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Interviewer: [00:00:00] You quite often described as being the sort of the first out lesbian writer in the U.K., which which sounds like a kind of a big deal. I mean, did you did you experience as a big deal at the time?

Maureen Duffy: [00:00:13] Well, that’s how it was. Nobody understood. I mean, nobody spotted that that was what it was about. And then I wrote my second novel, a lot of which was based on my experience of teaching English as a foreign language in Italy, which was called ‘The Single Eye’. And then. There was we’d sort of come to the period of the Woolfenden Report had been ’57 and there was now the agitation to reform the law and I was extremely interested in this and sort of took what part I could in it, including some, you know, sort of television appearances and speaking at conferences and things like that. And it led to a great flurry of male homosexual literature, a lot of sort of socio sexual studies, and I got a bit fed up with this and sort of thought to myself, why is it only the boys who are getting their say? And so I thought, well, I will do a similar study of a whole sort of spectrum of women of different ages, different backgrounds, different jobs and so on. You know, to show that there is another side to all this that needs also needs to be brought out into the open. Because the problem with women then and I think still is to some degree, is invisibility.