A Secret Love
シークレット・ラブ: 65年後のカミングアウト
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Two women who hid their relationship for six decades, one of them a catcher in the league behind A League of Their Own.
A Secret Love follows Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel, who met at a hockey rink in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in 1947, fell in love, and spent the next six decades letting most people believe they were cousins or friends sharing the rent. Terry was a catcher for the Peoria Redwings in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the league behind A League of Their Own. In Chicago the two worked for the same interior design company and kept their love to a circle of close friends. They stayed away from lesbian bars, where a police raid could put a woman's name and employer in the newspaper, and as Canadians they would not risk their immigration status. Their love letters had the signatures torn off.
The director, Chris Bolan, is Terry's great-nephew; he began filming in 2013. The couple had told Terry's family the truth only in 2009, and her niece Diana, the director's mother, answered that now they could tell their story. The film moves between home movies of their young life and the present, in which the two women, in their eighties, face old age in their house outside Chicago. Terry has Parkinson's disease, and Diana wants them in assisted living near the family in Edmonton. Pat, prickly and protective, resists: she has never had to share Terry, and she fears how a care home that has never had a same-sex couple will treat them. In a tearful argument Diana tells her how frightened she is by Terry's weight loss; another niece says they had better marry and stop living in sin. In the end they pack up the house, finding a love poem of Pat's with its signature torn away, and move into a care home in Edmonton. The film includes their wedding; they married in 2015, on Terry's ninetieth birthday. Terry died in Edmonton in March 2019.
Starring
Terry DonahueHerself
A former catcher in the women's professional baseball league, sweet and easy-going, whose Parkinson's forces the couple's hardest decisions.
Pat HenschelHerself
Terry's partner of nearly seventy years, prickly and protective, who resists leaving their home and their friends.
Diana BolanHerself
Terry's devoted niece in Edmonton and the director's mother, who pushes the couple to move near the family.
Why it matters
A Secret Love is a love story, but its pressure comes from old age. Two women who spent sixty years guarding their privacy now need help, and help comes from a family that learned the truth late and finds one of them far easier to love than the other. That is the film's real subject: what happens to a gay couple when illness hands decisions to relatives, and when the care on offer is in a home that has never had a same-sex couple before. Pat's fear is not paranoia. She lived through decades when exposure meant arrest and a name in the paper. Reviews were almost uniformly warm. BuzzFeed's Shannon Keating dissented, arguing that the film sees the couple too much through the straight family's eyes and says too little about the gay friends who were their other family. Both readings can be found on the screen, and the wedding, when it comes, carries all of it.