Unsung Heroes
BRINGING TO LIFE THE LGBTQ HISTORY OF MANCHESTER THROUGH THE STORY OF TWO INCREDIBLE WOMEN
WORDS DANIELLE MUSTARDE
UNSUNG HEROES
Angela, Luchia, and now, Luchia
Angela marching in 2017, Manchester Women’s Aid banner
Canal Street in Manchester.
PHOTOS LUCHIA FITZGERALD/ANGELA COOPER, ALICE SMITH
Luchia Fitzgerald, 70, and 67-year-old Angela Cooper have spent the last half a century fighting for their rights as women and as lesbians. Their work revolutionised Manchester throughout the 60s and 70s, and has transformed the lives of thousands of women since, yet no record of them exists in the city’s archives. That is until filmmakers Alice Smith and Joe Ingham began making a documentary about their story, titled Invisible Women. Here’s how it all began.
ANGELA RUBBERNECKIN’
In the 60s, when Luchia and I met, I was a student involved with something called the Gay Liberation Front. We really wanted to reach out to what we then called the “straight-gay community”. It makes me laugh now when I think about it, because we were a little like the Salvation Army, you know?
We thought, ‘We’ll go out and reach the masses!’ That’d be something. So myself and a friend went into a gay club called The Picador. We were trying to talk to people, we had little leaflets and things, but we weren’t getting a great deal of feedback. That was until we noticed somebody sitting at the table next to us rubberneckin’ – and that somebody turned out to be a 23-year-old Luchia.