Celebrity Blogger, Resident

Jessica Valenti, Sunnyside resident and founder of the influential site, Feministing, has an interview with U TV.

I meet Valenti at her pretty brick house in Sunnyside, Queens, a planned community that was built in the 1920s and was once home to the architectural historian Lewis Mumford. On the wall is an Edwardian poster claiming to reveal the inside of a woman's brain: chocolates, love letters, clothes, babies and puppies are rendered next to two dapper-looking men. "I often wonder about that," says Valenti. "Women think about what? Chocolate, babies and... homosexuals?" On the dining-room table is a pile of invitations to the wedding she is planning for October, an event that has garnered a great deal of commentary since she wrote about it in the Guardian last month. She will be wearing an off-white wedding dress, keeping her surname and asking guests to donate money (in lieu of a gift) to a charity fighting for same-sex marriage rights. Her fiancé, Andrew, 25, calls himself a feminist too and is the deputy publisher of a political blog, talkingpointsmemo.com.

"Want to see the dress?" Valenti asks, springing up in the face of superstition. On the back of a cupboard door in the spare bedroom is a beautiful, floor-length, white, appliquéd, organza gown with a dove-grey silk lining. The neckline and the back are cut into a deep V shape. I mutter something about not wearing anything underneath it and she replies: "Luckily the girls are still in pretty good shape." I am slightly flummoxed - was there mention of bridesmaids? Only later does it occur to me that she must have been referring to her breasts.

Valenti grew up in a shop that sold bras and she certainly saw no reason to burn them. That was one of the many small businesses her parents owned. They also sold, in her words, "old lady velour jumpsuits and bedazzled sweatshirts"; they now have a health-food store. She and her younger sister, Vanessa, who also works at Feministing, are part of a large Italian-American family, who all lived on the same block in Long Island City.