Juno had premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to a fervent response. I did not have a personal publicist at the time. I’d decided I could go it alone after a previous experience where an innocent teenage question—“Did you ever watch Xena?”—was met with “No, because I’m not a lesbian.” I was glad to not be working with that publicist anymore—these comments emblematic of the Hollywood they warn you about. Plastic, empty, homophobic. Still, I wasn’t prepared or experienced enough to navigate this new fame alone.
It is different growing up as an actor in Canada, especially when I did. Canada didn’t have the glossy cover. We weren’t so obsessed with being shiny. The insistence to mask up mostly came with Juno.
I was planning on wearing jeans and a western(ish) shirt to Juno’s world premiere. I thought it was a cool look, and it had a collar. That’s fancy, right? I thought. When the Fox Searchlight publicity team learned about my outfit, they urgently took me to Holt Renfrew on Bloor Street, with a dramatic rushing that is characteristic of the Hollywood circulatory system. I suggested a suit. They said I should wear a dress and heels. After they discussed this with the director, he called me. He said he agreed with them, insisting that I play the part. Michael Cera rocked sneakers, slacks, and a collared shirt. He looked fancy to me. I wonder why they didn’t take him to Holt Renfrew. I guess he had nothing to hide, he was approved. He fit the part.
Being made to feel that I was inadequate, erroneous, the little queer who needed to be tucked away while being celebrated for repudiating myself was a slippery slope I’d been sliding down since before I could remember. And like a film stuck to my skin, I couldn’t wash it off. The compulsion to tear apart my flesh, a sort of scolding—I became as repulsed as them.
I was spending more and more time in Los Angeles. Press for Juno, meetings, “awards season,” which is two actual seasons. Back in Nova Scotia, another publication investigated my sexuality, perhaps trying to win Michael Musto’s “sexuality sweepstakes.” Frank, a “magazine” that has been published out of Halifax since 1987, considered itself a satirical magazine but was actually more like a tabloid. I was in Santa Monica when my father called to tell me that I was on the cover, a photo of me from Sundance with a giant headline that read IS ELLEN PAGE GAY?
I spun out. In bed at a friend’s guesthouse, I closed my wet eyes tight, tears soaking my cheeks—please let this be a dream. Please.
When I got back to Halifax, the magazine was everywhere. Always sitting in view at the grocery store, the gas station, the corner store … and there they all were, asking the question—Is Ellen Page Gay? Paula would flip them around. Hide them behind other magazines. Once she stole a bunch from a gas station in the South End.
The freedom I felt during my summer with Paula was coming to an end.
There was a photograph inside that included Paula. A small group of us at a party. I remember that night, a gathering at an apartment in one of the drab condo buildings that continue to overtake Halifax. The article speculated whether we were in a relationship or not, examining the rumors. Paula was still not out to her family. Staring at that picture, a realization: a friend must have sent this to them. I never knew who.
3
BOY
We matched online, my first time on a dating app, my first time dating as an out trans person. After eating dinner in the Meatpacking District, I hopped on the train to Midtown to meet up with Sara and her friends. I was nervous, but energized, these spontaneous adventures new to me.
The bar was tacky, but I liked it. Searching for her, my eyes landed on a group of women. They sat at a high table with stools, already a few drinks in. I hate tall stools, they don’t work well with my short legs. The women greeted me kindly, welcoming me, pulling up another seat.
All of them were gorgeous, hovering around six feet. I was dubious about my match with Sara. Were they just tipsy, swiping through the app, bemused by my presence on it? The little trans guy. Did they flip through all the cis dudes, the hot record producers, pro athletes, doctors, and then pause on my photo—a moment of disgust or merriment or both?
I ordered a tequila soda on the rocks with lime. TVs played, remnants of food were scattered on the table. I downed my drink and ordered another.
“Nova Scotia,” I said, responding to the obligatory “Where are you from?” “It’s in Canada,” I added.
“What? I thought it was in Scandinavia or something?” one of her pals responded.
I finished my second drink and popped out to smoke a joint. Sara followed.
“When did you know?” she asked as we stood outside, leaning against a wall. She loomed over me. For a brief moment, I wondered what she meant. This is something I’m asked frequently and not something I wish for during a casual night out. I’d experienced this inquiry as a queer woman, but as a trans guy it’s perpetual. Code for—I don’t believe you.
I knew when I was four years old. I went to the YMCA preschool in downtown Halifax, on South Park Street across from the Public Gardens. The building had a dark brick facade and has since been demolished and replaced. Primarily, I understood that I wasn’t a girl. Not in a conscious sense but in a pure sense, uncontaminated. That sensation is one of my earliest and clearest memories.
The bathroom was down the hall from my preschool class. I would try to pee standing up, assuming this to be the better fit for me. I would press on my vagina, holding it, pinching and squeezing it, hoping I could aim. I befouled the stall, but the bathroom often smelled of urine anyway.
I was perplexed by my experience, severed from the other girls, twists in my stomach when I gazed at them. I remember one in particular, Jane. Her long brown hair, the way she could draw, her eyes focused and still with concentration. I was jealous of her artistic abilities. When I drew a person, limbs would protrude out of the head, arms like branches, thin lines for fingers. Little chicken legs with oversize sneakers. Jane, however, would draw a body, a stomach, a belly button. I was transfixed. My first crush, but I knew I was not like her.
“Can I be a boy?” I asked my mother at six years old.
We lived on Second Street at the time, having moved only a few minutes’ walk from our previous attic apartment on Churchill Drive. A ground-level flat on a tree-lined street, it had two bedrooms, hardwood floors, and a lovely small living area with big windows. I’d sit in front of the TV for hours playing Sega Genesis—Aladdin, NHL ’94, Sonic the Hedgehog—praying to God when my back was against the ropes, requiring the all-magnificent force to help me beat the game. There are no atheists in foxholes.
“No, hon, you can’t, you’re a girl,” my mother responded. She paused, not moving her eyes from the dish towels she was methodically folding, before saying, “But you can do anything a boy can do.” One by one, stacking them neatly in their place.
It reminded me of how she looked when ordering a Happy Meal for me at McDonald’s. I insisted on the “boys’ toy” every time—a delightful, congenial bribe. My mother’s discomfort requesting the toy was palpable, releasing a sort of shy giggle, slivers of shame peering through. Often they gave the girls’ one anyway.
At ten, people started addressing me as a boy. Having won a yearlong battle to cut my hair short, I started to get a “thanks, bud” when holding the door for someone at the Halifax Shopping Centre.
It was unfathomable to me that I wasn’t a boy. I writhed in clothes that were even in the slightest bit feminine. Everyone around me saw a different person than I saw, so for much of my childhood I preferred to be alone. I played by myself extensively. “Private play,” I called it.
“Mom, I’m going to have private play now,” I’d say as I marched up the stairs to my room, closing the door behind me.
I loved action figures—Batman and Robin, Hook and Peter Pan, Luke Skywalker, two Barbies from Happy Meals whose hair I cut off. The “girl toy” making it into the bag, despite the “boy toy” request. I was a walking stereotype, just not in the way my mom wanted.
Disappearing into private play for hours, I’d build forts on my bunk bed. It was metal, bars lined the bottom of the top bunk, and I would hang blankets and towels, making rooms. A little kitchen, a miniature bedroom. Vanishing into intricate and impassioned narratives, danger lurked, I’d hang off the top bunk, as if dangling from a cliff, facing death, using all my might to pull myself up to safety.
Imagined romances bloomed. I would write love letters to my fake girlfriend from across the lava floor, always signing, Love, Jason. I would tell her about my adventures abroad, how I longed for her, cared for her, that I needed her in my arms.
Those were some of the best times of my life, traveling to another dimension where I was … me. And not just a boy but a man, a man who could fall in love and be loved back. Why do we lose that ability? To create a whole world? A bunk bed was a kingdom, I was a boy.