DYKE SHOES (Echo Chamber)*****

 

By Aashiq 

Link: https://kite.link/DykeShoes 

Available until: Unknown

Content warning: sexual themes, in the podcast and the review.

A play can achieve many things. It can entertain, in many different ways. It can educate. It can make you feel enriched and fulfilled. It can even get you quite… excited, if it’s rude enough. It’s not very often it makes you want to travel back in time and turn into a lesbian (which, by the way, would completely ruin my marriage), but Dyke Shoes is very special.

Dyke Shoes is only nine minutes long, but it has so much in it. It’s very easy, as a homosexual, to look back at the past as something bad you’re glad you missed. It was a terrible time. Homophobia was rife – and accepted. Until 1967, homosexuality was actually illegal. Even once it was legalised, it didn’t mean everyone was okay with it. Far from it. The AIDS epidemic was devastating and seriously misunderstood, by the medical profession who didn’t know how to treat it and by society in general. Love was dangerous. Love could kill you.

I usually love moaning about how terrible my life is because it’s fun to pretend everything is awful, but I’m also very aware that I’m lucky. I got married. To a man. I spent most of my life (though that wasn’t very long really, I’m incredibly young, but you know how slowly time moves when you’re in your early teens) believing that marrying someone I loved would never be possible.

But Dyke Shoes shows that it wasn’t an entirely terrible time, at least not for Jane, Bee and the Chain Reaction lesbian sex family. They found ways of having fun. They challenged authority and got away with it. They didn’t let society minimise them. They just had fun… and not just sexually. The lesbians in Dyke Shoes know how to have fun, they know how to laugh, they know how to show everyone they really don’t give a ****. (Except to each other. All over the place.)

It sounds fun and liberating and so much more than just making the best of things. Dyke Shoes is full of great stories of what the lesbians of the 80s got up to. The clothes. The rebellion. The naughtiness of all kinds. It’s full of joy and it makes you smile. And the great thing about lesbians is they never try to steal your husband.

The creative team of Dyke Shoes is JJQOP, Caroline Kilpatrick, Sam Frankie Fox, and Radhika Aggarwal (who we already know from the brilliant Digital Sharing 5, and who I remember well even though I did spend most of the time staring at Tyler. I’m married, not dead). I’m not sure how the creative duties were divided, but it obviously worked.

Jane Campbell's writing is phenomenal. The content is great - it has funny stories and interesting details and that alone would have made a great podcast. But there’s been so much attention to detail with the language. Each word has been chosen with all the care you’d put into choosing the perfect outfit. The words sound descriptive and beautiful. Gorgeously-pronounced by Jane Campbell, almost as though she can taste them. It’s sensuous but not crude. Warm, loving and joyous. Celebratory. And rightly so. The Dyke Shoes team are so right to celebrate these luscious, liberated leather lesbians and also this incredible podcast they’ve created.

The positivity in this is so important. Although we mustn’t forget the terrible times (and this podcast doesn’t) and it’s something we need to know about, we should also learn about and remember the good times. The inspiring people who played such an important role in getting us to where we are today. There’s still a long way to go. We all know that. But we’ve come a long way too (I am not going to turn that into a pun. I am NOT).

 

Dyke Shoes is an incredible, brave, powerful, inspirational and hilarious work from Echo Chamber.