the family who lived in the closet
by Douglas Messerli
Katherine Leggett (director) Small
Town Secrets / 2005 [9 minutes] [documentary]
This short film reveals a world very
seldom talked-about phenomenon in small town life. Documentary filmmaker
Katherine Leggett interviews her father and shows family pictures of her
parents living in the small Midwestern town of Stoughton, Wisconsin.
Almost from the beginning her father describes loving his young wife: “She
was very magic, Uh, I idolized her, which is probably a very dangerous word.”
Kathrine admits he had a very
conventional view of how it would all unfold: “You go to college, you graduate,
you get married. You have a family and you live happily ever after.”
But almost immediately he also reveals something that no one in his
community might have imagined.
“I was afraid that she had found out about my secret life. And I was
going to be exposed. And then, I, you know, later, I realized that she didn’t
know my secret life, but she had her own secret life. And if I had known about
it, she probably would have lost custody [of their children].”
Her mother, after having fallen in love with her female friend Margot,
began to feel that living with Leggett’s father would be living a lie.
She expresses that she was determined to remain in the closet for the
rest of her life. But when she actually fell in love with another woman, it
felt great, and she wanted everyone to know. Despite her mother’s own dreadful
fears, the two were divorced, Katherine reporting that they moved, soon after,
into duplex, where they both lived, cutting a small door between the two
apartments so they could “pretend” as they moved back and forth between one
another’s spaces at 4:00 a.m.. The very idea of this seems, given what has
happened since, perverse. But you can’t judge a world before your time if you
don’t realize the limitations of their society, and his Leggett’s mother confesses,
the paranoia of the times. In a sense they were freed each by the fact that
they were queer. One can only imagine the horror and heartbreak if only one of
them had been gay,
As
Leggett’s mother explains, they both wanted to remain as a presence in their children’s
lives, but it was very difficult.
The young Kathy wrote a note to her mothers saying that she doesn’t like
Margot anymore, her mother’s lover, and doesn’t feel she can communicate, but asks,
nonetheless, to find a way to talk. It is clearly a family in denial and disarray.
Her father reiterates: “It was scarry
being gay back then, really scarry.”
The
daughter admits that she was confronted
about their possible sexualities only once when they were in a whirlpool. She
simply replied “No,” and dunked her head under the water and stayed there as
long as she possibly could. And her father admits, that because of their
closeted life, she too had been put into the closet.
The mother admits that the truth wants
to identify itself, and eventually will.
The father asks if his daughter still has pain
about it, she admitting it was hard for all of the, for her mother to be with
Margot and for the kids to do what had to do. It was clearly a impossible world
for all of them, despite the parent’s best intentions.
There is clearly nothing more to be
said. These were different times, unfortunately for many, not different enough
from what they are in some small towns today.
Los Angeles, August 2, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(August 2026).
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