“This is America, where a makeshift memorial pops up yet again to mark the violence that stalks us all.” A botanic meditation on America’s troubling love affair with guns…

I didn’t want to be gay. Entering adolescence in the late 1950s, it was not a popular thing. Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household made it even less so.

In her new memoir, You Can't Buy Love, Carol Anderson writes of growing up gay -- and fundamentalist -- in the 1960s and trying to establish a queer family a decade later. Read an exclusive excerpt below.

For much of her life, Carol E. Anderson struggled not to be herself. She struggled against her attraction to women, where she found her deepest emotional connections, and celebrated with relief every time she fell for a man, one of whom she nearly married.

I take the flowers and arrange them one by one in the blue crystal vase that my mother loves; today is her day. I have plotted and planned for months and enlisted five of my closest friends to create a surprise birthday party in honor of her 80th year.

An older lesbian reflects on same-sex marriage in Michigan, and rushing to the county clerk’s office to get married before the attorney general appealed the case.

From the time I was a teenager and all through my college years, my father wrote me letters. In them, he’d express his deep and abiding love, and always reinforce my goodness, my character, and the gifts he saw in me. His letters were heartwarming in their simplicity, and they inspired me to strive toward his vision of the adult he dreamed I would become. I kept them all. In response, I sometimes wrote and sometimes called, but never did I write the one letter I wish I had. I just didn’t know how. Wherever he is, I trust he can still hear me.