Get the tissues ready, because new Netflix documentary A Secret Love is bringing us a heartwarming love story of a lesbian couple that will bring tears to your eyes.
Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel first met as young women in 1947, when Donahue was 22 and Henschel was 18.
Donahue played catcher in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the women’s team featured in the hit 1992 film A League of Their Own.
While the pair kept up appearances for their conservative families, Donahue and Henschel were inseparable and very much in love.
The documentary’s trailer shows how the women met, fell in love and hid their relationship for decades.
“We always wore dresses, makeup. The whole thing. Anybody who was not gay, they simply didn’t know,” Donahue explains in the trailer.
“I felt like I was sort of living a lie. I loved my mother but she would’ve disowned me,” Henschel explains.
The trailer for A Secret Love follows the couple as they come out to their family and prepare to enter aged care.
Henschel says of her partner, “What she means to me? She means everything to me.”
Bolan tells Donahue she has “kind of broke the rules your whole life.”
Donahue responds, “Yes, I have, that’s why I’m happy. No regrets – I’d do it all over again.”
Lesbian love story in ‘A Secret Love’ is ‘beautiful, complicated, and truly inspiring’
Director Chris Bolan said the two women’s story was “beautiful, complicated, and truly inspiring.”
“I had never heard of a love story between two women like this before,” he told SXSW earlier this year.
“Having the opportunity to spend the past seven years with these two amazing women in the twilight of their lives and learn about a life they kept secret for seven decades has been a gift.
“I strongly feel that stories of women are simply not told enough, and stories of lesbian women from this generation even less so.”
Terry and Pat are Bolan’s great aunts. He said he knew he had to share their story after meeting them and hearing their story for the first time.
“After a couple of rum and cokes – their drink of choice – they sat us down and told us they were gay,” Bolan recalled.
“They began blurting out the story of their life together. I knew at that moment I needed to tell this story.
“I can still see them dancing together in their living room after they told us. What an amazing story.”
A Secret Love, produced by Ryan Murphy, starts streaming on Netflix on April 29.
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