks to only one. As I say later in these pages, we are all but a speck in this universe, and I hope that in speaking my truth I have added yet another speck to dispel the constant misinformation around queer and trans lives. If you haven’t already, I urge you to seek out many other vast and varying narratives from LGBTQ+ writers, activists, and individuals. The movement for trans liberation affects us all. We all experience gender joyfully and oppressively in different ways. As Leslie Feinberg writes in Trans Liberation, “This movement will give you more room to breathe—to be yourself. To discover on a deeper level what it means to be yourself.”
In writing this story, I have remembered each moment to the best of my ability. When I could not remember details, I reached out to others who shared those experiences to gain more clarity. A few names have been changed and some other specifics have been altered when necessary to protect the identity of certain people. At certain points I’ve referred to myself using my previous name and pronouns. This is a choice that felt right to me, occasionally, when talking about my past self, but it’s not an invitation for anyone to do the same. It’s also important to note that while, in my life, gender and sexuality have been in constant conversation, these are two separate things. Coming out as queer was a wholly different experience from coming out as trans, and who I am evolved as I freed myself from the expectations of others. These memories shape a nonlinear narrative, because queerness is intrinsically nonlinear, journeys that bend and wind. Two steps forward, one step back. I’ve spent much of my life chipping away toward the truth, while terrified to cause a collapse. This is reflected on the page intentionally. In many ways, this book is the story of my untangling.
The act of writing, reading, and sharing the multitude of our experiences is an important step in standing up to those who wish to silence us. I’ve nothing new or profound to say, nothing that hasn’t been said before, but I know books have helped me, saved me even, so perhaps this can help someone feel less alone, seen, no matter who they are or what journey they are on. Thank you for wanting to read about mine.
This world has many ends and beginnings
A cycle ends, will something remain?
Maybe a spark, once so bright will bloom again.
—BEVERLY GLENN-COPELAND,
“A SONG AND MANY MOONS”
1
PAULA
I met Paula when I was twenty. Sitting on our friend’s couch, eating raw almonds with her knees to her chest, she introduced herself, “I’m Paula.” The sound of her voice radiated warmth, a kindness. It wasn’t so much that her eyes lit up but that they found you. I could feel her looking.
We went to Reflections. It was the first time I had been to a gay bar and would be my last for a long time. I was a miserable flirter. Flirting when I didn’t mean to and not when I wanted to. We stood close, but not too close. The air so thick, I was swimming in it.
That summer we took a friend’s boat to an empty island to camp. We did mushrooms around fires and cooked salmon wrapped in tinfoil. Stars pulsating, reaching, as if forming sentences. Mushrooms always made me cry, but she loved them, eventually my anxious tears turned to joy. I envied the self-assurance in her body. We danced on the beach. A guitar was being strummed, we took turns playing shitty covers.
I had just returned from a monthlong trip in Eastern Europe, backpacking with my childhood best friend, Mark. We began in Prague and took the train to Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, and Bucharest. We stayed in hostels, except for one day in Bucharest when Mark was so ill that we got a hotel room with air-conditioning. I bought individually wrapped cheese slices from the store and put them in the small freezer of the small hotel room’s small fridge. We waited as they became cold, and I pressed damp cloths on the back of his neck and along his spine. When the cheese slices were frozen I placed them all over Mark’s body, and that seemed to help a bit. The room had a Jacuzzi, and we sat in it without filling it up and flipped through the television channels, landing on a porno that incidentally also took place in a Jacuzzi. Mark ate the cheese.
This was before smartphones. Navigating trains, hostels, men, all with one guidebook. We would go to internet cafés to send a message home. “Hey, we are alive.” I would email Paula, yearning for her. I thought about her incessantly—while we railed through Austria, looking at a sea of sunflowers; while I drank blueberry beer in a basement in Belgrade, lips purple, head spinning, like the last time we kissed, which was the first time; on a twelve-hour train ride from Belgrade to Bucharest during one of the worst heat waves in decades. Mark and I lay next to each other on the same bunk, window down with our heads as close to the opening as we could manage. There was no air-conditioning, and we had no water. We listened to Cat Power through shared earphones and sipped absinthe. Are you listening to it at the same time? The CD I made you? I wondered, almost saying the words out loud. I watched the night pass by, the Serbian landscape, rural, motionless with its sparse, fleeting lights. I thought of Paula.
That time at Reflections was new for me, being in a queer space and being present, enjoying it. Shame had been drilled into my bones since I was my tiniest self, and I struggled to rid my body of that old toxic and erosive marrow. But there was a joy in the room, it lifted me, forced a reaction in the jaw, an uncontrolled, steady smile. Dancing, sweat dripping down my back, down my chest. I watched Paula’s hair twist and bounce as she moved effortlessly, chaotic but controlled, sensual and strong. I would catch her looking at me, or was it the other way around? We wanted to be caught. Deer in the headlights. Startled, but not breaking.
“Can I kiss you?” I asked, jolted by my boldness, as if it came from somewhere else, powered by the electronic music perhaps, a circuit of release, of demanding you leave your repression at the door.
And then I did. In a queer bar. In front of everyone around us. I was coming to understand what all those poems were about, what all the fuss was. Everything was cold before, motionless, emotionless. Any woman I had loved hadn’t loved me back, and the one who maybe had, loved me the wrong way.
But here I was, on a dance floor with a woman who wanted to kiss me and the antagonizing, cruel voice that flooded my head whenever I felt desire was silent. Maybe for a second, I could allow myself pleasure. We leaned in so our lips brushed, the tips of our tongues barely touching, testing, sending shocks through my limbs. We stared at each other, a quiet knowing.
Here I was on the precipice. Getting closer to my desires, my dreams, me, without the unbearable weight of the self-disgust I’d carried for so long. But a lot can change in a few months. And in a few months, Juno would premiere.
2
SEXUALITY SWEEPSTAKES