Catherine Gigante-Brown

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 realized my father was from a generation that never said those three little words. He was saying he loved me without them. But I didn't realize it then.

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

Instead of categorizing people as different colors, I proposed we might begin to think of each other as Earthtones—because our skin colors are based on hues from the earth. Just as the planet is made up of a myriad of shades, it’s still one cohesive entity. We can be thought of as one entity also.

Being a little bit chubby is better than being a lot dead.

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.

Mindel and Maria were young teenagers when the horrors occurred—but they remembered the tiniest details with crystal-clear intensity.

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.

I’m a firm believer that Tiny Kindnesses can change the world, one sweet, loving gesture at a time.

"Bring over a meal—and leave. Breakfast, lunch or dinner, from soup to nuts. And coffee. Plenty of coffee."