Actress-supermodel Patricia Velasquez
comes out gay in an upcoming memoir.
The 44-year-old Velasquez is best known
for her appearances in the films The
Mummy and The Mummy
Returns and a guest role in the fifth season of Showtime's
groundbreaking lesbian drama The L Word.
In Straight
Walk: A Supermodel's Journey to Finding Her Truth,
Velasquez discusses falling in love with openly bisexual comedian
Sandra Bernhard.
“I was deeply in love with Sandra,”
Velasquez wrote. “In a way I'd never experienced before.”
Lesbian blog Autostraddle.com
pointed us to a 2001 interview with Cinema.com in which Velasquez
denied having an affair with Bernhard.
“Everyone talks about Sandra,” she
answered a reporter's question about the rumored affair. “Look,
she was a very, very important person in my life – and she still
is. She was a friend, she was like a mother to me, and also like my
daughter sometimes. I had no idea who she was when we first met in
France. She came to do a show and we became really good friends.
People say many things, but at the end of the day people can say what
they want. Sandra is somebody that I have in my heart forever,
because I didn't even speak English when I met her, and she taught me
so much. I didn't even know what a credit card was, or frequent
flier cards or any of that stuff. She really, really helped me.”
In Straight Walk, available
for pre-order at Amazon.com, Velasquez also talks about coming
out to her Venezuelan family and the difficult challenges she
overcame to become “the world's first Latina supermodel.”