Maurice Vellekoop's memoir reflects strained family ties growing up gay and Christian
The Toronto-based artist spoke to Ali Hassan on The Next Chapter about his book I’m So Glad We Had This Time
In his graphic memoir, I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together, Maurice Vellekoop paints a complicated portrait of faith, family and sexuality having grown up in the Christian Reformed Church in 1970s Toronto as a gay person.
I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together depicts his intense childhood and difficult young adulthood as a young gay person in a strict Christian household. Set in Toronto from the 1970s, Vellekoop begins to see his relationships with his mother and father fracture. As he ventures out on his own, he explores his passion for art and is set on finding romance and is met with violent attacks and the anxiety surrounding the AIDS era. I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together shows an artist's personal journey to self-love and acceptance.
Vellekoop is a Toronto-born writer and artist. He has been an illustrator for the past three decades, including companies like Air Canada and Bush Irish Whiskey. He is also the author of A Nut at the Opera.
Vellekoop sat down with The Next Chapter's Ali Hassan to talk about how it felt to reflect on his life decades on in this memoir.
WARNING: This article contains details of physical violence.
In the opening pages of your book, we see three- or four-year-old Maurice on a special day with his beloved mom and you write that you and her were a perfect team. Can you tell us about that day and that childhood relationship?
I'm the youngest of four children. It's Remembrance Day around 1968 and my mother has taken me downtown from the suburbs of Toronto. It's a very magical time for us because I get to be downtown and see all the buildings that have interesting, ornate details and there's all kinds of sights and sounds that are absolutely missing in the suburbs and I'm with her, my favourite person in the world. As we're heading downtown, my mom's explaining to me what Remembrance Day is and how at 11, the entire world is going to come to a standstill for a minute's silence and I don't believe her.
Lo and behold, we get to Simpson's, now the Hudson's Bay store at Queen and Yonge, we're on the escalator and the escalator stops for a minute and I'm like, "What is going on here?" And my mom says, "It's Remembrance Day. We're just going to pause now and remember what happened here in Canada and all the people who lost their lives." I realized that she knows everything at that point.
I realized that she knows everything.- Maurice Vellekoop
Then we meet your dad, and in some frames the colour changes in these interesting ways, right? He appears in cooler colours — blue, sometimes black. Then, of course, he turns really red as he starts to lose his temper. What was his role in your family?
He was what they used to call a good provider. He worked really hard as a caretaker in the Toronto District School Board and he was the breadwinner. My mom worked really hard too as a hairdresser. He was, I think, a very conflicted, tormented person. I'm not sure how comfortable he was being a father. But it was that time, the 1950s and '60s, when people conformed and they did what was expected of them and so my parents married and started having children when possibly he may not have really wanted them.
Your mom gives you a book called God's Temple, A Christian Guide to Growing Up. How does that book affect your growing sense of sexuality?
In that book I discovered the Christian Reformed Church's views on homosexuality and they are, as they remain today, that the homosexual in the Christian Reformed Church must remain celibate in order to win God's grace and if he — I'm going to use the delightful word that they use — if he was to practice his homosexuality, that would lead to damnation. So their only choice is celibacy and acceptance or damnation and rejection by the community of the church.
As you leave adolescence, we see these lovelorn years, bad dates, unrequited love. In short, lots of sexual uncertainty. What was it like to go back and examine that period and write and draw about that period?
It was painful. There was a lot of unresolved guilt and shame from childhood and the exact moment that I came out and started going to bars was when AIDS hit the world so there was a lot of just naked fear running amongst the community and for me, it was terrifying too.
There was a lot of just naked fear running amongst the community.- Maurice Vellekoop
So on top of the guilt and the shame, there was that and then there was also this very narrow gay culture at the time in the '80s. Most gay men wore a moustache and a polo shirt and that was the uniform, right? Everybody went to the gym too so if you were not a gym bunny, you just didn't get attention. I was this skinny little twink avant la lettre, before twinks were a thing, so I couldn't really connect with people of that community too.
Your size and your uncertainty led you to also be no stranger to bullying and attacks. At one point you're the victim of a pretty terrifying knife attack and in one of the most heart rending scenes in the book, you call your father for some support. What happens there?
Well so there were two attacks, the first attack was in the mid-1980s and I was walking down the street at night and two guys got out of a car and one of them punched me in the eye and I lost consciousness. When I got up they were gone and I ran to my brother's house where I was cat-sitting for him at the time and my eye was all swollen. I was freaked out, I was crazy with anxiety and fear and it was maybe one a.m. by this point. I decided to call my dad and finally roused him out of a deep sleep after the phone ringing like 20 times and told him what happened and I expected him to rush to be by my side… He asked me, "Can you see out of the eye?" I said yes and his advice was to put some ice on it and he would see me the next day. I realized with a sinking heart that he was not going to be there for me and what I had always kind of suspected, that he couldn't really be there for me in a meaningful way, was at that point confirmed. The knife attack happened many years later. My reaction to the fist in the eye was like rage. Rage at my father, rage at the world — I've behaved very badly to people who were trying to help me.
I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together, the title of the book is from The Carol Burnett Show, it was her sign off song, but the way the book is organized mirrors the story of Sleeping Beauty. Why did you choose that story?
One of the first lines in the book is about me having periods of sadness as a young child. We listen to a lot of classical music in our house, and the waltz from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty got stuck in my head. When I was trying to go to sleep at night, I would hum the waltz over and over again and as a kind of self soothing exercise and eventually I would fall asleep. So again, Sleeping Beauty is there right from the beginning and it keeps popping up in different guises throughout the book.
I read one of these scholarly books that looks at fairy tale and tries to take them apart. One of the interpretations of the story is that it expresses an anxiety on the part of parents about their children reaching puberty. So in the story, the princess who becomes the sleeping beauty pricks her finger on a spindle of a spinning wheel and bleeds. Some people see that as a metaphor for menstruation, that this girl has come of age and disaster follows. I think that mirrors my story in a way — not that I ever menstruate or anything — but that when I hit puberty everything started to fall apart between me and my parents. My mother particularly couldn't accept my sexuality and she had a hard time when all four of us reached puberty and started being sexual.
The Carol Burnett section represents the first conflict that I had with my mother that broke the serenity and the peacefulness of our relationship. My parents had very strict bedtimes in our house and there was a point where I was being sent to bed halfway through The Carol Burnett Show. I lived for that program, that was like my whole life, and this senseless strictness that would make them not stay up for just one half hour. The irony, of course, was that I would lie in bed like furious for hours just raging against this injustice.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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