Interviewer: Were there two separate, kind of, facets of liberation?

Marsha: Well, there was this group called Status of Women and it was a little bit more middle class, and they didn't want to be identified as lesbians because most of them were married and...straight. But a good number of them were also lesbians, so there was a fight in that group...but I was never in that group, so... (long pause) But I never found any divisions in any of the groups I was running, like in the self-defense or in the uhm, incest survivors groups. There didn't seem to be any conflict between the lesbians and the straight women in...in those groups. But we were focused on something else, we weren't focused on 'Are you straight or are you gay?'. We were focused on, like, how to not get abused and how to not get beat up, and how to not get raped.

Interviewer: Do you think that focus has changed- the focus of the identity of it has changed over time?

Marsha: I think now that people are not so uptight about being around gay people- like straight people don't seem to- doesn't seem to bother them. It used to be, like, incredibly embarrassing and shameful and...you didn't want to talk about it or use the word, or anything like that. (pause) I don't think that's a problem nowadays, I think... [ ] people just seem to be more open. [Mhm, yeah.] In Vancouver, anyway. I mean (laughs) it's probably different, maybe, in the deep south of the U.S or somewhere, but...

Marsha: Yeah, so I guess the different groups I was involved with was the women's self defense, women's karate, the uhm, lesbian groups... lot of different lesbian groups. And then uhm... one of the women in one of the lesbian groups... was- started talking about incest and sexual abuse and that kind of thing. And again we didn't know, at all, how common it was or...I-I, when I first [ ], this woman said that's what she was specializing in her psychology practice, and I said, Well, how do you get enough clients? She said, There's no problem (laughs) getting clients. And then I started asking my clients that were coming to me, and... it was like eighty-five percent of them had been abused... And I had no idea, I thought it was maybe five percent...because when we were taught, we weren't taught anything about abuse, it wasn't mentioned. (long pause) So we didn't know the extent of, like, rape or molestation or incest or any of those things, we weren't taught. But then, once we started asking the questions, of course it became pretty obvious pretty fast what was going on. It also became really obvious why we weren't taught that, because the guys who were writing the books, some of them were the abusers- or their buddies or their teacher or whatever. [It's like a culture, almost.] Oh yeah, it was total- a total silence of what was going on.