Reading: Sensible Footwear

[white_hart]

Sensible Footwear: A Girl's Guide is at once cartoonist Kate Charlesworth's autobiography in graphic novel form and a history of LGBTQ+ culture in Britain over the last seventy years. Charlesworth mixes formative moments from her life (the gradual realisation of her sexuality, key relationships, moves from a small town near Barnsley to Manchester, London and Edinburgh) and her career with double-page spreads, each focused on a period of a few years, setting out key events for the LGBTQ+ community during those years - legal changes, LGBTQ+ figures in public life (including a couple I hadn't realised were gay), cultural milestones from the first use of the word "homosexuality" on the BBC to Brookside's lesbian kiss and beyond.

I thought this was terrific; Charlesworth tells her own story in an entertainingly self-deprecating and utterly relatable way, while the "history" sections are bursting with things I didn't know about the quarter-decade or so before I was old enough to understand that queerness was a thing, and a thing that applied to me at that. The artwork is vivid and engaging, mixing Charleworth's cartoons with newspaper headlines and occasional photos. The pages are busy and complicated and I think I will want to read it again soon, as I suspect there are things I missed first time through, but that certainly won't be any hardship.

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

My mother was very disappointed, when she picked up this book in the shop at the Scottish Portrait Gallery, do find out that it was not in fact a book literally about sensible footwear.

[white_hart]

I would also have been entirely delighted to read a book all about sensible footwear, but I liked it as a queer history too :-)

[nineveh_uk]

It does sound like it covers its actual subject very well!

[mountainkiss]

I wish DW had a “like” button just for this.

[perennialanna]

It's so good I'd ordered another copy for a birthday present before I'd quite finished mine (I did wait until I'd checked it for TERFery, because one never quite knows these days, but it is All Good).

[antisoppist]

It is very very good, even though I had to explain to my children that people were not sending me parcels insulting my taste in shoes and they didn't have to leap instantly to my defence.

It ties in very well with how I've been thinking everyone has a small developmental-environmental window in which they attempt to make some sort of sense of everything and how that goes really depends on what the society they are in is saying at that very particular time and it is different for everyone (while often being fundamentally the same) even a very few years apart.

[white_hart]

I think I'm still trying to make sense of everything, but then a lot of that is actually trying to unlearn the things I picked up first time round (like "being anything other than heterosexual is something that has to remain deep deadly secret for ever and ever"...).

[jinty]

It is indeed ace and as you say clear of TERFery which you can never be totally sure of in advance! I would jolly well hope Kate C would have no truck with such but alas I have been mistaken about others before now.

[white_hart]

It is really awful how people one always thought were sensible and right-thinking seem to have bought in to the TERF lies, but happily not in this case!

[white_hart]

I think I first heard about if from your recommendation, so I knew it had been pre-checked for TERFery :-)

[alithea]

Ooooh! Another one for my list ;)