In a cover story for American Way,
actress Ellen Page talks about her decision to come out gay.
The 28-year-old Page announced she's
gay last year on Valentine's Day during a speech delivered at Time to
THRIVE, an LGBT youth conference hosted by the Human Rights Campaign
(HRC) and held at Bally's Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“I was just done,” she said. “It’s
so toxic to just be hiding; it becomes so consuming without you even
knowing it’s consuming you. You become so complacent in this
reality you create. It’s like a bucket, and it’s filling up and
filling up and filling up – and finally it just spills over. And I
felt guilty for not being out for the LGBT community.”
“I wanted to do it and not make it
seem about myself. And I wanted to align particularly with something
LGBT-youth-oriented,” Page said of her Time to THRIVE speech.
“For me, it was a great opportunity
to be honest, to share certain elements of the pain that I went
through. Hopefully, that can connect with someone else. The reality
is, there are very few young people out as actors, so I was hoping to
speak to a lot of the issues so it wouldn’t just seem like, 'Hey,
look, I'm gay,'” she
added.
(Related: Ellen
Page beams on Ellen
talking about girlfriend Samantha Thomas.)