Walk down Canal Street today and you'll find a bustling strip of waterside bars, rainbow bunting fluttering overhead and people living their lives out and proud.

Wind the clock back 60 years or so and it was a very different story.

"It was a really run down part of town where various outsiders congregated," is how LGBT and women's rights activist Luchia Fitzgerald remembers the Gay Village.

"There were the gays, the prostitutes and the petty criminals, and there were only a few places to go back in those days. Everyone got on, there was no judgement.

"It was a place you could go and be yourself. It was seedy, but it was our seedy place. It felt safe."

It became a haven for Luchia when she arrived in Manchester in 1961 as a teenager running away from an abusive and oppressive childhood in Ireland, where she was raised by her grandmother.

"She found out I was a lesbian, basically, and she was threatening to put me into an asylum. She used to beat the daylights out of me," she said.

"It was a very abusive childhood, in the emotional and physical sense.

"A lot of young children did run away from home like myself. The attitude to the LGBT community was to put them into mad houses or lunatic asylums. Nobody would call them that now and rightly so."

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Things were not much better in Manchester, where homosexuality was still illegal at the time and would only be partly decriminalised six years later.

Luchia found herself living on the streets and, after a run-in with the police, was sent for a lobotomy.

Horrifically, the drastic brain surgery was advocated as a 'cure' for homosexuality at the time, along with other cruel 'treatments' including electric shock aversion therapy.

"There were quite a few people I'd met, young Irish like myself, who'd already had lobotomies," said Luchia.

"I got arrested at one point. The police picked me up and said I had to have a social worker. The social worker ended up sending me for a lobotomy.

"She thought all my problems were because I was a lesbian. I was just an innocent kid with nothing between my ears. I didn't get much of an education because I was dyslexic.

"I already had low self esteem. I thought I couldn't be right, so I was delighted for a little chance to be normal and solve all my problems and maybe go back home again and live like normal.

"Then the psychiatrist explained what they were going to do and it was appalling. I was still a Catholic, and the questions were so bad and rude and dirty I started getting suspicious.

"I got up and pinned him to the big mahogany table and ran.

"It was about a month or so after that that I ended up nearly having a nervous breakdown, because then I was on the run."

Luchia found refuge - and a job with lodgings - at the New Union Hotel, one of only a handful of places LGBT people could go and feel free to be themselves at the time.

(Image: Joel Goodman)

"I went every day and stood outside in the evening. I had nothing else to do. I just felt comfortable there, I felt safe, even standing in the street," she said.

"Straight away the older lesbians gravitated towards me and asked me if I was okay. They took me under their wing and looked after me."

Back then there were just a few gay bars in the area, including The Rembrandt, on Sackville Street, and The New York. Across town were scattered a few more, including the Picador club on Shudehill. It was there, in 1971, that Luchia met Salford-born student and activist Angela Cooper.

The two women had a lot in common.

Both were born to single Irish mothers in Catholic Magdalene homes - religious institutions where unmarried pregnant women were sent to live and work.

Angela was adopted from the St Theresa's home on Salford's Broome Lane into a loving local family. While they never rejected her, they also struggled to accept her sexuality.

"I was raised a Catholic but also grew up knowing I was gay," said Angela.

"There wasn't a word at the time, but I knew it was sinful and I had to hide it. Into my teens, I already knew I was different.

"I came out when I was 20. My mother didn't want to know. That was for the rest of my life."

Bonded by their shared experiences, a two-year romantic relationship was kindled - outlasted by a friendship and political partnership that has endured to this day.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

"By the time we met we had a lot of things pent up. We wanted to be free and express who we were and suddenly we could. It was okay to be who we were," said Angela.

"One of the things we did was go round the town with tins of yellow paint after a night out and paint 'lesbians are everywhere' on the bridges.

"With the gay movement we were trying to get out of the ghetto. From the 70s onwards we were trying to live life more openly. Nobody was coming out before that. It was too dangerous.

"I was a hippy, it had just been the Summer of Love and society was moving slowly towards a more liberal attitude to sexuality of any kind. The gay movement built from that."

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Women were also enjoying greater freedoms thanks to the contraceptive pill, developed right here in Manchester a decade earlier.

"There was this amazing energy and desire for change, a repressed energy not just from us but other women who wanted to have freedom over their own sexuality," said Angela.

Services for women had been non-existent, however, until The Manchester Women's Liberation Centre on Upper Brook Street came along. Angela and Luchia moved in in 1971 and lived there for five years, offering services such as pregnancy testing and helplines for women who had suffered domestic violence or rape.

They were swamped.

"The police started bringing battered women to our door because they had nowhere else to take them," said Angela.

"At our meetings one of the women said the house next door to her was empty, so we went to squat it. We were pretty militant in those days."

Using a donation from a local solicitor, they turned it into the city's first women's refuge - today known as Women's Aid.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Alongside their work, Angela and Luchia also established a radical printing press, Amazon Press Women's Co-Op, and played in a rock band, the Northern Women's Liberation Band, amplifying their ideas to a wider audience.

"A lot of the women's conferences had discos and we wanted the music to express those feelings and ideas. We needed a band," said Angela.

"A few of us got together, we had a couple of guitarists, it turned out I could sing and Luchia could play the drums."

She added: "It was a really exciting time to be young. We were full of ideals and thought anything was possible."

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Their activism continued throughout the 1980s when they organised a demonstration against Clause 28 of the Local Government Act, the draconian law passed by Margaret Thatcher's government that banned teaching about same-sex relationships in schools.

A crowd of around 20,000 activists marched through Manchester in protest at the legislation, which was not officially repealed until 2003.

"There was no way we were going to let them get away with that or they'd start chiselling away at the rest of our rights we'd fought for," says Angela.

"It created a whole new generation of activists. You could say that's why Manchester has become such a gay capital now - it put us on the map.

"It's fabulous now to see youngsters in the Village and at Pride all enjoying themselves now. It makes you think it was all worthwhile and I'm glad we were part of it."

(Image: Mirrorpix)

Despite their trailblazing roles in the fight for equal rights, Angela and Luchia's story remained a little-known one - until a short film, Invisible Women, shone a spotlight on their work.

Directed by Alice Smith, the documentary was made after producer Joe Ingham interviewed Angela and Luchia for a BBC4 programme in 2017, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK.

While they made only a fleeting appearance in the Prejudice and Pride series, Joe later got back in touch about making the film.

"He knew there was a whole other story to be told," said Angela.

So why has it taken so long for their achievements to be recognised?

"Nobody was interested," said Luchia.

"Everywhere you look around there's patriarchy. I'm not a man hater, don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are men, but it's down to patriarchy.

"We wanted to call the film Invisible Women and have that debate. If the cap fits they can bloody well wear it, because the women in this town changed a lot."

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Angela added: "I don't think we've been as good as we could have been about telling our stories. Women don't tend to shout, we don't blow our own trumpets."

"Hopefully the film does capture the fact there was a massive amount going on in Manchester and we make it very clear that we were just two people in the movement."

The film has since been shown in 11 different countries, winning Best Short Documentary at the 2019 Durban Gay & Lesbian Film Festival in South Africa and opening New York Pride 2019.

Next week it's coming back home with a screening at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford to celebrate LGBT History Month.

Angela, now 69, and Luchia, 72, both still campaign for LGBT and women's rights, and hope the film will galvanise a new generation of activists to follow in their footsteps.

"We're trying to pass on that mantle to the younger generation because as we all know, it's getting more and more right wing everywhere," said Luchia.

Angela added: "The main reason we're doing this is to say you've got to keep fighting, you've got to keep vigilant. History goes in tides."

The screening takes place on Saturday February 1 at 2pm and will be followed by a Q&A session. Admission is free. Visit wcml.org.uk for more information.

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