OH-4315_AngelaCooper_e02.mp3

Angela Cooper: [00:00:00] I think what happened then was there was something happening at Lancaster University in the way of gay liberation because that’s where I think it was happening in the colleges, around in the units. And I started going up to Lancaster with some of these people I’d met, you know, like for discos and things, and then you meet other people and.

Angela Cooper: [00:00:23] We were, you know, young, we were forming relationships and things like that. So I started seeing this woman called Sue and then she would visit me in Manchester. And out of this beginning of things, we started talking about the gay scene, which we saw as, you know, quite exploitative, etc. in our minds. So we decided, you know, we would go and try and meet some of these people on this gay scene because none of us knew any of them. We were all just like young (I’d call us), hippy politicos who would come out. I think we just got some leaflets done or we found some leaflets from somewhere. And then Sue and I went one evening to this Picador club in Shudehill in Manchester for a night out, but also to see if we could, as it were, a bit like the Salvation Army, I suppose, convert or get talking to some of these gays, you know, that we what we felt and we could help,

Angela Cooper: [00:01:28] I suppose, in some way and I suppose I linked that to thoughts about the women’s movement and trying to get feminism out there and get these ideas out there of liberation, you know, so sort of liberation thinking at the time. Black liberation, women’s liberation, gay, you know, all these things will come in mainly from America, I think, you know, the stuff I first read. I’d already read The Female Eunuch.

Angela Cooper: [00:01:50] And then I was feeling like I got into the book. S.C.U.M The Society for Cutting up Men. That’s the woman who shot Andy Warhol, you know, so there’s a lot of ideas that where coming across the Atlantic, I think that we were picking up on. I think gay liberation started in the States. They were those sort of ahead of us with the Stonewall.