This evening we watched A Secret Love on Netflix. It was a bit of a random pick—a movie we had never heard of, and we accidentally hit the play button while reading the description. Might as well go with it, etc.

How are you going to think of gay people as terrible deviants when you listen to two grannies talk about 70 years together—nearly all of those years unknown explicitly to family back in Canada, although surely known in whatever community they found in Chicago. Seeing the 1940s and 1950s pictures of them together was almost like a strange alternative history—all of the props and poses and styles and cars and so on that I've seen before in vintage mid-century photos, but with two women occupying the focus of the shot. Effortless subversion of an archetype, but also a half-sad look at what could have been for so many other people.

“I used to see little kids struggling with their identity at school, and not all kids are lucky enough to have a family that says, ‘That’s OK, that doesn’t matter,’” she said. “So maybe this will help those people understand it a little bit more. I really hope this documentary shows that love is love. I can hear Auntie Terry in heaven chuckling, just being so happy that she’s helping people.”

—Amy Kaufman. "Love is love: How do you go on without your ‘little darling’?" The Los Angeles Times (2020-05-08).