lift+love family stories by autumn mcalpin
Since 2021, Lift+Love has featured hundreds stories of Latter-day Saint LGBTQ individuals, their families, and allies - each with their own unique experiences. Each Lift+Love family story is written by Autumn McAlpin, who interviews each individual/family and publishes their story with the express permission of each person identified in the story and/or photos.
CAROL LYNN PEARSON
“Ultimately, they determined the best thing was to end the marriage and choose to part as friends. From that time on, Carol Lynn supported the family through her writing. Four years after the move, Gerald contracted AIDS. Carol Lynn brought him into the family home to care for him until he passed away.
“It never occurred to me that I’d write about it,” she says. “It was such a shameful thing at the time.” But something stirred. She had come to believe, “We have this whole thing wrong. I don’t know why people are gay, but I know they are children of God. We must figure out a better way to treat these people than we’ve done in the past.” As Carol Lynn witnessed families rejecting their gay children and churches offering no refuge, she knew: this story had to be told…
MARGARET STEWARD
Margaret Steward didn’t grow up imagining she’d one day be the wife of a mission president, or the woman quietly fielding whispers after her husband came out as gay…
At first, romance was the furthest thing from Margaret’s mind. She was on a dating break and says she liked hanging out, but not like that. She wasn’t exactly leaning in. But Travis liked being with Margaret and said he could see himself marrying her, though he’d never had a girlfriend before. “I thought he was just a shy and inexperienced guy,” she says. “But being together felt comfortable. He’d always wanted to be married and have a family. And we enjoyed each other…”
AMBERLY BEAN
Every month, Amberly Bean, 30, leads the Lift and Love youth support group on Zoom. She opens each session of new attendees with the same introductory joke, “I identify as lesbian but I’m married to a man but we’re not going to get into that tonight, it’s a long story.” Amberly and her husband Kendall have known each other since childhood. In fact, he was the name she’d throw out every time her middle school friends talked about the boys they liked, feeling he was a “safe crush because nothing would ever happen.” She laughs that, “Even when Kendall would hear that, there were no moves made—which felt really safe for me.”
MONICA, HORACIO, & CAYLIN
Monica Bousfield met her husband Horacio Frey in the fortuitous aisles of Babies R Us, where they both worked in the early 2000s. At first, they were just friends. Then best friends. Then after about a year of hanging out constantly, they surmised they must be dating. A year later, Monica nudged Horacio that it was probably time for them to go ahead and get married. After an eight-month engagement, they did, and while they eventually both left Babies R Us, their commitment to each other later resulted in two babies they would together raise. Through all this, Monica kept her maiden name—primarily because she’d never known of another couple like her and Horacio to last, and she didn’t want to complicate legal paperwork around having to undergo name changes twice. Monica had never heard of a woman marrying a gay man and having it not end in divorce. While she’d known Horacio was gay from their early days of hanging out, there were two other things she knew about Horacio: he was her best friend, and she wanted to marry him. Over two decades later, the couple is still making it work in Westminster, Colorado, where they have two children—Caylin, who is 17 and also identifies as queer, and Dominic—13.
