'A Secret Love' Is A Vital Window Into LGBTQ+ Love & History - Decider

With a run time of only 83 minutes, Netflix’s A Secret Love packs the emotional twists and turns of a film three times that length. The documentary follows two elderly women, Terry and Pat, who kept their lesbian relationship secret for more than seven decades before coming out to their families. It is full of sadness and frustration, but also a whole heap of joy. Not only that, but it serves as a vital window into the importance and most of all the normalcy of queer love.

What helps make A Secret Love so wonderful to watch, of course, is the fact that Pat and Terry are so likable. Their 70+ years together has resulted in a sort of symbiosis that allows them to function as a singular unit with their own unique, often hilarious personalities. They bicker, they laugh, and more than anything else, they care for one another in a way that is so undeniably pure and special that any one of us could only hope to be so lucky one day.

You can’t help but feel for them as they discuss the lengths they often went to in order to keep their relationship secret, but then in the next second, you find yourself giggling with them as they wax nostalgic about staying in hotel rooms together while making the men they were dating sleep elsewhere. In those moments, you can perfectly picture them as the cheeky 20-somethings they were at the time.

History tells us that being openly gay during Pat and Terry’s younger years was not only frowned upon, it was incredibly dangerous, and both women were well aware of that fact, hence their insistence on keeping the relationship secret. And yet, you get the sense from watching them that they refused to let that danger infringe on the happiness they’d found with one another, and instead they found a community of like-minded people who became their second family. Their first family wouldn’t be let into this world for many years to come.

One of the things that’s so heartening about A Secret Love is how timeless Terry and Pat’s love story truly is. While in theory, it’s much safer and easier to come out to family and friends and love who you want to love in 2020, that’s not the experience of all LGBTQ+ people, who relate all too well to the amount of planning, secrecy, and heartache that comes with having to fight just to be who you are. And yet, the documentary gives even those people a glimmer of hope that one day, they too may be able to live openly in the goodness of the love they’ve found regardless of the gender of the person with whom they’ve found it.

The assumption that homosexuality is an invention of modern life has been disproven time and time again — same-sex lovers have been around since ancient Greece, at the very least. Still, it’s not often that we get such an intimate and honest window into the experience of couples who lived through the years in which it was considered a criminal act and punishable by a lengthy jail sentence or even, in some cases, death.

Giving voice to those stories is vitally important, as is the hope that Terry and Pat’s story ultimately gives anyone who finds themselves in a similar position, unable to freely share their lives with the person they love even though it’s not hurting anyone else. Coming out in their eighties can’t have been easy for either of them, especially Terry, who openly admits that she feared she would lose her family over the admission. And yet they believed in one another and their relationship enough that they could no longer keep it secret, and why should they?

If you’ve never watched A Secret Love, watch it. It doesn’t matter what your sexuality or gender is, how old you are, or where you live. Watching Terry and Pat’s love story is to understand the power of love, as well as the right of every single person to experience it.

Jennifer Still is a writer and editor from New York who cares too way much about fictional characters and spends her time writing about them.

Watch A Secret Love on Netflix

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'A Secret Love' Is A Vital Window Into LGBTQ+ Love & History - Decider
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