Growing Up Queer and Evangelical in Victoria, BC
The Tyee | Dorothy Woodend | May 13, 2022
Jessica Campbell interview in The Tyee!
Being a teenager is hard. Being a closeted teenager raised in an evangelical household in the early 2000s is quantumly hard. But such is the premise of Jessica Campbell’s new graphic novel Rave.
The experience of 15-year-old Lauren — frumpy, confused, forced to wear awful long skirts and attend Christian raves — forms the meat of the story. When Lauren’s high school science teacher pairs her with a classmate named Mariah, the teenagers soon discover there are far more interesting things to do than a school project on evolution. Makeovers, movies, snacks and sexual exploration explode Lauren’s sense of self. Soon enough, the emotional complexities of balancing church, school, friends and wild new desire prove overwhelming.
First love is never easy and when a tragic event occurs, Lauren is forced to confront her deep-seated ambivalence about her faith and her sexuality and finally choose a path for herself.
Campbell’s alternately hilarious and bittersweet drawings funnel all the universal agony, ecstasy and uncertainty of coming of age into a story that clangs a psychic gong of recognition and empathy. In addition to her work as a graphic novelist, Campbell’s visual art practice is equally extraordinary.
The Tyee connected with Campbell to discuss her work, the weirdness of her hometown of Victoria, B.C., and the Christian right’s escalating war on women. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
The Tyee: Victoria has this very strange reputation of being a quaint Anglophile city with a dark side (Satanism, cupcakes on gravestones, murderous teenagers, etc.). Was this mixture partly what drew you to setting the story here?
Jessica Campbell: Yes, exactly! Victoria is really weird, a fake British tourist town with a thriving underbelly of meth labs and a history of all kinds of alternate religions/spiritual practices, including Paganism, Wicca or even Satanism. I grew up there, and I think setting the book there was just obvious to me because it’s what I know.
When I was growing up in the evangelical church, we would often be told that we were living in the Satanist capital of North America, which was meant to induce fear and drive us deeper into the church. I don’t really know if that’s true (or even what that means, exactly), but I grew up during the “Satanic panic” era and the fear of anything approaching Satanism was ever-present.
Growing up, it felt like the ground beneath my feet kept shifting. Like, for the first few years of my life, I was allowed to celebrate Halloween, but then at around six, it was deemed too Satanic, and my dad burned all of the Halloween decorations we’d made in school in the fireplace.
I was likewise forbidden from playing Dungeons and Dragons as a (nerdy) teenager because of its proximity to Satanism. Meanwhile, The Lord of the Rings was fine to read, likely because my dad had enjoyed it in his own nerdy youth. I think the fear of Satanism and the occult was amplified by living in Victoria, where we would encounter people with names like Blood Root in the course of our daily lives.
In the book, however, I don’t really feel like I made the location super overt. I live in the United States now and have met many more people who were raised Evangelical/Pentecostal than I ever knew in Canada, and the particularities of Victoria felt too complicated or specific to cover in the book. Mostly the setting is conveyed through drawings of really specific convenience stores (like the old Mac’s in Cook Street Village), street names, early ’00s Island-specific slang, etc.
To read the rest of the interview, click here!
The experience of 15-year-old Lauren — frumpy, confused, forced to wear awful long skirts and attend Christian raves — forms the meat of the story. When Lauren’s high school science teacher pairs her with a classmate named Mariah, the teenagers soon discover there are far more interesting things to do than a school project on evolution. Makeovers, movies, snacks and sexual exploration explode Lauren’s sense of self. Soon enough, the emotional complexities of balancing church, school, friends and wild new desire prove overwhelming.
First love is never easy and when a tragic event occurs, Lauren is forced to confront her deep-seated ambivalence about her faith and her sexuality and finally choose a path for herself.
Campbell’s alternately hilarious and bittersweet drawings funnel all the universal agony, ecstasy and uncertainty of coming of age into a story that clangs a psychic gong of recognition and empathy. In addition to her work as a graphic novelist, Campbell’s visual art practice is equally extraordinary.
The Tyee connected with Campbell to discuss her work, the weirdness of her hometown of Victoria, B.C., and the Christian right’s escalating war on women. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
The Tyee: Victoria has this very strange reputation of being a quaint Anglophile city with a dark side (Satanism, cupcakes on gravestones, murderous teenagers, etc.). Was this mixture partly what drew you to setting the story here?
Jessica Campbell: Yes, exactly! Victoria is really weird, a fake British tourist town with a thriving underbelly of meth labs and a history of all kinds of alternate religions/spiritual practices, including Paganism, Wicca or even Satanism. I grew up there, and I think setting the book there was just obvious to me because it’s what I know.
When I was growing up in the evangelical church, we would often be told that we were living in the Satanist capital of North America, which was meant to induce fear and drive us deeper into the church. I don’t really know if that’s true (or even what that means, exactly), but I grew up during the “Satanic panic” era and the fear of anything approaching Satanism was ever-present.
Growing up, it felt like the ground beneath my feet kept shifting. Like, for the first few years of my life, I was allowed to celebrate Halloween, but then at around six, it was deemed too Satanic, and my dad burned all of the Halloween decorations we’d made in school in the fireplace.
I was likewise forbidden from playing Dungeons and Dragons as a (nerdy) teenager because of its proximity to Satanism. Meanwhile, The Lord of the Rings was fine to read, likely because my dad had enjoyed it in his own nerdy youth. I think the fear of Satanism and the occult was amplified by living in Victoria, where we would encounter people with names like Blood Root in the course of our daily lives.
In the book, however, I don’t really feel like I made the location super overt. I live in the United States now and have met many more people who were raised Evangelical/Pentecostal than I ever knew in Canada, and the particularities of Victoria felt too complicated or specific to cover in the book. Mostly the setting is conveyed through drawings of really specific convenience stores (like the old Mac’s in Cook Street Village), street names, early ’00s Island-specific slang, etc.
To read the rest of the interview, click here!