The
sixth installment of the CBS reality
show Big Brother
premiered last week, and among the 14 contestants living in
a house together vying for a cash prize is Ivette Corredero,
a 25-year-old openly gay Latina teacher-turned waitress with
a live-in girlfriend and a plan to infiltrate the "house
of [heterosexual] hotties."
Big
Brother is a sort-of Real World-meets-Survivor
series that was originally developed in the Netherlands in 1999,
and has since been successfully adapted for prime time TV in
several countries. In the U.S. version, the format
is as follows: a group of people live together in a
house for 12 weeks, and each week vote among two nominees to
evict one of the housemates, with several mini-challenges and
rewards along the way. The last person standing wins a large
amount of money.
A
5' 6" Catholic woman of Dominican and
Cuban descent, Ivette is the first Cuban-American woman and
the first openly lesbian contestant on Big Brother.
In real life, Ivette is open about her sexual orientation, but
in her pre-game interview with former Big Brother
contestant Marcellas Reynolds on the show's official website,
Ivette says her strategy is to lay low in the beginning of the
game--which includes not coming out to the other contestants
right away.
Disclosing
that she's gay might make her more of a threat, she says, and
"guys
will spend their whole time trying to [convert me], or they
might hate me and kick me off. And the girls [may] hate me because
they swear I'm not really a lesbian." To which she adds
with a laugh, "it's been 10 years--it's not a fake thing,
and it's not a phase."
Eight
days into the contest, Ivette has still not yet widely disclosed
her sexual orientation to the other contestants. "I
can be discreet because I'm more lipstick," she explains
to Marcellas. "If I was butch you could tell right off
the bat, right?...Not me, I can play it off a little more."
She
may describe herself as "lipstick," but don't
put the word "lesbian" at the end of that sentence.
"I just say 'I like girls," she tells Marcellas. "I
don't say 'I'm a lesbian.' Such a vulgar word. I'd rather someone
say 'she's gay.'"
Ivette
isn't overly fond of being labeled by her sexuality at all.
"It's
kind of ridiculous of us to think that in a perfect world, we're
not going to be labeled, and we're not going to have to introduce
ourselves like that," she says, "but nobody walks
around saying 'Hi I'm Ivette and I'm straight' so I don't feel
like I should have to say 'Hi, I'm Ivette and I'm a lesbian.'"
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