30-year-old Francisco José Alvarado is a family doctor at Lavapiés Health Center in Madrid. While working tirelessly to help COVID-19 patients back in March, he contracted the virus. After making a full recovery, he returned to work. Now, he’s just been named Mr. Gay World Pride.

Alvarado says he first developed symptoms of COVID-19 around March 10.

“I began to notice them while on duty at the hospital,” he tells a local Spanish media outlet. “It started with a dry cough, but we were in a moment of collective chaos, so I didn’t pay much attention to it.”

The next day, Alvarado says he started feeling achy and fatigued. Having just finished a 24-hour shift, however, he assumed he was tired from work.

“Coming out of a 24-hour shift, it is normal that you have the feeling that you have been beaten. It was hard to tell if that usual tiredness was from work or the symptoms.”

 

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A post shared by 👨🏽‍⚕️Fran Alvarado 🤸🏽‍♂️🌈 (@fj_alv) on

But the next day, his symptoms worsened. He decided to get tested for coronavirus. When the test came back positive, he immediately went into self-quarantine.

“When I told my grandmother, she started crying. Little was known about the disease at the time and there was fear of uncertainty,” he says.

After nearly 20 days in quarantine, Alvarado no longer had any symptoms and eventually tested negative for the virus. A week later, he returned to work.

That was in early April. Then last week, he was busy tending to patients when he got a call. It was Mr. Gay World Pride calling to inform him he was being granted the title.

Alvarado had placed second in the competition the previous year. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Gay World Pride announced it was postponing its 2020 competition. In the meantime, they needed someone to fill in, since 2019’s winner Janjep Carlos’s reign had officially concluded. As the first runner up, Alvarado got the title.

“I was at the health center when they told me,” Alvarado recalls, saying the unexpected news was a welcomed surprise during a stressful time.

He now says he hopes to use his platform to fight against homophobia.

“We must continue fighting against it,” he says. “It was 30 years ago yesterday that the World Health Organization stopped calling homosexuality a mental illness. Today, in 2020, it continues talking about conversational therapies to cure homosexuality.”

Mr. Gay World Pride says it plans to hold its official 2020 and 2021 competitions simultaneously sometime next year.

Scroll down for more pics from Alvarado’s Instagram page…

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https://www.instagram.com/p/Boj1ekPnsmn/

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5n1IDdouVK/

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