Review by Frank Plowright
Sensible Footwear is a wide-ranging mosaic in which Kate Charlesworth considers her own life in the context of the very gradual changing of attitudes to same sex relationships in the UK from the 1950s onward. Starting with actor John Gielgud’s arrest for cottaging and computer scientist Alan Turing being hounded to death during her infancy, Charlesworth charts her own discoveries alongside LBGT landmarks using a dazzling array of visual techniques and metaphors you couldn’t make up. As a youngster she wants her own garden shed more than a school trip abroad.
What might be assumed as an awkward combination of autobiography, history and polemic avoids every pitfall due to Charlesworth’s engaging nature. She invites people into her life as if chatting with them in the pub, has something to say beyond discussions of sexual identity, and has so many ways of saying it. At school she shows herself discovering the works of Gilbert & Sullivan, and 35 pages later delivers a five page operetta explaining the lesbian pub she frequented in Manchester during the early 1970s and the rapid learning it provided. It’s reprised a couple of times as a cleverly compact method of figuring things out. Other sequences are delivered as a story from 1960s British girls’ comic, discussions around a table in hindsight and scrapbook pages. Emotional dexterity is present throughout, particularly when detailing the complexity of her relationship with her parents after coming out.
On reaching the point where Charlesworth is sure about her own identity, reflections from the wider world are reduced to a series of spreads, accompanied by ephemera and quotes. It’s possible because her own life becomes entwined with landmarks, initially by chance, then through contacts and dedication to causes, as while some battles had been won, public opinion remained ignorant. In detailing atrocities, prejudice and insults Charlesworth is astonishingly restrained, but in her own illustration career she’s able to include covert gay references. It’s a delight in passing when someone tells her years later of picking up on the pink triangle badge worn by a background character for an illustration in a physics textbook.
In passing is actually a regular feature of Sensible Footwear, points made without a need for additional comment, although Margaret Thatcher and her 1980s Conservative government’s war on the LBGT community is singled out for a justified rant. While reflective and personal, though, Charlesworth always ensures accessibility, and there’s an element of structuring to develop dramatic threads as people drift out of and back into her life.
On Sensible Footwear’s cover Posy Simmonds is quoted, calling it a stunning achievement, and if one of Britain’s greatest comic artists is of that opinion, how much more needs to be said?
