Sensible Footwear
A Girl's Guide
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.
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 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.
'Engagingly documents decades of changes in the LGBTQ+ life. The often hidden history of lesbians in Britain...comes alive through the vivid re-creations...' — Paul Gravett, The Bookseller
Kate Charlesworth is a cartoonist and illustrator living and working in Edinburgh, originally from Barnsley, South Yorkshire. After art college in Manchester she began work as a freelance illustrator in London where, along with David Shenton – as cartoonists accidentally documented L&G – she was part of (as it was then known) the ‘golden age’ of Gay publishing.
Her work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, books, indie comics, exhibitions and electronic media and she has drawn storyboards for Hot Animation and Aardman Animations. In 2014 she collaborated with Mary and Bryan Talbot – 2012 Costa biography winners for their graphic novel Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes – to illustrate Sally Heathcote: Suffragette, published by Jonathan Cape.
Her graphic memoir, Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide is out now.
