Advocate

Peter Paige is not Emmett, and he wants you to know that. Their differences are worth noting if only because the contrast between the actor and the character throws each into sharp relief. In person, Paige is surprisingly broad-shouldered and sinewy. He’s handsome, his face wide and frank, and there is a solid middle-American masculinity underlying his demeanor that stands in sharp contrast to the willowy confection he plays on Showtime’s Queer as Folk. Paige has arrived at Cafe California, a restaurant on the gay strip of Toronto's Church Street, kinetic and flushed from a morning workout, dressed in jeans and a bulky-knit blue sweater. As he takes a window seat, he's oblivious to the covert attention he's attracting from the other patrons, gay and straight, who, with typical Canadian reserve, are far too polite to officially notice.

Paige quickly makes it clear that whether he's noticed or not matters very little to him personally. He does, however, want people to notice Emmett. "I pray to God that people are relating to Emmett," Paige says, "and that men who are effeminate see a champion in Emmett. I love the fact that he's effeminate and not self-loathing." He recalls a family photograph taken of him as a child, arms akimbo and wrists on wide hips, an awkward, girlish pose that made him wince for years every time he saw it. "I like to think I'm a masculine guy," he says, "but I think that it's when I made my peace with the part of me that can be feminine - that was girly, that is sensitive, that cries at romantic comedies and Hallmark commercials-that I came into my power as a man."

Yet even the best argument that Emmett honors the feminine side of gay men will not satisfy those Sunday night armchair sociologists who debate, often querulously, whether Queer as Folk is "good for the gays"-whether the show's portrayal of drug-taking, sex-seeking, flamboyant club puppies paints an oversimplified and negative picture of gay life, one that doesn't accurately