Heartfelt and moving, Netflix’s documentary A Secret Love (2020) shows the 72 year love story of two women. Director Chris Bolan, great-nephew to Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel, tells the story of his great-aunts and their love and devotion to each other. The story that the film tells is tender, and it’s incredibly sweet to watch Terry and Pat, who have been together for decades. However, I did question the areas of Terry and Pat’s story that the film chose to focus on, specifically the central focus on being in the closet and coming out.

Terry and Pat met in the late 1940s—Terry was a baseball player for the Peoria Redwings, a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League on which the film A League of Their Own (1992) is based. Falling in love during a time in which living as an openly gay couple was not an option due to discrimination, the two kept their relationship hidden, especially from their families. The present-day narrative of the film follows the two as their health declines in old-age and they make the difficult decision to enter an assisted living community.