Prepare your hanky and your deepest thoughts about the future when you watch the poignant Netflix documentary Secret Love. Director Chris Bolan traces his great-aunt, Terry Donahue, and her life partner, Pat Henschel, from their love-at-first-sight romance in the 40s through their struggle as ailing elders. Bolan’s mother Diana is the third major figure of the film, as she struggles with Pat over the best way to support Aunt Terry in her decline.
The lovers met the year I was born, 1947, while Terry was a Canadian star of the Peoria Redwings – a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (which inspired A League of Their Own.) They only came out to Terry’s beloved family in 2009, living in a sometimes brutal, if love-filled closet, all that time. With remarkable footage and stills from back in the day, we see how they constructed a life in Chicago of fierce devotion, building friendships with other queers. The film shorts us on what this life was: we see only one dinner shared with a couple of gay men who are clearly central to their community, but we are given no sense of how the advent of gay liberation, with its new institutions and cultural opportunities, affected them – as it surely did.
The ways in which homophobia impacted them is encapsulated by Diane’s discovery of Pat’s love letters to Terry, from which the bottom signature has been ripped off to protect their identity. Pat is alienated from her own family, but unfortunately not entirely embraced by Terry’s. The reasons why they came out so late to Terry’s family remain under-explored, but we get a hint when one niece is outraged at having been deprived of this information (it’s all about her) while she is scandalized that they are living in sin. Pat is only too aware that in this family she is mainly seen as an impediment to Terry’s return to Canada, and not always as the solicitous life-partner she has been.
If gay people had made this film, it might have looked very different. The years of their Chicago life together and the social fabric they wove would have had more primacy. Their relationship may have remained a secret to the family – and there must have been good reason for that – but surely they were more open within the life they built for themselves.
On a personal level, the film reminded me of how our worlds shrink if we make it to old age, with our peers dead or ailing or retired in Florida or returned to distant home towns. Those with younger family members who give a shit have a lifeline, but those of us without close bio families are too often thrown onto the trash-heap of impersonal if not homophobic social services. We pioneers have failed to build any solid intergenerational network. The LGBTQ movement seems to have more cross-generational disdain, in both directions, than connection.
I wept throughout this film, most especially at the barriers to their love, prior to the 70s, and then at what ill health does to this couple’s independence. Sufficient hard-earned savings and Terry’s family’s concern allow them safe solutions in which to thrive. But I wept for those without money or loyal young people to shepherd them to the end.
The trailer:
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