At 11, already intent on being an actor, he moved in with his father. He attended an arts high school in Raleigh, N.C., graduated summa cum laude from Boston University in theatre arts, then lived in New York and Portland, Ore., before settling in Los Angeles-a city he now desperately misses. Toronto in winter is everything that Los Angeles is not. Paige misses his boyfriend, and he misses his best friend. He misses his godchildren, Morgan and Charlotte. Mostly, though, he misses the California sun. "I feel like I've been on a submarine for nine months," he says lightly, looking out the window at the slate-gray Canadian sky, streaked with freezing rain. "I'm looking forward to a little bit of shore leave."

Paige's casual openness about his life has spared him the endless questions about straight actors playing gay characters that other cast members have faced. He has no patience with such questions, in any case. "I find the idea that straight actors playing gay roles is somehow exotic offensive in the same way that I find the notion that I as a gay actor might not be able to play straight characters after this show offensive," Paige sighs. "The fuel to the fire is that the show actually has sexual energy to it. Not only are these actors playing gay guys, they're playing gay guys who actually have sex.  They're called upon to invest in the emotional lives of the characters, and they're called upon to actually touch bodies."

As for his fellow cast members' occasionally ill-considered answers to questions about physical contact, he says. "There is something about the question 'What's it like to kiss a guy?' that is innately homophobic. What does it matter? You'd never in a million years ask an actor who was doing an interracial relationship what it was like to kiss a black person."

Paige acknowledges that apart from himself and fellow out actor Randy Harrison, who plays 18-year-old Justin, and many of the producers and writers, the cast and crew members of Queer as Folk are mostly straight as arrows. Dominated by craftspeople, a film set can resemble a high-tech construction site at times, and a blue-collar ethos more often than not carries the day. Yet Paige says the culture on the set has been embracing, if occasionally wondering, as any initial trepidation among the heterosexual crew members dissolved quickly.