Jamie Lynn Cruz believes there are lots of misconceptions about the modern pageant industry—the level of diversity, how contestants treat each other and more.
Cruz wants to change that. Representing the South Side of Chicago in the 2025 Miss Illinois pageant, Cruz is using her experiences as an LGBTQ+ person struggling with mental health to create her pageant platform.
Cruz started pageantry later in life, participating in her first competition at the 2023 Miss Asian Chicago pageant. She was at a new period in her life, having recently dropped out of college and moved to Chicago.
“My goals were different back then,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to win. I was just trying to make friends, because it was like my second or third year living in the city. I wanted to try something new.”
Cruz had always wanted to be part of a sorority but never joined one in college. She found that type of sisterhood through her first pageant. She initially didn’t even know if pageants were something she wanted to continue doing, but after such a positive first experience with girls she’s still friends with today, she kept with it.
One part of her current platform is highlighting the women she’s met through the competitions, whom she describes as “amazing, inspiring women who are at the top of their fields and just doing amazing things in their community.”
Being part of the LGBTQ+ community herself, Cruz’s first platform for Miss Asian Chicago focused on creating workshops geared towards Asian parents to educate them about them community. The importance of family was heavily emphasized when she was growing up, so Cruz wanted to create a space could learn more about their family members’ identities.
“My mom wasn’t against me being gay,” Cruz said. “She just didn’t know anything about it, because that stuff just didn’t exist in her world. My dad too—that stuff just doesn’t [exist]. That’s not something that they ever thought they would need to know about.”
Cruz, who’s Filipino, said being gay is generally accepted in her community—LGBTQ+ people are often shown in the media with a positive light. People are okay with it, but no one wants to talk about it.
For the state level competition, Cruz’s platform centers more around mental health in the LGBTQ+ community—something inspired by the current Miss Universe’s platform as well as Cruz’s own experience with mental health issues. After leaving college and trying out a few different career paths, she fell into a difficult time and began having suicidal thoughts and behavior. She then went on to spend six months in partial hospitalization and eventually an intensive outpatient program.
For her, the program was “life changing.” She had been hospitalized before as a teenager, and neither initial hospitalization was ideal, but the support and community she felt in her most recent program was nothing like she had ever experienced before.
“It’s different in that a lot of other group therapies will discourage participants from speaking with each other outside of group,” Cruz said. “But in this group, it’s heavily encouraged because that’s how we look at relationship dynamics—everything that goes on outside of group, and we bring it back to the room.”
As far as how her upcoming platform will work, she’s researching mental health organizations in Chicago with youth as their target demographic. Cruz will have help making her platform possible too—she’ll have a team of coaches at the state level and some funding. As a Miss USA titleholder, she would be doing a slew of tours as well, and is expected to also receive support from the national level.
Beyond the competition staff, she’ll also have the support of her pageant sisters.
“Regardless of your being a titleholder or not, you’re part of a sisterhood now,” she said. “It’s basically like being in a sorority, you have a whole network … pageant sisters, past and present, all the way from as far back as you can go.”
Looking towards the June 2025 state competition, Cruz said participating at this level has proven to her what someone who’s been through all these difficulties can achieve. She hopes people who are currently going through similar hardships can see her and feel inspired by her journey.
“Someone who looks like me, who has been through the things that I have been through with being depressed, being suicidal, and being anxious and not having the most conventionally thin or pretty body and is Asian, can do these hard things, can set their mind to something and do it,” she said. “I just want to have that be my platform … [that] someone like me can do this.”