OH-4315_AngelaCooper_e01.mp3

Angela Cooper: [00:00:01] Growing up in the 60s, and it’s a time and in a place where it wasn’t OK to be gay, so I knew, you know, I was aware that I wouldn’t have called myself gay, but I was aware that I had attraction to, you know, girls.

Angela Cooper: [00:00:16] And I wasn’t quite like my friends. But then it just went on through my teens. And I left school at the convent and started my degree and became a student. And that’s when I met all different other kinds of people who lived, you know, much more middle class or broader kind of life that I had. But it also coincided with the end of the 60s, which was the hippie period. So I became a hippie, you know, smoking dope while the rest of it went a bit wild. The classic convent school girl gone wild.

Angela Cooper: [00:00:52] And then this. The thing about being gay was that the back of my mind and it sort of was something that was a little bit referred to, then I realised that my flatmate had a visitor occasionally that she’d known from Essex University and that there was some relationship there. And then that’s how I eventually came out through that friends network of just one drunken night. Oh, my God, we drove last night scenario, which I think is the way a lot of people have come out over the years. But it proved to me that I was a lesbian and by then I was quite political in the way of left wing politics, the beginning of the women’s movement, again, of, you know, the beginning of the seventies. I was starting to become very politicised.

Angela Cooper: [00:01:42] So although I’d known about the union and quite a lot of what Lucias referred to of the gay scene at the time in Manchester, for whatever reason, I never felt drawn to where to just turn up in a gay bar or whatever. And so my way into being gay was quite different. And I just thank my lucky stars, really. The politicisation came about that seemed to allow me to, you know, to come out in that way.