Elliot Page Describes His First Gay Bar Experience & His First Meaningful Kiss With a Girl

Elliot Page looked back on his first time attending a gay bar.

The 36-year-old The Umbrella Academy actor is preparing to release a memoir titled Pageboy on June 6.

A snippet that was obtained by People contained reflections about how he first immersed himself in LGBTQ+ culture. The story also involved what he described as his first meaningful kiss with a woman named Paula.

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Elliot recalled that the bar he visited was called Reflections, and the visit was just before the premiere of his movie Juno.

“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,” he wrote. “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.”

He asked if he could kiss her. “And then I did,” he continued. “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,” Elliot continued.

Aside from describing the kiss, Elliot also reflected on how the bar helped him address feelings of shame at the time.

“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,” he wrote. “But there was a joy in the room, it lifted me, forced a reaction in the jaw, an uncontrolled, steady smile.”

Pageboy will be released on June 6. You can preorder a copy here.

If you missed it, earlier this month Elliot shared a shirtless photo in a celebration of “trans joy.”