Catherine Gigante-Brown

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

erotic. intimate. unapologetic.

The santero sent us off with a shopping list of ite

We’ve pieced ourselves back together in a patchwork quilt of ragged emotions. The aftermath of 9/11 wasn’t easy for us, yet it was much easier than for some. People standing 50 feet away from Peter didn’t come home that night; he did.

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

As a breast cancer survivor, the worst day of the year is when I go for my mammogram. True, nobody actually likes mammos, but I’ve been bitten by one. On the way to my annual squishing, I realized that I have a bunch of coping strategies.

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.

My husband and I agreed: raising a child with an independent spirit who made decisions for himself was a good thing.

The office cubicle is indeed a strange bird. Here's how to survive life in a box without driving you—or your office mates—crazy.

Upset you lost your keys? Try losing your breast. Pissed off about missing that train? Try missing your son’s 8th grade graduation because of a horrific infection from fluid buildup in the previously-mentioned missing breast. See what I mean? It kind of puts life into perspective.