Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and you're listening to The Takeaway. Today we have the next piece of our series Aging While Queer which chronicles the experience of aging as an LGBTQ+ elder. Throughout the series we've looked at what it's like aging with HIV, finding affirming housing as an LGBTQ+ elder, and today we're looking at what it's like coming out at an older age. Pat Henschel and Terry Donahue met on an ice rink in Saskatchewan Canada in the late 1940s and fell in love but spent decades hiding their relationship from the world. Their love story which also became the two women's coming out story was made into a 2020 Netflix documentary called A Secret Love.
Speaker 2: Pat and Terry with the exchange of your vows and your rings, you have begun in law that which has existed in faith and in love for very nearly 70 years.
Melissa: With us now is the director of that documentary. Chris Bolan. Welcome, Chris.
Chris: Thanks Melissa for having me.
Melissa: Let's begin with this secret love story. Tell us about Pat and Terry.
Chris: Pat and Terry are two extraordinary women. They are also my relatives, my great aunts. Terry was my biological aunt. She's the baseball player and Pat is her partner. They've been in my family for obviously over 50 years. Both Canadian grew up in the prairies on farms in Saskatchewan. Terry came down to play professional baseball in the 1940s and during her winter break met Pat playing hockey up in the town of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
Melissa: The unmarried auntie as part of family dynamic is very much a part of my multi-generational experience. There is typically in my household a presumption that unmarried auntie is also queer auntie. Even when that hasn't always been true but certainly if unmarried auntie was also an athlete, then that would be the presumption.
Chris: The question came up over and over and over, over the decades were they partners? They said no multiple times. We have to remember that obviously they're born in the 1920s and grew up in the 1940s. It was very very taboo. We are in a different place now obviously, we still have a ways to go but it was dangerous back then. The family did have questions about their relationship but when they said that they were just friends and that they were living together in Chicago because the rent was expensive, the family just believed them.
Melissa: Let's talk about that a bit and what it means to be queer auntie in a loving long-term relationship but when asked point-blank by your family who you also love, whether or not this is your life partner you have to say no.
Chris: I can imagine what that must have been like for them. Over and over and over saying no and what that must have felt like to Pat, Terry telling her family no that she's just a friend and what that must have felt like for Terry, for Pat telling her brother out who was extremely homophobic. No, Terry's just a good friend of mine. They hid it so well in fact that Pat's brother Earl, who as I mentioned is very homophobic loved Terry and I think probably would've wanted to marry Terry because he just thought that Terry was Pat's good friend. This hiding in this double life was so hard for them especially for Terry which is why near the end of her life, she made a comment in the film and this was true, obviously.
That she just couldn't go to her grave feeling like she was living a lie. Finally, after seven decades of hiding to their biological family, Terry just said she needed to tell the truth. It was amazing, Melissa to see the transformation that came over both of them once that burden had been lifted.
Melissa: You made that important distinction about biological family because they had family, they had community-found family who were aware of who they were and what they meant to each other. Talk about that a bit.
Chris: They had these two lives. They had their found family of friends that were in Chicago and they had their biological family which obviously were their blood family up in Canada. They kept those two worlds completely separate. To their found family they were the loving lesbian couple, open and free and to their found family they would have to hide that part of themselves every time they'd come up to trips to Canada. They would sleep in different bedrooms. They wouldn't share a bed obviously so they navigated those two identities for decades.
Melissa: Say more about and I think you've hinted at this about there were obviously these cost of keeping it hidden but this is our Aging While Queer series. Say a bit about why it mattered even after decades and after decades of having found family and community. Why did it matter to tell the biological family and maybe most critically to marry?
Chris: Our aging LGBTQ elders it's funny. We're losing all of them, people of that generation, and their stories are disappearing with them. It's interesting because that generation in particular as I was filming, as we were making the movie, watching them navigate coming out was fascinating and just so moving. Oftentimes, Melissa, I think that a lot of people of that generation don't come out. They have a number of friends who have gone to their grave that have never come out to their family just because of the time that they grew up in, the '40s was dangerous, you were arrested. You were lobotomized, it was treated as a disease that you could be cured.
In Chicago, they were telling me stories of principles and teachers' lives being ruined. People committing suicide being outed in the newspaper. That sticks with you. It took a tremendous amount of courage for Terry and Pat to come out. Pat wouldn't have come out had Terry not pushed her. Pat I think would've been fine hiding but Terry just as I said couldn't keep that secret anymore. Then it was interesting, Melissa noticing this twice closeted effect that happened once they had moved out of their house into the assisted living facility. They had taken this courageous step to come out to their biological family.
Then they move into an assisted living facility with that generation of people and they ended up going back into the closet.
Melissa: I so appreciate you bringing up that aspect. In our Aging While Queer series that was one of the first conversations we had. It was and continues to be I think this like knife twist for me this idea of what it takes particularly for our elders of that generation. Of this moment when so much of society was opening but not around that identity. To find that in one's elder years we already have such limited options for healthy and fulfilling spaces for our elders to live out these fabulous final years but to have to do so again with that protective cover that forces you to pretend you're someone other than who you are.
Chris: We could have made a whole film, Melissa just off of that because it was something that revealed itself as they were transitioning from their home into the assisted living facility. It was interesting that for those of your audience who have seen a secret love, that wedding scene took place in the assisted living facility but they told everybody who lived there that it was Terry's birthday party. They didn't feel comfortable with everybody knowing.
Now they did have certain members, the staff were very supportive, who they were open to but from the actual residents, they really kept that hidden. I asked them point-blank. I said, "How does that make you feel and why do you feel the need not to be truthful?" They said it's none of their business and they just wouldn't understand.
Melissa: Chris Bolan, thank you so much for this thoughtful conversation for this documentary and for joining The Takeaway.
Chris: Thank you, Melissa. Thanks for your great questions.
[00:09:33] [END OF AUDIO]
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