“Sensible Footwear”

In 2016, Kate Charlesworth, an ageing lesbian cartoonist, is on holiday in Tenerrife with her partner Dianne, her ex Ness, and friend Wren. The three long time friends’ reminiscing launches Charlesworth into a sprawling history of her own life, and the changes British queer life during it. This forms the basis of her memoir-come-social-history, “Sensible Footwear,” melding the personal and the political through 1950’s North Yorkshire, to 70’s Manchester, 80’s London, to 90’s & 00’s Edinburgh. In bars and workplaces and on streets, Charlesworth takes us through a social and personal history over almost 70 years.

Cover by Kate Charlesworth

Written & Illustrated by Kate Charlesworth
Cartoonist Kate Charlesworth presents a glorious pageant of LGBTQI+ history, as she takes us on a PRIDE march past personal and political milestones from the 1950s to the present day. Peopled by a cast of gay icons such as Dusty Springfield, Billie Jean King, Dirk Bogarde and Alan Turing, and featuring key moments such as Stonewall, Gay Pride and Section 28, Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide, is the first graphic history documenting lesbian life from 1950 to the present. It is a stunning, personal, graphic memoir and a milestone itself in LGBTQI+ history.
In 1950, when Kate was born, male homosexuality carried a custodial sentence. But female homosexuality had never been an offence in the UK, effectively rendering lesbians even more invisible than they already were—often to themselves. Growing up in Yorkshire, the young Kate had to find role models wherever she could, in real life, books, film and TV.

Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide is a fascinating history of how post-war Britain transformed from a country hostile towards ‘queer’ lives to the LGBQTI+ universe of today, recording the political gains and challenges against a backdrop of personal experience: realising her own sexuality, coming out to her parents, embracing lesbian and gay culture, losing friends to AIDS. Kate’s ex-navy dad said to her: ‘You shouldn’t have told her, love… you should have just told me.’ But it turned out her mother might have known a bit more about life, too.

Across almost 70 years, Charlesworth has seen massive changes in British attitudes towards queer people. These weren’t changes that happened on their own, they’re not part of some inevitable tumble towards progress, they were fought for and pushed against by reactionaries and tories. Partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality happened in 1967, while Charlesworth was a teenager. Twenty years later Thatcher’s Conservative government would introduce section 28, which banned the ‘promotion’ (generally read as mention) of homosexuality by local authorities, forcing people into the closest, and making schools, police departments, and social services less safe for queer people.

Progress isn’t linear. But section 28 did galvanise queer activism and helped build a solidarity between the trades union movement and queer activists, both being marginalised by the Tory government. A solidarity that made the Labour party the best electoral route to queer liberation policy. While not a paragon of leftist values, Tony Blair’s Labour government repealed section 28, equalised the age of consent, introduced civil partnerships, and made it illegal to discriminate based on sexuality or gender identity.

“Sensible Footwear” covers all of this and more at lightning speed, rarely able to settle as Charlesworth makes sure as much of our history is touched on. While the book uses Charlesworth’s own direct experiences as its launching point, her fierce intersectionality means she doesn’t want to leave anything out. At one moment, her and a friend are making flyers for a meeting of queer women they are arranging after noticing the dominance of men in queer activist spaces, her friend questions whether they *have* to include bisexual women in their invite, to which Kate emphatically responds “Yes!” This scope makes the book at times overwhelming, with a lot of information, names, and years worth of events going by in just a few pages at times.

To manage the weight of all this history, Charlesworth breaks down major events into five year blocks, making timelines out of newspaper clippings, notes, and scanned images, invoking a DIY zine vibe across intricate double page spreads. This mash up approach, taking different sources and styles, feels defining here. Charlesworth’s pen has an energy in it, flowing between sketchy and clean, you can see that she has a history working in newspaper strips, illustration, as well as this literary graphic novel space. I’m finding the style in “Sensible Footwear” is really hard to describe in a way that feels adequate, Charlesworth is using all the tools at her disposal in different ways at different points. A lot of these pages are gorgeous in themselves, but trying to look at it as a whole book it can feel unwieldy.

There are these two ways of looking at “Sensible Footwear,” the first is as a social history, the politics and culture of being queer in Britain over the last 70 years, which is most of what I’ve talked about here so far. But it is also a deeply personal book, it’s built around the author’s own experiences, from the anxieties and confusion of coming out, to finding community and solidarity in bars, and protests, and romance.

Covering an entire lifetime is an ambitious effort, a life isn’t made up of one story, it’s lots of intersecting moments and events and contexts that go together to build a person. The problem is putting that into a book requires a bit more narrative structure than reality has, and I think “Sensible Footwear” lacks some cohesive shape, leaving it feeling a little cold at times. Which is a shame because so many of the individual moments and so much of the craft is really warm.

Nevertheless, it remains vital for us to be aware of the history, the struggle, and the joy of our communities. The strives the LGBTQIA people have made in the UK in the second half of the twentieth century are incredible, and they were the achievements of people like Kate Charlesworth and her friends in this book, organising and being visible. “Sensible Footwear” is an ambitious testament to those steps forward.