The man attempts to extract his whereabouts from friends with fake emails.
“He would attach pictures of me with my eyes closed, and photoshop himself with massive angel wings above me, glaring down,” Page writes. The correspondence continues in secret for almost two years-much in spite of Page’s efforts to end it.
CELEBRITY REFLECTION REVIEWS SERIES
The man had become obsessed with Page’s stint on a minor Canadian TV series and hunted him down online. In his mid-teens, he began corresponding with an older man who found Page’s student blog on the internet. As he enters adolescence these childhood fantasies prove to no longer work and depression drops its anchor. The seclusion lets him fantasize of being a grown man who writes letters to girlfriends and conjures a figurative identity away from the gender estrangement of daily life. Hiding out in his imagination, alone in his bedroom, provides escapist pleasure and quiet relief. The artifice of such gender play is embraced by the young Page-as is the pleasure of finally being recognized for who they feel they are: “Perhaps people would see me,” he recalls.Īs a kid, Page is sometimes confused for an effeminate boy, facing the wrath of bullying classmates who throw homophobic slurs and chase him from the playground. Scenes like playing Charlie in his elementary school production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are recalled as transformative moments. Page details how he experienced gender dysphoria from an early age, preferring the usual traits of boyish roughhousing over fairies and femininity.
Pageboy is pitched as the “story of untangling.” It’s the life of someone battling everything from misogyny, abuse and male obsession, to the unwelcome cruelties of homophobia and transphobia combined. This was only compounded by publicists and film studios trying to feminize his image and head off gay rumors. A Canadian magazine called Frank put Page on the cover and asked, “Is Ellen Page gay?” The period proved a particularly low ebb, as the glory of an Oscar nomination was undone by the frenzied obsession with his sexuality. Chapter 2 begins with memories of a Michael Musto in The Village Voice provocatively headlined “The Ellen Page Sexuality Sweepstakes” and then more memories of being called a dyke while growing up in Canada.īut Juno thrust Page into the harsh Hollywood celebrity system and made him prime meat for tabloid fodder and media scrutiny.
CELEBRITY REFLECTION REVIEWS MOVIE
The book begins in 2007, the time of a first kiss with a woman in a queer bar, and of Juno, the movie that brought Page an Academy Award nomination for his turn as a pregnant teen, but also speculation on Page’s sexuality, with some journalists arguing that Page owed it to the community to come out. Pageboy subscribes to the dictum that since queerness is intrinsically nonlinear, recording a queer life should not be a linear narrative. (There are also the details of romances with public figures, like Kate Mara and Olivia Thirlby, that have made headlines.) But behind each is a clarity and assuredness that is restorative and empowering to read, as Page’s opening statement of “At last, I can be with myself, in this body” echoes with confidence in spite of these hardships. There are truly disarming recollections shared, including mentions of heavy self-harm and sexual assault. Incautious and unscripted, Pageboy displays a kind of deep breathing and thoughtful self-reflection about a life defined by public roles-whether on screen or imprisoned by closets-that now sees the quiet narrator solely reset the story of his life. Now Page, 36, is perhaps the most famous transman in the world and his new memoir Pageboy (June 6) examines this fraught but privileged position. It was the second coming that attracted doubters, dogmatists, and difficulties: “When I came out in 2014, the vast majority of people believed me, they did not ask for proof.” Coming out as trans six years later meant people wanted evidence of lifelong dysphoria to legitimize his new gender identity, often refusing to simply accept his adult announcement as true.
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