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A recent graduate of St. Thomas University with a major in communications, Ivette's official bio on CBS.com lists The L Word as one of her favorite shows, Angelina Jolie as one of her favorite actresses, and hip-hop and R&B as her favorite type of music. When asked to describe herself, Ivette tells Marcellus she is loving, friendly, honest and straightforward, but she also admits she is brutally honest, can't deal with hypocrites, and has a catty side. She also has diabetes and OCD ("I don't like people touching my stuff," she says about the latter).

When she's not working, Ivette helps take care of her 10-year-old goddaughter, and she lives with her girlfriend Maggie. "I've got my Maggie back home," she says when asked about her relationship status, adding, "don't even bring it up, I'll start tearing up! I've been a mess."

Although there is a lot of flirting between contestants in what CBS is touting as a "house of hotties," Ivette maintains she won't be hooking up with any of her fellow contestants. For all her strategizing and determination to outlast the other contestants, when asked how far she's willing to go to win, she says, "Not far enough to lose a relationship, that's for sure. You want money, but you have to have respect too--respect for your relationship. It's kind of unrealistic to say, but maybe someday Maggie and I can have that kind of money, and to just throw away our relationship for money is horrible, because what does that say about me?"

"$500,000 is not going to be more to me than Maggie," she says.

Winning the prize money is her primary motivation for being on the show--"this is my get-rich-quick scheme" she laughs--but she also hopes to contribute in her own way to improving lesbian visibility. "[I want to offer] a different perspective of what gay women look like," she says, "although The L Word is doing that already. But everybody's got this stereotype for girls, they don't see that some girls can like girls and still be feminine, and still be chic, and still care about their appearance."

There are twists introduced on each season of Big Brother, and in the sixth go-round, it's that each housemate has a secret pre-existing relationship with one of the other housemates. If the winning contestant reaches the end with their partner, and have kept their relationship a secret, they win a million dollars; if the winner's secret partner has been voted off, and/or their relationship has been revealed, they win only half the million dollars. The other twist is that each set of secret partners have been told they are the only secret partners in the house.

The pre-existing relationships between secret partners can include everything from brothers and sisters, to friends, to significant others, ex-significant others, and even spouses.

This Thursday, host Julie Chen will reveal these pre-existing relationships to the audience. But through live feeds from four cameras placed by CBS around the house, which let viewers watch the action unfold in-between episodes for a small monthly fee, a few secret relationships have already been discovered by viewers. This has led to a consensusamong avid Big Brother watchers that Ivette's secret pre-existing relationship is with Beau, a black man who is also from Miami, and is the other openly gay contestant on the show. A less popular theory is that her secret partner is blond waitress Janelle (an ex-girlfriend perhaps?).

Will Ivette remain closeted? Will she win? Tune in to CBS three times a week starting this Tuesday to find out.