Maurice Vellekoop is a cartoonist and illustrator from Toronto whose work spans decades and has been featured in dozens of publications, including The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, GQ, and Time. The author of numerous books, Maurice’s work delves into queer community and culture, providing a voice on issues and topics that are often overlooked in media.
For fans of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together is an epic graphic memoir about a queer illustrator surviving his intensely Christian childhood in 1970s Toronto.
Interviewed by Ash Hampson
Ash Hampson (AH): What was it about this point in your life that felt right to write a memoir?
Maurice Vellekoop (MV): So, in 2012, I was at a very low point in my career as a freelance illustrator, working mainly for magazines. There was no work coming in, and I realized I had to try something different. I had always drawn short comics as a more artistically meaningful form of expression, and so I began to think about creating a graphic novel. I began to consider my own life as a potential subject, and how eccentric my Dutch immigrant, deeply Protestant family was, and about my struggle as a gay man against some very repressive forces. I thought this material could potentially be an entertaining and touching memoir. I put together a proposal which was immediately taken up by Chip Kidd at Pantheon Books in New York. I got my first Canada Council grant soon after that. Twelve years later, I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together is on bookstore shelves!
AH: From the start of the memoir, we see the obsession with the story of Sleeping Beauty. Can you explain how this fairytale impacted you growing up and what parallels can be drawn between you and the story?
MV: In general, Sleeping Beauty represents a lifelong love of fantasy and escape, a big theme in my life and in the memoir. The story has a couple of elements that roughly mirror experiences in my life. For example, Beauty is cursed at birth: on her 17th birthday she will prick her finger on a poisoned spindle and die. Despite her parents’ best efforts to protect her, the curse comes true, but, because of a fairy’s intervention, she does not die but falls asleep for 100 years. Some scholars have seen this plot as an expression of parental anxiety about puberty, and by extension, sex and love. In my case, my mother was adamant that I suppress my sexuality for the sake of being a good Christian. When, against her wishes, I came out in the early 1980s, I had a couple of bad experiences with sex and love, right at the dawn of the AIDS era. As a result, I shut down emotionally and sexually for a long period of celibacy, kind of like Beauty’s hundred-year sleep. I call this section The Sleep in the book. (Also, spoiler alert, at the book’s ending I meet a wonderful man, like Beauty’s Prince, with whom I at last find happiness!)
AH: As your story progresses and you start to explore and better understand your family dynamics, we start to see your beautiful artwork that depicts older photos of your parents and their families growing up. Was this material something that was discovered and explored later in life or did you grow up with access to a lot of this interesting family history?
MV: The material that concerns my mother was very familiar all my life — her family emigrated to Canada as a group in 1950 when she was twenty. Her siblings all married and settled down to raise families near Toronto and we were a big, rambunctious group that got together as a huge extended family (in total we number 17 cousins) for holidays and birthdays. My dad’s story emerged only much later. He left most of his family behind in the Netherlands. He also had some really brutal experiences in WWII, and like many men of his generation, he didn’t speak about any of it until much later in life. There were a few things I learned only recently from interviewing my brothers that I included in the book, because they helped to explain so much about this difficult, complicated figure.
AH: Can you tell me about what outside resources were used to capture the visuals and feelings from all the places of your past in Toronto? The attention to detail as you take us across the decades is remarkable. (And as a queer woman born and raised in the GTA, I spent a lot of time downtown, and it was an absolute delight to transport myself back to some familiar places!)
MV: Oh, that’s lovely to hear! Yes, I’ve been getting similar comments from other Toronto readers… Blog TO is a wonderful resource for historic pictures of the Toronto skyline, vintage TTC buses and streetcars, etc. Google Street View was my best friend for looking at buildings like my childhood home in Rexdale and being able to view Toronto landmarks. Denise Benson’s website, Then and Now: Toronto Nightlife History was a fantastic resource for images of nightlife in the 1980s and 90s.
The book ends up being a mostly-love-some-hate-letter to Toronto, which seems to constantly be eating its own past by abandoning or knocking down beloved historic buildings. So, the book is a way to bring back some of my favourite lost places and awaken them from the sleep of forgetfulness!