Catherine Gigante-Brown

I was 21 –– a Catholic, heterosexual college student, living at home in Brooklyn and still trying to discover who I was. At the crossroads of her life, Lorde knew exactly who she was. She was waging a war against cancer and sharing an old house in Staten Island with her kids and partner. But maybe we weren’t so different after all.

The hell with his elaborate metaphors and rhetorical phrases. Iambic pentameter is cruel and unusual punishment.

A midtown Manhattan studio was recently the site of liberation-both on and offscreen-when Shenshean

BCBs are loud and proud and refuse to go down easy. And quietly. We have things to say. We have things to teach. We still have life to live. And damn it, we are and we will. With one breast. With no breasts. With reconstruction surgery.

That’s the thing about being a breast cancer survivor — it’s always there: it never goes away. The scars, the fear that lurks in the back of your mind like a boogeyman. You’re going along nicely, living your merry life, and you’re fine, until you’re not.

“It’s almost as though this niche was patiently waiting for us to find it.”

Alas, I am the lone female in a house full of men. Only two men, but they take up a lot of space.

Although I tried to convince myself that I wasn't racist, if the truth were told, I didn't like Muslims. Especially after 9/11.

Candida Royalle pretty much invented couples erotica. She made it socially-acceptable. Respectable. The women in her films looked like real women and had real, comfortable female bodies. And her movies actually had stories. Good stories. She hired her friends—adult legends like Annie Sprinkle, Veronicas Hart and Vera, and Gloria Leonard — to create Femme films too.

I fumbled with my lace bra, hoping my silicone form wouldn't fall out from the left cup. I wasn't exactly ready . . . yet I was.