Catherine Gigante-Brown

I try. I really do. But whenever I attempt to embrace my husband Peter’s Cuban culture, I always screw up.

"I was afraid this thing was going to do me in. But I took a deep breath and decided very early on that I would face cancer on my own terms."

herbalist. shiatsu practitioner. healer.

I’m boycotting you until you start recognizing breast cancer survivors like me by carrying mastectomy bras.

Makeup and I have always had a love/hate relationship: I love it; it hates me.

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

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.

"Sometimes David wore his hair spiked like a cockscomb. Others, he wore it feathery like a baby chick. He wore his Mohawk to summer camp (exchanging encouraging head chucks with another older camper who sported one, too) and even to Vacation Bible School—no judgment there."

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.

Once upon a time, it was easier to keep track of gender. Today, not so much — the lines are blurred. For many, gender’s not so much about questioning your own identity as it is about questioning the very nature of identity.