[Plugin: The Event Calendar 3.8] Include Events in Loop

Hello…brand new WordPress user here, so apologies if my terminology isn’t quite right.

I’ve set up my homepage as a static page that pulls posts from a certain category. I used this code:
<?php query_posts($query_string . '&cat=17'); ?>
in front of the Loop, and it works great.

However, I’m getting stuck with the Events Calendar plugin. Because they use a custom post type and you can’t assign normal WordPress categories to the post, I can’t include events on my homepage.

I think this could be solved by adding something to the Loop code that would pull posts with the Event custom post type and certain category (I don’t want my homepage to have ALL events listed, just ones with a certain category). But I have no idea how I would write that.

Can anyone help, or point me to something that might do what I’m hoping to accomplish?

http://www.elissashortridge.com/eaa377