What We're Reading – February 2020

Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide by Kate CharlesworthMy favourite place to be is partway through a book that I have just realised is becoming an all-time favourite. This month, it happened with Kate Charlesworth’s graphic memoir, Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide, a political history of gay rights in the UK and a personal history of her place in the struggle.Born in 1950, Charlesworth left for university as a not-yet-out lesbian in the year that homosexuality was decriminalised. She renders her childhood home, cramped yet somehow empty, with stark precision, then offers sweeping full-page drawings of her first gay bars – or rather, spaces coded as gay because of their dingy corners, daring clientele, and raucous singalongs of Gilbert and Sullivan. Gay rights marches, Section 28, the AIDS crisis, second-wave feminism and the journey towards civil marriage all appear, threading in and out of Charlesworth’s life in traditional comic book panels, or captured in colourful spreads like a dreamed scrapbook.Beyond the fight for rights and recognition, Sensible Footwear also celebrates the joyful community spirit of queer culture, where a single kiss on television, or a shared passion for a poet, can have a deep emotional resonance for LGBTQ+ people to connect over. From the overlapping dialogue balloons as Kate and her friend Jacky both dance around coming out to one another – each trying to admit their sexuality in subtle, abstract ways – to the page on Drew Griffiths of the... Continue reading at 'British Council global'

[ British Council global | 2020-02-14 09:49:28 UTC ]

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