‘A Secret Love’ Chronicles a Lesbian Romance That Endured Despite Discriminatory Times 

Alci Rengifo

Romances are a dime a dozen in the movies. But few have the kind of meaningful impact found in the true story of Netflix’s “A Secret Love.” Chris Bolan’s documentary works on many levels as a reflection on age and a reminder of a time when being in love could be dangerous in the United States. Bolan tells the story of Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel, two women who were partners for over seven decades. “I consider them great aunts, we’ve always been close. I’ve always been particularly enamored with Terry,” Bolan shared with Entertainment Voice. “She was my professional ball-playing aunt who lived in the States. I grew up in Canada.” 

Terry was indeed not just any ball-player, but a member of the legendary All-American Girls Baseball League in 1950s Eisenhower USA. This moment in sports history was immortalized in the 1992 film “A League of Their Own.” Nearly 6 decades ago Terry and Pat moved to Illinois so Terry could continue her sports career. As the documentary begins the two women still live together in a house they shared for 25 years. Yet now in their twilight years, age is presenting acute challenges. Of the two, Terry is the frailest, something easily noticeable to her family, particularly her niece Diana (the director’s mother) who would like them to move to Canada. Headstrong Pat is resistant to the idea of leavin their home. Friends also wonder why the two don’t marry, now that it’s legally acceptable. As we witness these developments Pat and Terry take us on a journey of memories back to the ’40s and ’50s. For years they publicly claimed to be either cousins or good friends, lest anyone suspect they were romantic partners. It was an era where homophobia and stark misogyny were more of the norm, when women in the wrong place could be arrested for wearing the wrong kind of clothing.

Bolan, who has acted on stage and in shows like “Billions,” tells the story of Pat and Terry with an intimate view into how an unbreakable bond can form for life, and then how age brings its own kind of assault. “Me and my wife met with them. They poured us rum and cokes, which is their drink of choice,” said Bolan, “And then they said, ‘we need to tell you something. We’re gay.’ We obviously were totally fine with it and accepted it immediately. Them seeing our acceptance and pure love, it just opened these floodgates for them. All these stories started spewing out of them and they began walking us through this history starting with the 1940s. Even though I had known them my entire life, I had never known that side of them. I remember sitting on this couch as they told us this story. At the end of it they got up and started dancing with each other in the living room. I thought to myself, ‘my god, I have to tell this story.’”

“A Secret Love,” with its nostalgic tone, flows like a recap of lives. To Bolan’s credit it’s full of admiration but honesty as well. We see Terry and Pat with flaws and all, as real couples actually are. There are tense moments where Terry’s Parkinson’s disease flares up or Pat and Diana have confrontations about selling the house or finding a retirement home. “Terry was especially very comfortable in front of the camera because of all her appearances for baseball. After ‘League of Their Own’ became a hit she was constantly flying around the country, and going to Japan, and had all these speaking engagements. But talking about being gay was a totally different thing for them. Because I’m their relative there’s a degree of trust there already, which helped, but it was tricky getting them to open up about being gay. It took a while. Me and my producers, Alexa Fogel and Brendan Mason, started this thing almost seven years ago and it took a lot of filming over and over again… they’d open up more and more each time.” 

Being related to the subject also brings its own unique challenges, “I would say the intimacy part of it was difficult for me, because I had to learn to stay back and stay out of it. I knew early on I didn’t want to be a major character, so seeing Terry as she ages and seeing things as they happen, like her trying to navigate down the stairs, my immediate reaction was to be her great nephew and jump in and help her. But as the filmmaker I had to learn to sit back and watch Pat take her down the stairs.” When funds ran out Bolan would pick up the camera himself, which helps give the documentary even more of the sensation one is invited into these lives. “I ended up shooting a lot of the movie. The footprint ended up being me and my camera, those very cinema verite moments. There’s a fight scene in the film at the dinner table where my mother kind of blows up at Pat. I filmed that all on my iPhone. The crew had left six hours before that and I had my good camera in the car and I can’t just say ‘cut, can everyone wait while I go get my good camera?’ So I picked up my iPhone and prayed to God that I had enough memory and started filming. So moments like that add to that kind of raw intimacy.” 

Throughout the documentary the two women gaze at old photographs and remember the days of the All-American Girls League, when players were expected to wear skirts and secretly carried on lesbian relationships. Hearing them narrate their romance is a reminder that love is something that builds through an evolving, organic connection. In hindsight some meetings of hearts nearly seem inevitable as when Pat shares about how many boyfriends and fiancés she lost to sudden deaths before meeting Terry. Ironically the love they found with each other was against the law. Being gay meant that if you were caught in a suspicious bar it could land you in a police paddy wagon. It’s startling to see how being in gay in ‘50s America could be the equivalent of living in a semi-police state. 

“I had directed some things for the LGBTQ community here in New York, for certain foundations… and so I had a little bit of an idea of those times,” said Bolan. “But I think it’s right to coin it that way, as a police state in Chicago at the time. It just shocked me… it was shocking for me to find out that they would print anyone who was lesbian or homosexual in the papers. If you were a school teacher, or a principal, or a police officer, or whatever, they would print your name in the paper, and their lives would literally be ruined. They would commit suicide. I could’ve made a whole documentary about that, about how people would even go missing all of a sudden.”

“A Secret Love” was finished with the help of producers Ryan Murphy and Jason Blum, who Bolan credits with getting the film a wider platform and stronger production values, including access to the rights for the film’s theme song. Doris Day can be heard crooning “Secret Love,” an Oscar-winning hit from the 1953 musical “Calamity Jane.” Edited like a reverie, the documentary reaches a wonderful crescendo as its two lovers exchange wedding rings, at a retirement home, and then make one, last major decision. Off to Canada they go, to be close to the family who now know the truth about their story. Not all love stories end in despair. This one is a story of deep and lasting love that defied the norms of an age and endured.

“I want people to see the power that a simple love story can have,” said Bolan. “I had the opportunity of screening this with a very small audience, we were going to premiere at SXSW and that obviously didn’t happen, but it was eye-opening to me how universal this story seems to be… we had audience members who were lesbian and saw it through that lens, and audience members who were gay, and then some with aging parents they were caring for, everyone could relate to something in it. We all have family members, people that we love, or aging family members that we love. I hope audiences feel something.”

“A Secret Love” begins streaming April 29 on Netflix.