Yahoo Lifestyle Miss Spain Comes Out Via Instagram
Former Miss Spain Patricia Yurena Rodriguez has taken to social media to reveal she is a lesbian, a move that makes her the first openly gay national pageant winner.
The pageant queen, who took out the title in her native country in 2008 and 2013, posted a shot of herself staring into the eyes of her girlfriend, DJ Vanessa Cortes, with the caption "Romeo and Juliet".
The post has since garnered over 7,000 likes, with support for the beauty queen flooding in from around the world.
"I do not regret what I did," Rodriguez told a local Spanish newspaper. "I'm thrilled with what is happening to me. Really, I would love to one day live in a society where coming out is no longer necessary because we don’t make assumptions about one another's sexuality and homophobia is laid to rest. For now, that is more of an ideal than it is a reality. But if you want to see that ideal become a reality and you have the courage to change history."
She told the Costa Rican newspaper La Nacion that she and her girlfriend met via mutual friends last year, before the 2013 Miss Universe pageant and began dating several months ago.
Rodriguez won Spain's national beauty pageant for the first time in 2008.
She is not the only beauty queen to out herself - Maria Walsh, the newly crowned Rose of Tralee (a global Irish beauty contest) revealed she was gay in a newspaper interview over the weekend.
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