Pageboy: A Memoir

by Elliot Page

These memories shape a nonlinear narrative, because queerness is intrinsically nonlinear, journeys that bend and wind. Two steps forward, one step back.

So true!!

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.

“I just want what’s best for you … I want to protect you … I don’t want you to have a hard life.” These sentiments would slide over me. What was best meant fitting neatly into our society’s expectations. Staying inside the lines.

my heart aflutter for Sandra Bullock, my eight-year-old self not comprehending that I once again had a crush.

It is not as easy to forgive my father. I’m going to come to Toronto and kick your ass. When his kid needed safety, when his kid needed love, when his kid needed protection, he threatened violence.

It’s hard to explain gender dysphoria to people who don’t experience it. It’s an awful voice in the back of your head, you assume everyone else hears it, but they don’t.

It puzzled me to watch cis straight actors play queer and trans characters and be revered. Nominations, wins, people exclaiming, “How brave!”

Hollywood is built on leveraging queerness. Tucking it away when needed, pulling it out when beneficial, while patting themselves on the back. Hollywood doesn’t lead the way, it responds, it follows, slowly and far behind. The depth of that closet, the trove of secrets buried, indifferent to the consequences. I was punished for being queer while I watched others be protected and celebrated, who gleefully abused people in the wide open.

“The system is twisted so that the cruelty looks normative and regular and the desire to address and overturn it looks strange,” Sarah Schulman writes in her required read, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences.

be kind, collaborate, take care of the Earth, share—concepts that don’t jibe well with our capitalist system, the ones they push us to forget.

The freaks, the artists …

let’s be real, the queers.

We do not realize the extent of the energy we are losing until we find where it is seeping from. Invisible until it is not. A thought just out of reach. Only now do I understand just how much I was consumed, the degree to which my brain was taken by a desperate, insatiable need to control. A watchtower enforcing my own personal isolation.

Someone will break your heart but you will break one, too.

I kept trying to explain the difficulty I was having. But he kept spitting out his unwanted opinions while then berating me for getting “too emotional.”

Imagine the most uncomfortable, mortifying thing you could wear. You squirm in your skin. It’s tight, you want to peel it from your body, tear it off, but you can’t. Day in and day out. And if people are to learn what is underneath, who you are without that pain, the shame would come flooding out, too much to hold.

It is not trans people who suffer from a sickness, but the society that fosters such hate.

How does it hurt anyone else? What about my peace demands vitriol, violence, protections?

This is your life. You don’t need to believe their stories. Those are their narratives.

We were Pisces buds.

I can see now how moments like these—between me, my mom, my dad—silently paved the way for my future relationship dynamics. I would throw the feelings aside, worried I’d get in trouble for having them, remaining in situations a lot longer than I should have, hide my truth.

Regardless of everything before, it’s painful to think that someone who parented you could support those who deny your very existence.

I am patient, we all are endlessly learning and I’ve made the same mistakes, but sometimes patience wears thin. I know these instances and remarks may seem tiny, but when your existence is constantly debated and denied, it sucks you dry.