A Secret Love: Doc about elderly same-sex couple who 'come out' after 60-plus years is literally a moving experience

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

In the rural community where I grew up, I recall several cases of unmarried seniors - either lifelong singles or widowed - who shared houses and expenses. 

But. when I look back at that time, I can’t help wonder if there wasn’t more shared. These thoughts come naturally after watching Chris Bolan's heartfelt, real-life love story A Secret Love (new on Netflix), about his great aunt Terry Donahue and her long-term partner, Pat Henschel, who came out as a romantic couple in their eighties. At a time when men and women went to jail for being gay, and families gathered around the TV sets to watch the barely-closeted Paul Lynde and Liberace, a policy of don't ask and don't tell was the social norm.

Terry and Pat hit the beach early in their lifelong relationship in A Secret Love

Bolan's film is essentially a home movie, that fantails into a larger cultural narrative of post-war North American culture. Shot on video between 2013 and 2018, mostly in intimate indoor settings, the film begins as fly-on-the-wall style cinema verite. 

Two women in their eighties are in their  suburban Chicago home, when one of them, Terry, gets a call from her doctor. Her roommate, Pat picks up the extension. This is the beginning of a period of tough decisions. The two women need more care. Terry's favourite niece, Diana Bolan, travels down from Edmonton to push the two women to find a retirement home. Pat is resistant and quarrels ensue, but eventually, they are relocated tp a nursing home in Edmonton, Canada - back “home” after almost 70 years.

A Secret Love, which was to have premiered at the South by Southwest festival, has some heavyweight support in producers Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story and this week’s Hollywood) and Jason Blum, of the Blumhouse horror franchise.

The reason isn't hard to understand: While Pat and Terry's personal story is fascinating on its own, it also ties into a public one about homosexuality in post-War America. It's also linked to baseball, the sport that Yvonne Zipter (who briefly appears in the film) has called "the lesbian national pastime."

In the late 1940s, Terry Donaghue was a professional baseball player in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, founded by chewing-gum magnate Philip Wrigley and celebrated in the 1992 Penny Marshall film, A League of Their Own, with Geena Davis, Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell.  Pat met Terry at a Moosejaw skating rink 1947, during the off-season of her second year in the league. Shortly after, Pat moved to Chicago to live with her, pretending to be her cousin and enjoying the anonymity of big city life, and the comfort of a gay and lesbian social circle.

There's a wealth of archival photographs and film clips from Terry's playing days, where players wore skirts and attended charm school to counter any suggestion of lesbianism among its players. Not only was a player's livelihood endangered, both lesbian and gay men's bars were routinely raided, and any woman not wearing three articles of feminine clothing could be arrested for male impersonation. 

Living in the closet became such a  habit that the women recall a Chicago sandstorm, where visibility was so poor, they actually risked kissing each other on the street.

Like any great romance, A Secret Love is made more piquant by the personality differences between the two women.  We still see how Terry, the extroverted former baseball star, still likes the limelight: She gets a kick out of signing autographed baseball cards for people, prickly when she's being feeling excessively petted. Pat, who is more reserved and romantic, is, as W.H. Auden put it, "the more loving one."

But they connect with a powerful bond. I'll eat a bridal bouquet if there's a rom-com out this year that will have a more moving wedding ceremony.

A Secret Love. Directed by Chris Bolan. Written by Chris Bolan, Alexa L.Fogel and Brenda Mason. With Terry Donahue, Pat Henschel and Diana Bolan. A Secret Love is currently available on Netflix.