Sensible Footwear: A Girl's Guide (Myriad Editions)

"A stunning achievement - as a graphic study of LGBT history, and as a memoir of growing up gay from the 1950s onwards. Kate's fluid and tellingly detailed drawing reveals not only the frustrations and traumas of lesbian life, but also the laughter and camaraderie...

and a glorious cavalcade of gay icons." Posy Simmonds "This joyous personal history of British LGBTQ life leaves no stone unturned. It is an amazing, joyous panorama to which I could never do justice in a short review.

Let me, then, just say this. Sensible Footwear is an instant classic." Rachel Cooke, The Observer Graphic Novel of the Month Cartoonist Kate Charlesworth presents a glorious pageant of LGBT history, as she takes us on a PRIDE march 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 and Section 28, Sensible Footwear is the first graphic history charting lesbian life from 1950 to the present - a stunning, personal, graphic memoir and a milestone itself in LGBT 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 Kate's personal experience: realising her own sexuality, coming out to her parents, embracing lesbian and gay culture, losing friends to AIDS.