It turned out he was the esteemed designer Isaac Mizrahi. “I thought to myself, ‘I guess I can do this guy a favor,’ ” she writes. “I was deeply in love with Sandra,” she writes, “in a way I’d never experienced before.”īerhnard introduced Velasquez to the downtown New York social scene and a young designer named Isaac, who asked her to walk in his next show. Yet she quickly began dating Bernhard exclusively, without declaring herself gay or bisexual. “There was no middle ground for me - a person was gay or not gay. “In my head I thought, ‘I just wanted to prove one thing, and I did,’ ” she writes. Soon after meeting and falling for Bernhard, she slept with a male fashion photographer. “I’d never kissed a girl,” Velasquez writes, and she agonized over what this meant. 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.īernhard invited Velasquez to her hotel, and the two hooked up. 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. She modeled for Victoria’s Secret, Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue and made it on the big screen in “The Mummy” franchise. Suddenly Velasquez was in Milan, Madrid, London and Paris, sometimes subsisting on a single candy bar for days, but she loved it. She placed second in the Miss Venezuela pageant, and her modeling career took off. In exchange for sex, he got Velasquez an apartment and paid for her cosmetic surgery. She hooked up with an older man she identifies only as David. In other words, Velasquez writes, “I would have to start prostituting myself.” I was deeply in love with Sandra in a way I’d never experienced before. She also starved herself on a strict diet of chicken and tomato juice and was required to find a sponsor. 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.ĭiscovered 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 was “the world’s first Latina supermodel” - but she was keeping a secret. New Year's Eve is not Sandra Bernhard's favorite holiday Sandra Bernhard: 'Pose' recalls horror of early days of AIDS Sandra Bernhard dishes on snark, 'Pose' and eavesdropping for material Groundbreaking 'Pose' stars 'will be wielding that power' as show ends