She was “the world’s first Latina supermodel” — but she was keeping a secret.
In her new memoir “Straight Walk,” Patricia Velasquez recounts her impoverished childhood, her time in the South American beauty-pageant system and admits what she had denied or played coy about in the past: She’s a lesbian.
Discovered as a teen by a local hairdresser, Velasquez was chosen to compete in the 1989 Miss Venezuela pageant — as long as she had her eyes done, her ears pinned back and got breast implants. (She agreed only to the latter). She also starved herself on a strict diet of chicken and tomato juice and was required to find a sponsor.
I was deeply in love with Sandra in a way I’d never experienced before.
- Patricia Velasquez, in 'Straight Walk'
In other words, Velasquez writes, “I would have to start prostituting myself.”
She hooked up with an older man she identifies only as David. In exchange for sex, he got Velasquez an apartment and paid for her cosmetic surgery.
She placed second in the Miss Venezuela pageant, and her modeling career took off. Suddenly Velasquez was in Milan, Madrid, London and Paris, sometimes subsisting on a single candy bar for days, but she loved it. She modeled for Victoria’s Secret, Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue and made it on the big screen in “The Mummy” franchise.
She found another boyfriend, a struggling musician named Ernesto, but writes that her life changed when she met comedienne Sandra Bernhard backstage at a fashion show.
Velasquez says didn’t know who Bernhard was — even though the comic was rumored to be with Madonna back then — but says she felt an instant connection.
Bernhard invited Velasquez to her hotel, and the two hooked up. “I’d never kissed a girl,” Velasquez writes, and she agonized over what this meant.
Soon after meeting and falling for Bernhard, she slept with a male fashion photographer.
“In my head I thought, ‘I just wanted to prove one thing, and I did,’ ” she writes. “There was no middle ground for me — a person was gay or not gay. Being gay was not for me.”
Yet she quickly began dating Bernhard exclusively, without declaring herself gay or bisexual. “I was deeply in love with Sandra,” she writes, “in a way I’d never experienced before.”
Berhnard introduced Velasquez to the downtown New York social scene and a young designer named Isaac, who asked her to walk in his next show.
“I thought to myself, ‘I guess I can do this guy a favor,’ ” she writes. It turned out he was the esteemed designer Isaac Mizrahi.
The model doesn’t get into the details of her relationship with Bernhard — or their clique, which included Madonna, party girl Ingrid Casares and nightclub owner Chris Paciello, who was famously convicted of murder in 2000. Of the relationship’s end, she writes only, “I cried for two years over Sandra.”
Velasquez slowly came out to her family, each member supportive. But she also felt compelled to come out in a book, mainly because there’s so much prejudice that remains in the Latin community.
“I want to at least start a dialogue,” she writes. “The tide is changing.”