You Can’t Buy Love Like That: Growing Up Gay in the Sixties

I read this book in two days. It’s a poetic, yet straight-forward, memoir of Carol Anderson’s realizations and reconciliations with who she is and how she loves. I got to the end wishing there was more. I would read a sequel!

The writing left me laughing, in tears, and inspired. Our lives are decades apart and I haven’t had her exact experiences, but the story struck a chord. The retelling of the events and feelings surrounding her coming out felt like an invitation to be a better person and always be true to whoever I discover I am. It’s clear Carol Anderson had to be courageous to both live her life and share it with all of us now. But her courage didn’t seem like a far off, unattainable, super woman sort of courage. It felt like something she struggled with and, through trial and error, ultimately chose. I can’t help but be grateful to her for showing us what she had to go through to get to the loving place she ends up.

I feel a renewed sense of life after reading this book — of the ways we can hold opposites at the same time, of the ways beauty can seep into the most painful experiences, and of the ways we can choose courage and love over and over again.

I knew the theory of women’s lib movement and saw a few movies, but it was touching to see this history through the prism of one lived life. Also to understand that women’s lib and gay women’s lib weren’t quite in sync at the time.

I liked the author’s writing, and appreciated the gentleness with which she addressed emotional moments. I could see the psychologist in her but I also got a sense of the young woman she was at the time, a woman who had a very hard time reconciling who she felt herself to be with other forces in her life: her parents, her communities, and her Baptist upbringing.

Thank you for this book.

With the incisive observations of a social scientist, and the wounded, resurrected heart of a healer, Carol Anderson draws the reader into worlds of intimacy. From a fundamentalist Christian family of the 1950s, to young college love of the 1970s, and the fluid definitions of family created by the movements of the 1980s, she tells a story of the triumph of love, true love. Not the trumped-up love of romance novels, the hyper-marketed, hyper-sexed love of reality shows, but the courageous love of living true to oneself. As we read of this love we are reminded of the best of our humanity, the love that draws us together across differences, the love that really only desires a sense of belonging.

This was a very honest account of Carol’s struggles to accept her love for women in spite of her religious upbringing. I appreciated the great writing and storytelling, the well developed characters, her honest portrayal of her parents, but most of all reading this book helped me relive different periods of my own coming out, including the music of Chris Williamson, and parts of early feminism. I read it in one day and loved every minute!

Carol Anderson bravely shares her love and confrontations with those in her world, as well as the always probing questions with which she confronts herself. She is insightful and funny, so the memoir is never mired down with her struggles. One completely poignant aspect of her life is the relationships she builds with the daughters of a partner. At first one of the children tells her decidedly, “You’re not part of our family,” but because of Carol’s constant loving responses to the girls – including the hilarious introduction into family meals of an uppity rabbit puppet named Samantha who outrageously and “shrilly” gives out fines for “talking with your mouth full [and] eating with your fingers” – eventually this same child suggests in 1978, “You’re the best, Carol! Why don’t you and Mom get married?” I couldn’t put the book down. It’s a gem.

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