Angela Hodgson: Full Interview

TRANSCRIPT

Angela Hodgson

Interviewed by Gill Crawshaw

29 April 2019

AS: My name is Angela Hodgson.
I prefer to be referred to as she.
I was born in September 1951 and I live in Halifax (which I believe could be spelt with an 'H'!)
I would identify as lesbian Luddite.

GC: Brilliant, thank you, Angela. So, where to start? Can you tell me about, maybe, why you moved away from West Yorkshire, and maybe what brought you back as well? And when that was, as well.

AS: Well, yes, I was – I mean Halifax is not, even now, the centre of any sort of gay world. It's quite a, a sort of – it's not physically small, but it's quite, like small town mentality. Close-knit family, Catholic tradition, so it was like, there was no, no possibility of any diversity of any kind and so I'd sort of struggled with the sort of feelings that I'd had in relation to lasses and women for, oh, since eight, nine, ten years old. And so it was basically a situation of, find a way to run away.

So I ran away to a college. And – I'd screwed up all my exams, didn't get a, didn't get many 'A' Levels, and didn't get many 'O' Levels and no 'A' Levels although I tried to do a course – anyway, they were opening this new college in the midlands. So, because it was a new college they'd got no students into this second year, so basically they took anything with legs, you know. So I got in. So I sort of ran away and it was, still, very, very problematic. I had no idea, it was a situation of complete invisibility. There was no such word as 'gay', I don't know if I'd have heard the word 'lesbian' and I think I'd sort of worked out 'homosexual' because in the course that we did they did this sort of, like sort of, theology, biblical sort of studies and they had somebody give lectures on moral theology. So, of course, within the context of that, this was all like, [blows through lips] all wrong, you know?

And so, the conflict that I left with just continued. And, I ended up, basically, having a breakdown. This was after about ten years of sort of denial, you know. So it was a massive sort of, explosion, and I was certainly suicidal. So, the college authorities, sort of – at the time there wasn't really any, there wasn't really any conversations about mental health. I'm talking 50 years ago, really. So, I was shuffled off to the nurse where they stuck me in the sick bay, just to, I suppose, keep an eye on me and sort of sedated me for about three days. And then I ended up at this psychiatrist who referred me to this specialist unit. Which was basically just trying to cure you of being gay. So, there, one of their sort of recommended treatments was go and, basically, interact, or screw, really, as many of the guys at the local university that you could lay your paws on. No advice about pregnancy, no advice about sexual health, it was just, it was just the pits. And basically, very sort of strong hints about, well, we'd best get this sorted, coz you can't be a teacher and feel like this and be like this.

Anyway, anyway, I sort of spent, sort of, several years of numbness coming out of that. And then as, I suppose a lot of people's journeys, sort of finding, finding ways of meeting. I found an article in, you know, some women's magazine in, I don't know, a doctor's waiting room or something, like Women's Realm or whatever. And there was this article. And I held on to it for years, and it was just basically saying, it showed you this picture of two women – only from the back – but they were holding hands. And it was like, absolutely, it was the first image and the first confirmation.

But I do remember, I do remember somehow – and I wish I knew when it was – visiting Shibden Hall. And knowing, by this stage, that, about Anne Lister, and this was well before any of these diaries were transcribed. And I remember, like, wanting to – well, I did, actually – scrawl on the walls of the toilet, something about, you know, women can love women, or something like that. And it was like that, before, or since, if you like, you know, it was like. So, that was about...

GC: What year was that, roughly, are we talking late, mid to late ‘60s?

AH: Late ‘60s, yeah, late ‘60s, yeah.

GC: Yeah, OK.

And… So, gradually, you'd sort of find your feet in terms of finding organisations and help. And I remember contacting an organisation, I must have found, I don't know how, coz, like, unhelpfully, they hadn't invented the internet just yet! And so I found about National Friend which was a, a national gay counselling and befriending service. Which was brilliant. It was all over the country, it was like affiliate groups, but they provided that, sort of, where you can meet somebody. So, it could either just be someone to talk to – they were all volunteers, but they, they trained them – and then you could, sort of, go to places with – if there are any places to go to, which, you know, didn't extend as far as Halifax at the time – so, yeah, coz that's the sort of, another bit.

And then I suppose I was sort of active in terms of, I suppose, there was the professional angle. And because I was in, like, education and teaching, with children and stuff, special units, units for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, there was like, oh well, it wasn't even a question, you know what I mean? It wasn't even considered that you could be what I now know, you could be out at the time. And so eventually there was the coming of Section 28. I think it was that that just, I suppose the phrase might be radicalised, now. It just, I just thought: ‘Right, that is it! If you don't want people like us in your schools, we'll go out bloody shouting. Fine, you know, sack us but we'll go out bloody protesting!’ And I remember marshalling some help, you know, from some of my close friends. I mean, I would have been sort of out to three or four people at work for twenty-odd years, but nobody else, you know? And it was really, it was very much like that. And so, I marshalled as much help as I could in my little sphere to go, vote against the Section 28 stuff in the local union, unity.

I did go on one of the early Gay Pride marches.

GC: Where was that, where was that, then?

AH: It would have been held in London.

GC: Right. And were you still in the midlands at that point or had you moved back?

AH: Well (excuse me), I always considered Yorkshire my home, so the family home was here and I always travelled back, you know, backwards and forwards, so I think it might have been whilst I was living in the midlands or it might have been, you know, I can't – it was a long time ago so I would have been younger, so it was probably from the midlands. But there was also one of the early ones in Huddersfield.

GC: Do you remember when that was, approximately?

AH: I wish I could, no, but it was at the height of, you know, the skinhead sort of thing? And I can remember, there was a film advertised. I don't even think there was a sort of procession, I think there was just sort of events advertised. And I was going to this film, and I can remember these skinheads chasing us down the street. And, when I say us, it wasn't as though I was going around, you know, with a, wrapped round with 'Lesbian' all over me T-shirt, or rainbow flag or anything. It was just, you know, certainly felt that they were, like, chasing us towards the venue. And I remember having to run in. And I can remember, certainly, oh, you know, a couple of occasions when I was in the centre, this is the gay centre in Birmingham, and, you know, people having been beaten up outside.

It was very much that climate, it was – and certainly, this idea of the Section 28, I felt was just a complete insult and assault and a lie. Because it was basically saying: ‘you will not promote.’ Well, none of us wanted to promote, we just wanted to be able to say, you know, there are some families that have two mummies or two daddies, whatever. And I felt that very, very strongly. And, and looking back now, you find it hard to believe, in the current climate, that actually that was what the reality of our lives was. That's the reality of the majority of my life and the majority of people, I should imagine, of my age. It was really, when you look back at what that was saying, it was very cleverly worded, because what happened was, a load of self-censorship. People, you know, didn't, didn't feel that they could talk about – the principle thing was how we were working with young people in schools and things. And I found that, it was very clever because it said: ‘you will not promote.’ So people who didn't have an understanding of it felt that to even talk about the existence of LGBT people... yeah, yeah. It was very much, we're not going to tell children the truth about life. I think the climate is different now. Although, it isn't, actually, there's still this... the conflict with teaching, helping to promote education programmes.

GC: Well, following on from that, can you tell me a bit about the Lesbian Identity Project?

AH: Yes!

GC: How that came about? What your involvement was?

AH: Would you like some more tea?

GC: I'm fine, thank you.

AH: I can, but it wasn't called the Lesbian Identity Project, it was the Lesbian History Project.

GC: OK.

AH: And the reason we couldn't – we needed, coz we wanted a bit of funding just to buy tape recording, pay for some transcription – the reason we couldn't use Lesbian History Project, I think was something to do with, there was another one somewhere or whatever, whatever. So we, so it wasn't really – the context was, we were a history group. And we had been asked if we, to start off with, we'd been asked if we wanted to join with the Bradford Mela, the multicultural festival, in Bradford, and set out a stall, you know, like there would be the Bangladeshi Workers' Association, you know, the Interfaith Group, the Muslim Education, and so they were very forward in saying, you know, why don't we have that lot, the lesbians from – it was the Northern Older Lesbian Network, NOLN, as was, that someone must have approached. And so what I did, what we did was, we started looking, being the idiot as you do, you volunteer, and there were a few of us and we said, what we'd do, we'd do the display. And the, the sheer, sort of, dawning that there was nothing to display! We looked, you know, we did a bit of research.

GC: And again, what year was this?

AH: Ah!

GC: Approximately, if you can...

AH: 2000 and... it would be, approximately, 2000 and...

[JM shouts at the cat. JM: Hey! excuse me - Cat! No!]

[Pause tape]

AH: Are we on?

GC: Yeah. OK, what year was that?

AH: It would have been round about the late 90 – honestly, I'm really sorry, I could actually look it up, hopefully later in the – I've got some of the raw materials, of the meetings and things.

And so we set about, saying, It's appalling, you know, where's the history of women? There were, I'm not saying lots, but there was stuff on men, and there was like nothing. And we started delving and so we set up the Lesbian History Project. There was about six or eight of us.

GC: And just, was that part of the Northern Older Lesbian Network, was that women across the north, or was it just West Yorkshire?

AH: It was very loose. It was a group that, in a sense, as it happened, was composed by women who attended the Northern Older Lesbian Network, NOLN. But that was, anyway, quite a loose sort of structured thing anyway. So it emerged from that, is probably the best way of putting it, and then became a sort of group in its own right, it became separate. And because then we needed to get a bit of funding and therefore we had to do these constitution things and get a bank account. And so people who were interested in history, that was the focus. And there were several tangents, there was like, we'd look at, you know, the history of some of the local things in Thornton and Bradford and obviously Anne Lister in Halifax. And, eventually there was this urge to do something to redress the balance of – we had nothing to take, really, to the Mela.

I mean, we did, and we've still got the panels somewhere which show the – but there wasn't that much which was specifically from t'north of England, and particularly around the lives of ordinary women.

So, the project that we landed upon was, we said, what we ought to do is make sure that from now, from here on in, we capture the lives of women who are around. And so, it was the Lesbian History Group for such a long time, and then became LIP for administrative sort of reasons. And so, the task was to capture the lives of lesbian women in the north of England. And so it was north of England. And actual fact it became wider because I think there was one, I'm not sure whether it went into the final project, but I think there was certainly a couple who were in Wales who were interviewed.

GC: And what were the aims of the project?

AH: The aim of the project was to create a record of and by and for lesbians at the end of the 20th century. So it was like capturing the lives of – and what we wanted to do, and gradually this was a very... I don't think that I've... we were very, you know, we were a very solid group but a very small group and it wasn't as though that's what we wanted to do from the very beginning, you know, from not having anything for the display at the Mela. It actually emerged, but once that task emerged, then that was the focus. And I don't know, it might have been about that stage that, or a little later, that it became the Lesbian Identity Project. But we always referred to it as the Lesbian History Group. And the, there was a long period of: What shall we do? How shall we do this? The objective was, we want the record, we want the record to be straight – I shouldn't say straight, should I! – we want the record to be as we would like it, it's us speaking about our lives. Anyway, so eventually it became an oral history project and in summary, after about ten years, we had interviewed approximately 40 women. And tape recorded the interviews which were roughly about an hour, some would be slightly shorter, a few, quite a few, would be longer, and the, they were then transcribed onto paper. The tapes, to be honest, I'm not sure what we – anyway, the tapes were transferred, transcr - whatever, into CD electronic form coz they were done on cassette, and then lodged with, is it the Fawcett Library in Leeds [Feminist Archive North] and the Glasgow Women's Library. Which was another sort of debate. But actually, the process between what we ended up with and what we started with was actually quite a long-ish journey because we were a small group.

GC: How long were you working on it from?

AH: Oh, in the end it would be about, I should say, about ten years more, and about seven, eight people, and two of those have now sadly passed away. So, what we actually ended up with was not – we didn't specifically say: this is what we're going to do, we didn't say: we'll produce a book or, we'll produce booklets, or whatever, and was we actually did was, we knew we wanted the voices, we wanted women to speak for themselves. And so getting from that broad goal, that was a very clear objective, to what we actually came up with in the end, which was four sort of booklets, which I think varied between about twenty pages and, what's that red one? How long is that? About 60? Yes. So at that stage it could easily have been, it could easily have become one book, which if you stick 'em all together,you know, it would be, it was the same, it, it – sometimes it was very often similar people speaking in different booklets.

And we spent ages looking at how to do this, because there was an experienced, there was a psychologist, there was somebody else who was experienced in psychology, there was someone who was experienced in, like, certainly academia and academic study and history. But actually doing it meant that we had to look at, what method do we use? There are so many ways to elicit conversations and interview people. So we had, you know, we spent what is probably months going off and having people come and talk to us to say, Well, these are the advantages of this method and these are the advantages of this method and – the whole idea was, we wanted their voices, but we knew we had to somehow manage and write it up in some form at the end, which, as I say, wasn't decided at the beginning but we knew we had to do it in some format.

And so, eventually it emerged, after quite a bit of learning and practice, the idea of having a loose format. I'm thinking we might have had six, eight, sort of questions, but they were very broad. And we decided that, if someone was on a roll, unless they were off, off on some sort of tangent that wasn't relevant to the theme, that we would just allow women to speak. And then there was – so we did a pilot of however many interviews, eight, ten. And then, what happened then was, was this process of, well, how do we write up all these, people who'd tell their stories. We'd got these, and we'd explain to women that that's what we wanted, and it was however they wanted to lead it, but we did have the structure, if they wanted it. Most women felt that that was useful, so there'd be something about their childhood, how they saw their sort of identity and how that changed. And one of the hooks, one of the things, the link between the very start of the whole idea was, that the Mela, like I said, come along and show your sort of, you know, tell us about your group, like lots of groups were doing at the Bradford multicultural festival at the time, was stick some pictures in. So what we said at one of the subsequent meetings in NOLN was, bring along some pictures of, like you now and you as a child or as a – you know, if you wanted. And it was fascinating, you know. I think this was one of the prompts that we used, because it was looking back on these pictures, what are your thoughts? What, what does your image, what does our image tell us about where we are and how we see ourselves in society. So, that was really, that was, you know, you could see that people would light up and they'd go, ‘Oh! I remember – oh, I had... ,’ you know, and it was like, ‘Last time I wore a frock was ... ,’ you know, that type of thing. It was absolutely – so there were some – it was a – it was hard work for a small voluntary group with no project workers, nothing. It was just, it was just that. But there were some absolute gems, you know, and it was the stories that you thought, well, we're getting, even if we have no more, you know, if the project explodes tomorrow or whatever, and, you know. But there is this, this woman's story about this part of her life that was just, it spoke volumes.

And then there was the, not just, what shall we do with this material, but how do we sort of structure it after the pilot sort of interviews? How do we structure it so that we get precisely that, we get the – and so we said, what we would do is, we would negotiate a contract with the women to say, we'd like to tape record it and we'd like to keep the transcript of it. But we always went back and said, ‘This is the transcript, is there anything that you're unhappy about?’ Which, actually, was very unusual and very often it was, like, ‘Oh, I've been thinking about it since then and I don't want to mention this because there was a sort of third party type of, I'd better be careful about that’, type of thing. But it was very, there was very little that women actually wanted changed after we'd showed them what we'd come up with or what they had said. And you realised how speech is so different from written. So if we'd asked women to, say, submit us a story, you know, send us a couple of sides of writing about a part, any part of your life that you feel, coz say, about your development as a lesbian or a bisexual woman. So it was open, it was lesbian, bisexual women, anybody who identified as loving and having relationships with women.

GC: Can I ask how you recruited those women, where did you find them, yeah, who were they?

AH: We put out flyers, to well, when I say, everywhere and anywhere, things like women's centres and like, libraries. Oh, trying to get them into ordinary libraries, you know, like local libraries – Huh? Oh, uh uh uh, you know, that type of thing! And so we recruited, when I say as far and wide as we could, we did actually spend a long time on that bit of the process. even though we had started some interviews for a lot of the women that would have attended the Older Lesbian Network, which was just a social gathering, I think it would have been once a month, held in Bradford, but women came to that from all over northern England, you know, from towns such as Halifax and Knaresborough, and whatever, so that they had somewhere to go to meet older women of like mind, if you can use that phrase. So we did actually really struggle to recruit Black women and women of Asian origin and it was really, we really specifically tried at that time. Things would be different now coz the channels of communication are there, the groups are there, the links are there, the diversity, you know, the concept of diversity where, that was beginning to emerge but it hadn't, the link into – there was multiculturalism had come into schools, eventually into other organisations, but - so that would certainly be described as a criticism that you could quite, fairly, but it wasn't for want of trying because we were aware of that. And then, the next sort of bit of it... I'm just going to have a pause.

[Recording paused]

Now then, what actually happened was, there was a sort of – we'd started, and collected the earlier ones, and then we had a bit of a pause and said, well, how do we, what do we do now? And what we were surprised at – very pleasantly surprised at – was the sheer wealth of what was coming in, you know, these sort of stories that had - and very often women were bursting to tell their stories because it had not been told! And we had women who we – we wanted as broad a spread as we could, so we did advertise as we felt we could at the time, but this was before the internet – when did the internet start? It was before then, anyway. And so we, we interviewed women from, I think the youngest was about 17 and the oldest was in her 70s, and we tried to get as many older women as we could, because we knew that would, that would slip, that would go, you know, and I know personally of a lot of these interviewees, who have, you know, they're now dead. And so we wanted their stories. And so, somebody who was like, in their 20s, somebody who was in their 50s, and somebody who was in their 70s, would talk about similar themes in their lives.

And what we – someone came up with a really fascinating way of analysing the – the way you could analyse whole life stories. And it was some theory that I couldn’t sort of recall now. But it was someone who'd got a background in history. And we had this sort of, massive chart which went from like, sort of, early life and childhood and then you'd got, sort of 30s, 50s and for those women who were older, older. And we tried to map anything that was mentioned that was similar. So you might have a theme of coming out, or the first encounter, or the first relationship or whatever, whatever. And any noticeable change, like we talked about earlier, about the change in the way dress and style and clothes, and even shoes, reflected a change in identity, very often, that we weren't aware of, that women would say, ‘Oh, I've never thought about that before!’ And so we had a long, long time to talk about, because we couldn't decide. And so what we said we would do is, we would take a process of going through every interview so each of us read, however many we'd got at the time, then it became a rolling process. Each of us read four or five interviews and then we marked in the margins and themes that emerged. We literally chalked them up. And there were, oh, dozens. But actually what then emerged was, there were some we hadn't even expected, and some that you would have expected that actually didn't really emerge. And the purpose was for women to speak for themselves, and that was absolutely crucial. And so what, if I give you the example of religion, it was something that we certainly had not asked the question about, but actually emerged across many. And by religion we meant any kind of faith affiliation or not, or belief, or reference to religion or religious belief or morality, that sort of thing. It came up very, very strongly. So what we then had was like a set of, called Venn diagrams, where you get a cluster here, a cluster there. And that was like, this is it, this is the light at the end of the – this is how we do it. And it was because a lot of women had spoken about this, it wasn't that we would only deal with, you know, a very constant, recurring theme, coz there were some fascinating insights, especially with the older women, of what their lives had been like in what would have been the ‘30s and certainly the ‘40s. You know, absolutely, you know, and people who'd lived their lives with say, a partner of 20-odd years, and then in say, a faith group. And might have been very active in a faith group, they might have been, like they'd go and sort out the flowers, and they'd sort out the this, the that, and having a role in some sort of church group. And then their experiences of either themselves becoming aware of what this religion is saying about same-sex relationships, or there were issues that came up, or it was about something like the Section 28 thing, and so, these were really powerful words. And that was one of the themes.

GC: Can you remember any of the other themes?

AH: The themes were along – the themes that we hadn't expected were certainly the religion, and icons. Icons and, well, we called it Icons but it seems like famous mentions in film, famous celebrities, famous, something that women women could, or remembered, that they themselves associated. Even if it was the Famous Five or whatever, a children's book. And somehow they identified with a character in a book. Television, for the older women, hadn't been, you know, but there'd been films. And people would talk about their first ever film, going, or trying to go, or to see, or whatever. Or sneaking off to find a cinema somewhere, you know, miles away from where they lived, because there was, girls in uniform was one of – now, I've got a terrible memory so I can't remember the details, but they're all in there and they're all captured. So, this was, then – we were in there and we were running.

And so, what then happened was, various people took various sort of leads. It was always a collaborative effort, we all did everything. So in terms of the first booklet that was produced, it was, it was supposed to be called Lesbians and Religion. Not because that’s what we wanted to write about, but that was because it was a theme that had emerged. And we couldn't in conscience call it Lesbians and Religion because there were, were so many faiths, you know, the Sikhs, the Muslims, I can't remember if we had any Hindu, were just not represented. So, it became Lesbians and Christianity. But you've got women talking about their experiences, generally very negative, or generally negative, and some that were actually quite positive, like the Quakers and their sort of philosophy. And that was extremely powerful and very moving and I think is a piece of history that I think is changing and I don't think, in 25 years' time, we'll really have a concept of what that was like.

And so, I lead on the first booklet that was produced, which was Lesbians and Christianity, before we had very much funding. And essentially, you can sort of tell from the way the booklets are produced. That one was done without any professional printer and setter, designer, but the others, by then we'd got some money to do the others.

So, the themes that we hadn't expected were certainly the force of people talking about any contact with faith groups, or things that they heard, you know, pronouncements that they heard. Like, people talking about, they had, if they were Catholic there were, the head of the Catholic Church, the Pope might have, you know, released a pronouncement or encyclical which mentioned. And the effect of being told that, eventually, they moved their position from: this is sinful, it's certainly disordered, you know, whatever that is, but it's not good; to: well, you can be, but you can't do. Which, for somebody who was, in their early life, any part of your life, well, I can't ever have a relationship? I can't ever have someone put their arms round me? I can't ever be held? You know, to reflect this, well, the love that dare not speak its name in some religious faiths. So that came across very strongly.

And the one that we, the other theme was about these icons. And that was magical, you know, people talking about, and you could see their eyes glaze over when they would talk about. They always wanted to be so-and-so in the Famous Five and so we've got, Choosing our Icons became the, I think that might have been the third one that we produced. And the other one, I think is called, yeah, Becoming Ourselves, which was about how – it's too simplistic to say ‘coming out’, but it was that journey. And for some women that took fifty years, and for some women, not necessarily the younger, you know what I mean, this was the fascinating part of capturing the lives of these women at the end of the 20th century, because they had lived through, and some of them had lived through, well, they'd certainly lived through the Second World War and they'd lived through all of the stuff in the ‘60s, the Cold War, the, the threat. And a lot of women in another theme, a lot of women talked about their role in the feminist movement. And many came through to their lesbian identity and where their social life is now, from very different routes. And that was the thing that, the mechanisms for people who are young now, to meet and find like-minded people are clearer and more accessible, I would say. That – some women would say, I had a relationship for 15 years, 27 years and never knew, we never met any other women who were a couple or who identified as being bisexual, lesbian, gay, whatever. And so, Becoming Ourselves was a record of how women talked about their development into where they were then. Which took us full circle to the origin of the project, what might have been by the time we produced the thing, 15 years before when we had no images. And we purposely said we wouldn't go down the route of asking people to include photographs. But I wish we had've done! That would have been fascinating.

So that was basically it. And then...

GC: Well, I was just going to ask: do you know how it was received, how they were received, these booklets? What did people think of them?

AH: Well, whenever we... They were very well received, people thought they were brilliant. Not, and certainly not just the women who were a part of it. And they all felt that they had sort of done something that they felt good about. But we said all along that it was actually a massive, a massive collection of, you know, from this tiny little sentence, to this pause in this tape, to this story here, to this story of terrible sort of discrimination and sadness and triumph, all this kind of stuff. We said that there's no way that we can present what we've got. So, the idea is that they are in an archive so that they, someone next year, or in ten years' time, or 50 years' time, can go back and look and they can find all of the things that we didn't have time and capacity to report on, because it's 30 or 50 pages if you, you know, look at one person's interview, if they're talking at length.

So, they were very well received. We did talks, here there and everywhere, especially to history societies, we talked to anyone who would want to hear the story of how, how we did the project and especially what women said in it. And we did, like, for example, we went down to, there must be some national oral history project somewhere, and we gave a talk in Oxford, at Ruskin College, to people who are, they don't have the lesbian angle. But they were absolutely fascinated by what was in there and – it was just a pity that we didn't have enough money to produce more booklets. It's a shame, I mean, people are quite happy to take this, they can get hold of a copy. Sadly, the person who did a lot of the coordinating of that angle of it has, is now dead. But she did a tremendous amount of work, getting it into, like university libraries, and libraries, getting them into libraries. But, for a voluntary group, it was quite hard work, going through the process of, well how do you get an ISBN number, so it's listed somewhere.

But that's what, I think, we feel is the legacy, it's that the actual sound of the women has been put onto a digital format now, that, you know, people can listen to. And the, the consent that we had said it would be, that the voices would be heard. The transcripts were OK. And some women wished to have pseudonyms, but many didn't. But the transcripts were saved, we said we would place in libraries where there was a sort of slight limited access, so you couldn't just walk in off the street. So you'd have to have an interest, you'd have to travel to Glasgow and look at the Glasgow Women's Archives or you'd, you know, there would be routes that you'd have to go through to get to where they're held in the Fawcett Library.

So that is what was the, originally the Northern Older Lesbian Network's sub-Lesbian History Group, that grew into its own, life of its own and became the Lesbian History Project.

GC: Fantastic, thank you very much.

[END]