One of this year’s most hotly anticipated books is Elliot Page’s memoir Pageboy, in which the trans actor opens up about his journey of self-discovery and transition. He is also poised to open up about mental health, assault, love, relationships, sex, and the trials and tribulations of surviving in Hollywood.
But that’s not all. In an excerpt obtained by People,Page also opens up about the first time he kissed a woman, and how utterly life-changing the experience was for him.
“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 and kindness. It wasn’t so much that her eyes lit up but that they found you. I could feel her looking,” Page says in the memoir, recalling that they left and went to a gay bar named 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,” he confessed. “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.”
Page finally decided to shoot their shot. “‘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,” he recalled.
The experience proved to be nothing short of life-changing for Page. “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,” he realized. “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.”
And finally, the kiss. “We leaned in so our lips brushed, the tips of our tongues barely touching, testing, sending shocks through my limbs,” Page shared. “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.
Pageboy arrives on shelves June 6.
