{"id":29809,"date":"2023-08-06T12:43:51","date_gmt":"2023-08-06T16:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/?p=29809"},"modified":"2024-12-27T21:12:21","modified_gmt":"2024-12-28T02:12:21","slug":"maurice-vellekoops-memoir-im-so-glad-we-had-this-time-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/maurice-vellekoops-memoir-im-so-glad-we-had-this-time-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Maurice Vellekoop’s Memoir: I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u201cI\u2019m So Glad We Had This Time Together<\/em> is a colossal achievement, perfect for those of us who search \u2018real life\u2019 for the perfection we find in Art.\u201d \u2014Jillian Tamaki, co-creator of This One Summer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

An astonishing, epic graphic memoir in the spirit of<\/strong> <\/strong>Fun Home<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>by Alison Bechdel and<\/strong> <\/strong>Gender Queer<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>by Maia Kobabe<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meet little Maurice Vellekoop, the youngest of four children raised by Dutch immigrants in the 1970s in a blue-collar suburb of Toronto. Despite their working-class milieu, the Vellekoops are devoted to art, music, and film, and they instill a deep reverence for the arts in young Maurice\u2014except for literature. He\u2019d much rather watch Cher and Carol Burnett on TV than read a book. He also loves playing with his girlfriends\u2019 Barbie dolls and helping his Mum in her hair salon, which she runs out of the basement of their house. In short, he is really, really gay. Which is a huge problem, because the family is part of the Christian Reformed Church, a strict Calvinist sect. They go to church twice on Sunday, and they send their kids to a private Christian school, catechism classes, and the Calvinist Cadet Corps. Needless to say, the church is intolerant of homosexuality. Though she loves her son deeply, Maurice\u2019s mother, Ann, cannot accept him, setting the course for a long estrangement.
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Vellekoop struggles through all of this until he graduates from high school and is accepted into the Ontario College of Art in the early 1980s. Here he finds a welcoming community of bohemians, including a brilliant, flamboyantly gay professor who encourages him to come out. But just as he\u2019s dipping his toes into the waters of gay sex and love, a series of romantic disasters, followed by a violent attack, sets him back severely. And then the shadow of the AIDS era descends. Maurice reacts by retreating to the safety of childhood obsessions, and seeks to satisfy his emotional needs with film- and theatre-going, music, boozy self-medication, and prolific art-making. When these tactics inevitably fail, Vellekoop at last embarks on a journey towards his heart\u2019s true desire. In psychotherapy, the spiderweb of family, faith, guilt, sexuality, mental health, the intergenerational fallout of World War II, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, French Formula Hairspray, and much more at last begins to untangle. But it\u2019s going to be a long, messy, and occasionally hilarious process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The release date for I’M SO GLAD WE HAD THIS TIME TOGETHER:\u00a0A Memoir is February 27, 2024.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author Bio:<\/strong> MAURICE VELLEKOOP<\/strong> <\/strong>was born in 1964 in a suburb of Toronto. A prolific artist and illustrator, he has worked non-stop for the last three decades. In addition to publications, his corporate clients include Swissair, Abercrombie & Fitch, Air Canada, Smart Car, LVMH, and Bush Irish Whiskey. He lives on Toronto Island.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019m So Glad We Had This Time Together is a colossal achievement, perfect for those of us who search \u2018real life\u2019 for the perfection we find in Art.\u201d \u2014Jillian Tamaki, co-creator of This One Summer An astonishing, epic graphic memoir in the spirit of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe Meet little Maurice Vellekoop, the youngest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":29810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gayleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}