Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Secret Love’ on Netflix, a Wonderful Tearjerker Documentary About Two Women’s Lifelong Love

Netflix documentary A Secret Love tells the story of a pioneering pair: Pat Henschel and Terry Donahue, a lesbian couple who kept their relationship a secret for decades. That’s not an exaggeration. They met in the 1940s, when Terry was playing in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and, of course, when being publicly gay wasn’t an option. Anyone thinking this documentary — one of the few non-horror productions under the Blumhouse banner — will bank on the novelty of Terry’s stint as a ballplayer in the same organization popularly fictionalized in A League of Their Own will be delightfully surprised to learn it’s much, much more than that.

A SECRET LOVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “She’s my cousin.” Pat Henschel has been saying it so long, you’ll believe it if you didn’t know better. She’s on the phone with the doctor, discussing her partner Terry Donahue’s arm tremors, a product of Parkinson’s disease. They’re in their 80s; it’s 2013; they live in a small house in St. Charlies, Illinois. Terry wears a T-shirt bearing a famous slogan: “There’s no crying in baseball!” They’ve been together 65½ years, Pat says. Not just 65 — 65½, she says many times. Diana, who shares a very close mother-daughter-type relationship with her Auntie Terry, learned just three years prior that she and Auntie Pat are lesbians. Diane says she doesn’t care and wouldn’t have cared, she’d still love Terry the same. Diana’s sister Tammy is a little less generous with her wording — “They lived a lie for how many years?” — but later sings a beautiful and heartfelt love song she wrote just for them.

Pat and Terry both grew up on small farms in rural Canada, with mostly stereotypically conservative families. They met in 1947, when Terry was 22 and playing baseball, and Pat was 18, working as a long-distance telephone operator. Both had dated men — three of Pat’s former suitors died in various ways — but something happened at that hockey rink in Moosejaw where they first came together. They discovered each other, and themselves perhaps. Together, they moved to Chicago, where being gay would carry less stigma — but it’s also where police raided clubs, arresting women simply for wearing “fly-front pants.” They knew nobody upon their arrival, but would eventually build a de-facto “family” of close friends during their 42 years in the city, as is so common in the LGBTQ community; they worked together at an interior design firm for 26 of them.

Now, they’re struggling with their physical health, reluctant to relinquish their independence and move to an assisted-living community. They consider moving to Edmonton to be near Diana; they visit a nursing home there, where they learn they’d be the community’s first-ever same-sex couple. They don’t sign up, but eventually, they find a place at the behest of Diana, who always has felt accepted, but not always loved, by Pat. A complex conflict quietly brews.

Diana helps them sift through their belongings — photographs, jewelry, Terry’s baseball paraphernalia. Terry’s still tickled to talk about baseball. She played catcher, just like Geena Davis in A League of Their Own, although her dark hair and robust smile in old photographs resembles Rosie O’Donnell. She carries a couple of her baseball cards in her purse to give away, “Just to make others happy,” she says. Diana comes across a fistful of love letters with the bottoms ripped off — the salutations were removed, Pat says, in case something happened to her and Terry and someone else learned their secret. One is a poem Pat wrote for Terry. “On we sauntered, seldom speaking, as we passed through moonlight lane/Happiness walked there inside me when you smiled and called my name,” she reads, her voice cracking a little. Decades later, their love is invincible.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Sure, pairing A Secret Love with a welcome rewatch of A League of Their Own is a no-brainer. But it also would make a great double feature with another recent Netflix documentary, Circus of Books, which was also about a long-loving couple who remained mostly closeted — a heterosexual husband and wife who owned a gay-porn bookstore for 30 years.

Performance Worth Watching: Terry has the flashy baseball story, and she comes off as nothing less than a sweetheart. But Pat’s facial expressions are a vivid reflection of her softly roiling complexity, whether she’s meeting Diana with stubborn skepticism or looking deeply into the eyes of the love of her life.

Memorable Dialogue: “I was a long-distance operator. I could always find you,” Pat says, telling how she could track down Terry at roadside motels while she traveled the Midwest playing baseball.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I’m not crying, YOU’RE crying. A Secret love is a heartfelt, touching, deep, beautiful love story. One might say Pat and Terry are brave for sharing it so openly with the world. One also might say they’ve been brave for being themselves for 70 years, no matter what they may have had to sacrifice. We all strive for that, don’t we? How many of us truly achieve it?

Although Director Chris Bolan takes a few moments to properly contextualize the harsh realities of being gay in mid-century America, the flm doesn’t stir a lot of outrage. Beyond their fears of being ostracized by family members — some of whom clearly wouldn’t have accepted having a lesbian as a sister or daughter — Pat and Terry don’t share any stories of prejudice. Perhaps they keep such accounts to themselves; perhaps they wish to move on, positively. This isn’t a tortured account of societal pressure and identity struggles, although they’re certainly implied. Neither is it a trifle. Underscoring the film is the bold feminism that’s the subtext of their lives, whether it was Terry pushing conventional boundaries by “looking like ladies and playing ball like men,” or both of them refusing to compromise who they truly are.

Bolan mostly follows his subjects as they search for a new living situation, and as their love for each other continues to evolve and grow. He does nothing flashy as a filmmaker, although the trust Pat, Terry and Diane afforded him is truly special. (It doesn’t hurt that Bolan is Terry’s grand-nephew.) They’re unafraid to be earnest, and occasionally quite emotionally raw on camera. They’re warm, open subjects, and the movie blossoms with those very same qualities.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you want a universal treatise on the enduring nature of true love, this is it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream A Secret Love on Netflix