Becoming Undocumented: Getting My Status and Identity Back After DOMA’s Demise
Introduction:
My name is Gabriella Bregman, I am a writer-filmmaker from the Netherlands, I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 25 years and am currently producing a feature documentary about LGBTQ-immigration exclusion-policy discrimination.
I am one of approximately 267.000 LGBTQ-undocumented immigrants, amongst a total 11 million undocumented immigrants. I am also a Legal Entry. 40% of the 11 million entered the US legally.
Because I was 19 when I entered the US legally on a 5-year student visa to study film in LA instead of 16 or younger I do not qualify for the 2012 DREAMAct nor for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) under President Obama’s 2014 Executive Action.
‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented’ is an expose of the US’s “broken” immigration system, its’ unconstitutional exclusion-policies and specific targeting of LGBTQ communities, (in a long history of policymaking designed to exploit the most vulnerable of minority groups, specifically women and of color, starting with the Page Act of 1875,) and my own situation as “queer and undocumented,” former film student within that.
(The documentary manuscript ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights,’ on which this essay is based, was inspired by my love for Zoe.)
( I dedicate this to my father Bram Bregman, 1934–2015, and my mother Truus Bregman.)
My Case:
25 Years ago, in 1992, at age 19, I moved to the US legally from the Netherlands on a 5-year Student Visa to study film in Los Angeles through enrollment in the Film Program at Los Angeles City College.
Through my non-immigrant Student Visa I received a California ID and a real Social Security number, but with a stamp stating validity for work with INS authorization only.
I intended to transfer to a 4-year university, hoping to get into UCLA on a student visa extension, but just 2 months into my first semester at LACC I was pressured into marriage by an older film student.
Without my parents’ knowledge nor an immigration lawyer’s advise my husband sponsored me for a permit to work and live in the US, by adjusting my status from non-immigrant student to wife of a US citizen, necessarily under a 2-year Conditional Status required by the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendment Act of 1986, and to be removed after an immigration interview validates the marriage as “bona fide,” and not for sole purposes of immigration.
I received a temporary 1-year work permit within 10 days of our marriage. He hadn’t wasted any time, and pushed the whole process on his own, I never even got a copy of the paperwork. All he had done on the few occasions we had talked in film class was pressure me into dating him, and make me doubt my ability to stay in the country.
On a trip that was supposed to happen to shoot footage for our school projects he ended up driving us to Palm Springs, checked us into a motel room with a jacuzzi and sexually assaulted me. (Not that it had actually happened on campus, as LACC didn’t offer any, but I didn’t hear of on-campus sexual assault as a real thing until the 2015 documentary ‘The Hunting Ground.’)
He moved us into an apartment, me from a Venice hostel and him out of his parents’ Palos Verdes residence, and consolidated our finances, including a lot of my full-time out-of-state tuition I worked 3 years in the Netherlands for.
I absolutely did not want to be married to him, and at all at 19, and immediately tried to get away, and after a lot of fighting within the 2 months we lived together took a plane back home for Christmas, only to be followed by him to the Netherlands, and after which I moved back to Los Angeles, and back into the Venice hostel, to start my Spring semester in 1993.
Due to his continuous stalking at the hostel, at school, and later at my work, I started dropping classes in 1993, eventually dropping out of school altogether in 1994, thereby violating the terms of my Student Visa.
(Despite still being married while officially dropping out of school in 1994, although already living separately and having started the filing for a divorce in 1993, this dropping out and thereby violating my Student Visa status may have been the official start of me becoming Out-Of-Status.
However, my husband had already started my Adjustment-Of-Status from non-immigrant student to immigrant spouse of a US citizen in late 1992. And because I originally entered the US legally on an F-1 Student Visa in the Summer of ’92, and have not been deemed unlawfully present, I never accrued Unlawful Presence. So I am technically only Out-Of-Status.)
Our divorce got finalized in August of 1994, within 2 years, during which we only lived together for the first 2 months, and just months short of the 2-year “Conditional Status” is supposed to get removed by immigration through an interview to establish the marriage is “bona fide,” real, and not solely for immigration purposes.
The U- Visa and VAWA did not yet exist at the time of our ’94 divorce, (the Violence Against Women Act got enacted sometime in 1994 but stalking wasn’t part of yet. I also never reported anything, and our marriage would have been hard to prove to be real towards immigration, when married so soon after arrival and only briefly.)
In February of 1993 I had gotten hired legally on my temporary 1-year work permit at a well-known art house movie theater chain in Los Angeles, The Laemmle Theatres, (who founded Universal Studios in 1912,) but stayed on for 9 years, paying income taxes all along by checking the US citizen box on my IRS forms instead of Legal Resident. I ended up working there full-time, selling tickets to a booming movie theater crowd of the 90s, at the height of the independent filmmaking movement in the US exactly. Due to not having a noticeable foreign accent, (having grown up on American movies in English with Dutch subtitles instead of dubbed,) I was never found out. I actually owe my job to them being short staffed for the overwhelming succes of a film that had just opened there, ‘Glengarry Glenn Ross.’
My ex-husband (E.B. from Palos Verdes) went on to co-write the first film of what turned out to become one of the biggest film franchises ever, ‘The Fast and Furious,’ has since long remarried, and has 3 children, which was what he seemed to want with me.
But the real reason I divorced him within those 2 years so crucial to the immigration process to US citizenship, and also didn’t remarry while still having legal status, was that I was gay, or lesbian rather, (and also identify as gender nonconforming, or trans-masculine, and do not personally feel any need to legally or medically transition, as this is a very personal and different experience for all gender atypical people, and not that I can legally do anything anyway.)
Immediate after our divorce in late 1994 I also officially “came out” as lesbian, having fallen hard for a female coworker and roommate by then. I had moved in with her and her two gay, male roommates the very day after the Northridge earthquake of 1994 rendered the hostel unlivable, and during the year I lived with them in their West Los Angeles house came out of the closet due to being in a gay friendly environment for the first time in my life, even though she turned out to not be a lesbian herself and with that broke my heart.
By 1995 I moved into an apartment with a 9 year older fellow artist and male coworker, who knew of both my legal status and my sexual orientation, since I had been openly gay at work but the divorce had played out fairly openly as well, with my ex-husband visiting me at the movie theater as well. And we had both liked the same female coworker and he had secretly been bothered by me living with her in ’94.
Before I signed the apartment lease with him in West LA he had already made sexual advances at me at work and after hours, since as an assistant manager he was in a superior position to me and threatened to get me fired.
In 1996, upon a visit to an immigration service in West LA, in anticipation of taking a final trip back to the Netherlands, and telling them I wanted to reenter college on a student visa from within the US, I was told that my only option to stay in the US legally was to marry a US citizen, (of the opposite sex that is obviously,) and “to not come back to them until I was serious about becoming an American citizen,” after I revealed to them I was gay when explaining my whole situation to them during an initial consultation.
1996 was also the year that DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) went into effect, along with IIRIRA (Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act) and DADT (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.)
After my last trip back on my student visa in 1996, intended to renew my Dutch passport and apply for a new student visa, as my parents also urged me to do. They had also really wanted to see me, and so I went and with my original student visa re-entered the US for a last time in August of ’96, went back to work and to my by then “boyfriend,” who had also transferred to a different unit in the same building, effectively taking me off of my apartment lease, and in May of 1997, just months after he withdrew his marriage proposal from me, my 5-year Student Visa finally officially expired, and my Dutch passport just a few months after that.
He hadn’t wanted to get married to me, nor even have a relationship but had wanted sexual involvement and I definitely didn’t even want that but had no choice but to give in. He had only used the marriage option, mostly over the phone long distance to pressure me to come back, just because he didn’t want me to leave him. He got both into drugs and religion practically simultaneously, and became physically violent with me. He threatened detention and deportation the more he realized I had no legal recourse.
My roommate had also become a new born Christian around late 1996, for several years heavily influenced by a controversial cult-like rightwing radio personality who preached his own brand of religion, (Roy Masters and his “Foundation of Human Understanding,” a mega-church in Oregon, and who’s broadcast network also produced the Mike Savage Show,) and aggressively promoted racism and gender discrimination, and even exorcisms as a “cure” for homosexuality. He had grown up religiously while I had been atheist as along.
He became increasingly aggressive, misogynist and homophobic as a result and started using threats, sexual aggression and physical force against me, taking full advantage of his social and legal status, his physical strength and his heterosexual privilege to keep me under his control.
He let go of most of his extreme beliefs later on but his misogyny remained, as it was rooted in deeper personal issues he had with women and had only used religion to justify his misogyny.
But since my work permit had expired after only 1 year, and I had also become Out-Of-Status in 1994 and with my Student Visa expiring in 1997, after 5 years in the US, I had become very dependent on my job as the only source of income, and so had also become gradually more “closeted” about my sexuality at work, to make sure I wouldn’t raise any suspicion, but also because I was getting genuinely confused as to how to reconcile all these identities and statuses by then, being at once lesbian, gender nonconforming and undocumented. (At subsequent jobs however I pretended fully to be American and just wasn’t able to keep going on like that, personally that is only, since nobody suspected anything, and I oftentimes ending up self-sabotaging my professional opportunities before anyone was ever suspicious.)
However, it was the combination of anti-gay immigration legislation, (DOMA in 1996 specifically,) and spousal abuse, (and the former making way for the latter, through the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendment Act of 1986,) that got me in the real deadlock, legally.
After I found out in late ’98 he was seeing someone else, besides taking advantage of me, I moved in with a girl I met at work a year earlier and whom I had fallen in love with. She identified as bi-sexual, had flirted with me plenty and with the idea of same sex relationships. But whether or not she had any real interest in me I felt that I couldn’t really invest in a relationship, even though this is exactly what I wanted with her, and I hinted at the complications of my undocumented status instead and lost her interest in me eventually, romantically or friendship wise.
My influences had always come from film, literature and philosophy, and mainly fed my lifelong fascination with gender, even if not fully understanding it, (and more direct information, on both the transgender experience and immigration issues stemming from that specifically, I couldn’t obtain just yet in 1998.)
I ultimately became aware of transgender people, and trans-men in particular, in 1999, through Kimberly Peirce’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry,’ but became somehow aware of it on a more subconscious level in 1998 through this new coworker I’d fallen for and moved in with.
And while my crush had quit her theater job in the meantime, me and my “ex boyfriend” still had to face each other there every day. I wasn’t going to quit because I had no valid work papers anymore and he wasn’t going to quit out of his own free will because the job was just that easy, minimum wage but appealing on most other levels, especially for young people trying to break into the film industry.
In 2001, after 9 years of working a minimum wage job and legally not being able to finish my long anticipated film education, and out of pure frustration over that, I produced a film retrospective at The Laemmle Theatres around the late, independent film director, John Cassavetes, which was very successful and enabled me to get several internships at film organization and production companies without the usually required school credit.
The film retrospective brought out some frustration in other employees however and I got fired as a result, just 3 weeks after 9/11, of course never receiving any unemployment benefits despite paying taxes.
From 2000 through 2004, besides maintaining my attempts at going the DIY route with my own digital film project as well as network in Los Angeles’ independent film industry, I held unpaid internships at film production companies IFC/Next Wave Films, Samuel Goldwyn Films and Miramax Films and at the non-profit film organization Film Independent, including their Independent Spirit Awards and Los Angeles Film Festival, after they were one of the original sponsors of my John Cassavetes retrospective.
Everything obviously changed post-9/11, with the INS or Immigration Naturalization Service becoming the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, and ICE, Immigrations Customs Enforcement, combined, under the biggest and most unconstitutional law probably ever written into US history with the Patriot Act, which also started using an Exit-Visa system, (besides SEVIS for the educational system and E-Verify for employment,) effectively not only not allowing a person to stay after they’re undocumented but also not allowing them to leave the country on their own anymore neither, hoping to so enforce “voluntary deportation” by basically trying to annihilate them.
Under an immigration system that never operated fairly most people are in fact punished retroactively after laws change, and which are in reality only ever tightening security measures, and enacted without regard to any constitutional rights, (such as due process, which taken away from detainees amounts to one of the worst immigrant violations.)
And 9/11 obviously overshadowed any international LGBTQ specific news like same-sex marriage becoming legalized in the first country in the world to do so, the Netherlands, ironically enough for me, and also thereafter became the temporary safe haven for bi-national American and Dutch LGBTQ couples who had to move there to wait out the whole cancellation of DOMA, thereby legalizing same-sex marriage marriage federally in all 50 states, and so also thereby extending to spousal sponsorship immigration law, but that would take another 14 years to happen in the US.
But almost immediately post 9/11, (after my “ex-boyfriend” was back in my life by jumping on the bandwagon during my John Cassavetes film retrospective,) and after I lost the stability of a steady income because of all of that, this “again boyfriend” took matters entirely in his own hands by having his religious and homophobic mother and two brothers move in with us, while also getting convinced by his brothers to join their rock band, starting a 15 year violent relationship and alcohol habit between them. His two brothers used us, and me specifically, in a very conscious move, and at all costs really, to establish themselves as musicians in Los Angeles, long after their oldest brother, my boyfriend, had moved here on his own initially in the early 90s himself to be an artist.
(He’d gotten fired before from the same movie theater where I had worked in 1999, and has been living of off me financially basically ever since, occasionally holding jobs himself but mainly living off of my family’s money, my parents stepping up financially after realizing my troubles, and realizing them late since I didn’t come out as gay to them until 2008, after Gus Van Sant’s “Milk” was released and starring one of my father’s favorite actors Sean Penn as Harvey Milk. My parents still didn’t get, or approved of, the transgender aspect of me at that time but have gradually come around since.)
Throughout 2002 his brothers had subjected me to involuntary servitude by hiring me at the music instrument store they managed, and after they had gotten fired one by one by 2003 his family moved back to Chula Vista, just below San Diego, his mother into a senior building and his two brothers back to their wives and children, after making us lose our apartment in Hollywood.
And me and my boyfriend became homeless for 7 years, 3 years in a van in Los Angeles and 4 years on the streets in Chula Vista, (about 10 miles from the US-Mexico border,) during the height of the failed immigration reform in 2007 and the whole Prop. 8 ordeal in 2008, subjected to a lot of general harassment and violence, as well as racial profiling by police and border patrol alike.
In 2004, after volunteering at the Los Angeles Film Festival for 10 days straight and working its’ closing night event where my boyfriend got very drunk, he got arrested in West LA for domestic violence against me but sent his two brothers on me to intimidate me into dropping the charges and I ended up falsely testifying on his behalf instead of mine in an out of court settlement, (we lived with them throughout that specific time.) And I in the process got screwed out of a chance to apply for a U-Visa as victim of a crime by a US citizen, because of not cooperating with the authorities. A lot of my chances to stay in the country actually hinges on that arrest, and so on my explanation for this false testimony.
In 2006 my boyfriend got arrested again, while living in Chula Vista by now, for assault and battery against me, and he disclosed my undocumented status to his arresting officers. I was able to talk my way out of getting arrested myself because I have a basic understanding of the constitution and basically held my own against them, for that could have very well resulted in my deportation. (I was initially fingerprinted in 1992 as part of my adjustment-of-status through my first husband so ICE could have placed a hold on me instead of the CVPD releasing me.)
The Chula Vista sheriff’s department had our vehicle towed during the ’06 arrest, (I couldn’t have a driver’s license so he was always in full control over the van even though I contributed financially throughout,) and from 2007 on we slept on the pavement in sleeping bags for the next 3 years, periodically resorting to food lines, (both of us holding jobs from time to time and with my parents still sending me money wires, which fed him as well.)
My husband’s 1-year probation from his 2004 arrest coming to an end is what triggered the move to Chula Vista in early 2006, and his brothers drove up to LA to make sure I would not resist going and persuade their brother to stay as well, and with their two cars in front and behind our van I was essentially kidnapped to Chula Vista, (and where he would get arrested again anyway of course, and only within half a year.) He was being persuaded by his brothers to move back to San Diego all along but it was his wanting to specifically get out of eyesight from the the LAPD that finally made that move possible.
And in May of 2007, on the brink of starvation and severely compromised by then, I got married to my boyfriend after all, in Chula Vista, below a last immigration checkpoint between Los Angeles and San Diego, in what is considered a “constitution-free border zone,” just 10 miles north of the US-Mexico border, where his brothers kept threatening to have me deported as well in the heat of the failed immigration reform attempts of 2007 and the SB-1070 anti-immigrant racial profiling bill that went through in Arizona and threatened to happen in California as well.
I got racially profiled, as well as gender and LGBTQ profiled throughout my 4 years in Chula Vista by the local police as well as border patrol agents alike, and on numerous occasions got stopped and frisked for “fitting the description,” usually on my way to Starbucks with my laptop to write the manuscript ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented,’ for my personal immigration story and film.
During our 7 homeless years we never turned to begging, but we had resorted to eating out of trashcans by the time of our marriage in 2007, and I had become extremely skinny. A homeless friend of my second husband had just sexually assaulted me as well, but my husband didn’t sponsor me and started accusing me of fraud instead.
In reality he played in a rock band with his two brothers throughout, and lived with them in a National City music rehearsal studio on and off, while I slept outside by myself a lot and got continuously harassed for being gender nonconforming, lesbian and homeless, (and the battered women and homeless shelters the police often referred me to, often seemed a hotbed for crime so I actually preferred to sleep out on the streets, in usually some church’s doorway. My presenting as gender nonconforming, as lesbian, and decidedly atheist, didn’t help neither in trying to get any basic assistance, like a single night of sleep indoors, and usually at the recommendation of the cops exactly, after splitting my husband and me up after our fights.) My husband hadn’t sponsored me throughout our homelessness, and still has not since, in our 10 year forced marriage in 2017.
His two brothers, whom he joined for at least 10 years in their religious rock band, were also violent with him, and his family was really the culprit in this whole situation, while he had lived under their “spell” for years. Being from a secular country like the Netherlands myself, and always having been atheist, by choice as well, I always had very little patience for any religion at all, and not just because it was generally anti-gay, and anti-woman, but because it made no sense to me, scientifically speaking, and I actually liked living in the reality instead.
(The one positive, finally in 2017, is that his alcoholic, religious, Trump supporting brothers are not allowed to come near me anymore nor contact me, by my husband’s doing, after years of me fighting them off. They vehemently believe LGBTQ people are pedophiles and demon possessed, and feel that way about women even more, especially successful ones, and for years sent me hateful and threatening messages, and with my husband’s assistance, would come over to my Los Angeles film production office to control me and get money out of me. They are still holding on to some of my belongings today.)
Living homeless in a van from 2003 through 2005 in Hollywood, West Hollywood and Santa Monica, wasn’t the worst of it but Chula Vista was a living hell, especially during the upholding of Proposition 8 and failed immigration reform talks in 2007 already, and being between an immigration checkpoint South of San Diego and only 7 miles from the border with Mexico, resulted in a lot of racial- and gender-, and gender-identity profiling from the cops, and a lot of harassment on the streets in general, (being a Dutch citizen, born in the Netherlands, with Indonesian heritage on my mother’s side, as well as looking and identifying as gender nonconforming, while female-bodied.)
From 2006 through 2010 my husband, back in his family’s town, completely alienated me from my familiar surroundings, from any chance to connect to an LGBTQ community in Los Angeles, and further separated me from communicating with my parents.
He completely isolated and endangered me by determining my social environment for me in homophobic Chula Vista, during the whole Proposition 8 ordeal in California especially, and surrounded almost exclusively by his religious heterosexual, male friends and family.
I slept in my sleeping bag, inside of a trash bag, in a church doorway, a little corner I would keep clean and claim as my own for the next couple of years.
I tried not to associate with other homeless people, except for on the most superficial levels, since running into each, even multiple times a day, was almost unavoidable as a regular part of being homeless and confined to a small area. So I stayed friendly, as a way to survive, but I did not hang out with them, as they expect from everyone, and so was thought of as a snob, always hanging out indoors at Starbucks on an espresso and writing on my laptop.
My parents fortunately sent me small sums of money on a regular basis via Western Union, holding no regular jobs anymore after having been forced to leave Los Angeles, and so this is what I mostly got by on in Chula Vista.
In Los Angeles, for at least the first couple of years of homelessness, I worked at coffee shops, paid my taxes, and got by that way, even interning at film organizations like Film Independent, volunteering at film festivals, and “celebrity escorting” for the Independent Spirit Awards, all while living in a van by the beach. (It hand’t been especially hard getting those kind of gigs, since I’d previously produced a John Cassavetes Film Retrospective, while still working at The Laemmle Theatres, which Film Independent, the organization behind the Spirit Awards, ended up co-sponsoring with Robert and Gregory Laemmle.)
So Chula Vista was a whole different world, in which I struggled to hang on to my identity while at the same time being continuously throated for who I am or what I represent to people in a small, military, border town.
The amounts I received from my parents in the Netherlands were less than what most homeless people I knew were receiving as benefits from the government, as US citizens, (and which I was excluded from as undocumented immigrant,) and they spent most of it on alcohol and drugs, and shared motel room to consume those items in.
They got most of their food from various food lines at churches and often collected cans for extra money. As Americans they often had family members not too far away, who would let them crash on their couches during holidays or on particularly cold nights, my husband living much of this way himself, while I’d check into motel rooms by myself on cold and lonely holidays to work on my manuscripts, and get a good shower, watch a little TV, and get a good night of rest for a change, usually still using my own sleeping bag over motel room covers.
Most homeless people were also not usually undocumented and gender nonconforming/women, or even LGBTQ in general, (although there are a disproportionate amount of LGBTQ youth on the streets,) but had emotional and mental issues, derived from various forms of abuse suffered in their lives, which in turn also affected them financially and set them up in conflict with the legal system.
It is often their own minds, in combination with the conditions of an extremely harsh system against them, that keeps them from getting off the streets. They often resorted to two extremes, with essentially somewhat similar effects, mentally, drugs and alcohol on the one hand, and religion on the other, (the latter often pushed on to them by shelters exactly, since they often operate on a non-profit basis and get tax breaks that way, just like the churches feeding the homeless.
And the homeless often used drugs and religion for similar effects, to numb their minds and feelings, resulting in the lack of experience, knowledge and strength to be truly self-sufficient.
I did not resort to drugs nor religion and was always able to remain creative, even ambitious, even though experiencing lows to the point of feeling suicidal, and was one of the few people who was actually able to get off the streets at all. I witnessed one after another of my homeless acquaintances die horrible deaths, and certainly not all by their own doing or undoing, some of them even set on fire while sleeping, which became a definite cause for anxiety for me. I never really slept well for those 7 years.
And the fear remains. In fact, I never had real fear of becoming homeless before I became homeless myself. I didn’t really think I’d have to, I didn’t grow up poor. And when it was happening and I survived it, I figured I could handle a lot if I had survived homelessness, but it doesn’t work out that way, at least not for me. I can still tap into my survival mode, which I seem to have adapted on the streets by necessity, but for the most part I’ve gotten comfortable again, having a roof over my head. I’ve slowed down, compared to when I was living on the streets.
The streets definitely slowed me down, as the streets will make you feel that death has got to be better than homeless, but I for years I still managed to move fast, I fought against being homeless, and I also wasn’t allowed to get comfortable, which tends to be the case when you’re homeless. You cannot ever get comfortable. When you have a place you tend to get comfortable. Even seeing other people out on the streets all the time in Los Angeles, I can still walk by, fairly comfortably, coffee in my hand, money in my pockets, as if I’ve never known poverty.
I still fight against my comfort, keep my belongings to a minimum, my furniture light, keep creative all the time or else I’ll die, but the fear of homelessness remains. I can sum up homelessness in these couple of words, in no particular order, hunger, humiliation, anger, discomfort, pain, desperation, fear, exhaustion, endlessness, danger, hopelessness.
The fear that my American husband has instilled in me, particularly the second one, and enabled by this “broken” US immigration system, with its’ focus on family and spousal immigration as citizenship option entirely, has been a gradual and subtle process. And one I have been conditioned to accept entirely, and even subconsciously, since women, or biologically female born people, are raised to serve men, and so even when one identifies as male this applies of course, and the conditioning still has a similar effect, and even if as self-identifying as male might make one not readily identify, and relate to, the results of misogyny.
Misogyny and its’ consequences are weaved through society and history, and however subtle or overt still manage to go undetected, as invisibility and erasure of women is part of misogyny exactly, one my husband practices on a continual basis.
I became both numb to the fear as well as paralyzed by the amount of doubt it also produces, and feel that I most likely have some PTSD from all the abuse I endured, (but am not in anyway chronically depressed, crazy, violent or even bi-polar, as my second husband so enthusiastically suggests every time I try to assert my free will, my opinions, my identity, my needs and my validity as a person.)
In 2010 I managed to get us both off the streets through my savings, and back to Hollywood where I secured an office to live in and conduct my film production business from. (I have a small production company and office, own all my film equipment, editing and recording, etc., business license and pay income taxes, can hire US citizens, and am producing a documentary for primarily educational purposes.)
And in 2012 his two brothers followed suit and moved back up to Los Angeles as well and my husband moved into a music rehearsal studio with them again for almost 3 years, during which I paid his rent and bills, from my family’s money, and while he received government assistance for himself only, and only to be finally thrown out by his brothers earlier 2015, in a big part due to his semi-support of LGBTQ people by now, and “losing his religion” in the process. (He’s basically agnostic I think, and I’m atheist as always.)
And so while I had dropped hints about the nature of my true situation in my writings as far back as 2008, after really a political awakening personally in 2007 because of Proposition 8 in California, it hit me as an absolute unreality in 2011 when then-Washington Post journalist and Pulitzer prize winner Jose Antonio Vargas published his life story as undocumented immigrant in the New York Times Magazine. Later on I naively came to find out there were about 270.000 immigrants like us, both LGBTQ and undocumented, and there was even a name for it by then, “Undocu-Queer.”
But it wasn’t until my husband moved out, (temporarily as it turned out,) in mid-2012 that I started openly identifying as transgender, or gender nonconforming rather, even to myself. I simply couldn’t find the time to completely understand myself, even though that had been my sole preoccupation in life, but my husband took up that much of my energy. Being around him and keeping afloat was a 24/7 job for me, and when he left I felt myself mentally detoxing from his overbearing presence, just like I had for the last time in 1998, when living with the girl I had liked.
It had just hit me, one day in late 2012, looking in the mirror. It had been a long time coming, and I had watched every film and TV show, featuring trans- and gender nonconforming characters all my life, and which there were never enough of, and increasingly had looked to first hand testimonials on YouTube for transgender information.
And I had already looked and dressed the part all my life, I had behaved male all my life, without ever stating I was male, and had felt disconnected from everything female all my life as well, including to some extent my body, and so had known nothing about what it was like to be a woman even.
And yet I felt mostly normal, I was generally introverted but not at all low on my self esteem, moody but not particularly depressed, fairly anxious but not to the point of not functioning, often lonely but able to be alone as well, creative, not destructive, and still always inspired and capable of love.
But one day it just hit me, looking in the mirror, that the reason people had not liked me, accepted me, loved me, throughout my life was because I was not typically, or easily identified as, female, and looked and acted to some extent male, but maybe not entirely convincingly neither. In other words, people could not tell, from the way I looked, if I was male or female, and the way I acted did not convince them I was female, even if they were inclined to think I was female. I wasn’t the right kind of female, I was a male kind of female.
And for people, who have sex on their minds a lot of the time on top, whether consciously or not, and whether they want to admit it or not, the idea that someone does not read as clearly male or female does not sit well. They literally don’t know how to behave in reaction, whether to make a move, if I’m female and they are male, or whether to take flight, because I look like I could actually be male and they had thought of me as female for a moment, as approachable, against this behavior usually coming from men. Women don’t have such strong reactions against me, and are either fascinated or, at worst, mildly amused or slightly annoyed with the male aspects of my behavior.
When I had this realization, almost like an outer body experience, of having been able to judge myself as objectively as I possibly could, as if my face wasn’t mine and I hadn’t grown up seeing it every day, being accustomed to it and its changes, and thinking of it as fairly regular. I was able to look at my body, the way my clothes were picked and reflected masculinity on purpose, as if it weren’t mine and the choices around it weren’t made by be, and finally I saw it, a female who looked male, and I understood in that instant why people hadn’t taken to me, had shunned me, had hated me even. And I got all the little instances, of disapproval, of hatred, so many memories flooded back in the next few days, all little revelations on people’s true emotions about me.
In the next few years it would really start to hit me not only how much people had shunned and disliked me, but also how much they had genuinely misunderstood me, and continued to misunderstand me, which was equally hurtful, if not more hurtful even than simple hatred, as I came to more openly identify myself as trans-masculine and gender nonconforming, with increasing self-awareness and pride.
People not hating me, but genuinely getting me wrong, turned out to be one of the worst things about being transgender, or gender nonconforming, (and which are not identical neither but which both apply to me, as I feel myself to be somewhere in between, in a smaller space, a sub-space, somewhere in between trans-male and gender nonconforming, and therefore call myself a trans-masculine, or gender nonconforming, lesbian.)
In 2012 being transgender was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders by the American Psychiatric Disorder Association, the same way homosexuality had been in 1973, and I counted my timing to come out as “trans-masculine,” or gender nonconforming, as such as sheer luck. I was so preoccupied with this newfound, or newly accepted, masculinity I did always have that I was hardly paying attention to how badly the GOP was waging its war on women around that same time and was dumbfounded when finding out the Violence Against Women Act had successfully been taken down, and while my husband had moved into the Silverlake music rehearsal studio with his brothers.
But in 2012 my only real solid defense, the Violence Against Women Act, had been voted down by the GOP in the “war on women” nobody seemed to notice it had been waging, and really has been going on forever of course, but in 2012 the Violence Against Women Act was temporarily struck down, and specifically over much needed updates regarding the inclusion of LGBT people and Native Americans.
(The U-Visa of 2000, a “capped,” limited visa category, unlike the VAWA self-petition, was at least partially designed to close the “abuser as spouse only” loophole within VAWA of 1994, and both stem from gender violence policies, though rightly also include men as recognized victims of abuse under immigration policy.)
And the Violence Against Women Act, (originally instated in 1994 to combat abuse during the “2-year Conditional Status” required under the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendment Act of 1986,) never applied to LGBT people, and definitely does not now in any “mixed-orientation marriage” which might have arisen because of LGBT exclusion from immigration spousal sponsorship law before DOMA article 3 was officially down in June of 2013.
Under the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 one has to prove the marriage as “bona fide” and not just for immigration purposes, in order to qualify for self-petitioning, the same as with spousal sponsorship, (and filed within 2 years after a potential divorce.)
But if VAWA was instated in 1994 as a response to domestic violence afforded by the “2-year Conditional Status” imposed under the Marriage Fraud Act of 1986, (8 years and many victims later,) then where does that leave LGBTQ people, subjected to institutionalized discrimination, at all within any of this?
Thus, what constitutes as fraud according to immigration under the Violence Against Women Act and U-Visa can often uncover physical abuse and sexual exploitation of particularly women instead.
My marriage is not fraud committed by me but women and spousal abuse as a result of, and backed up by, a patriarch controlled government and its policies.
Proving my opposite sex marriage to be “bona fide,” real, as lesbian no less of course, and not solely for immigration purposes, under the 1986 Immigration Marriage Fraud Act, is even a requirement for self-petition under the Violence Against Women Act, and so still a post-DOMA backlash and retroactive punishment for me, as this is exactly what makes my case still difficult today.
But a forced marriage is no less “bona fide” real as a marriage as rape constitutes “bona fide” real sex, even if non-consensual.
A lot of my actual belongings, including as evidence, have disappeared over the years as a result of prolonged government and domestic abuse as well, and my second husband would have loved for my original documents to have disappeared, my trail of evidence of both legality as well as moral character, not at all one and the same, and even for my endless original writings to disappear, my voice and validity forever silenced and to be used further in any manner he pleases.
If it hadn’t been for changes in the law, and the social progress and activist movements behind those, my husband would have never changed his behavior, and he has only barely changed his mind on LGBTQ validity and equality, and just as easily changes back into being a homophobe again, because he is ultimately a misogynist, and misogyny exactly is what is at the root of homophobia.
In 2013 the VAWA fortunately got restored and with much need updates included when DOMA article 3 went down on June 26 of 2013 as part of same-sex marriage legalization in the state of CA, (and after the prolonged and unconstitutional setback of Proposition 8 here.)
2013 also brought President Obama’s immigration reform announcement, as well as a most important reacquaintance with my old crush from 1998, in terms of personal development primarily, and certainly not for romance or marriage, (not that same-sex marriage for US sponsorship in my case is necessary anymore, but I would still potentially desire same-sex marriage, for love, and since June 26, 2015 in the US that is finally possible in all 50 states.)
Post-DOMA backlashes, as retroactive punishment from the government, will most definitely surface, and the irony remains that if I would have moved to the US after the summer of 2015 instead of in the summer of 1992 I would have had no real problems getting US citizenship through marriage sponsorship, just like my heterosexual counterparts have been able to do for centuries, (and despite this method as primary method entirely misguided and unfair constitutionally, trampling all over individual rights in the process.)
With Obama’s Executive Action late 2014 as response to the stalled 2013 bill, came my round two of political awareness, after enduring 2008’s Proposition 8, but with a more clear cut purpose of activism in mind this time around, and leading up to another coming out, again, not just as lesbian and gender nonconforming but now as undocumented, to the whole world, both socially and online.
In reality all this delay of comprehensive immigration reform is in anticipation of the 2016 elections, (an important one at that with the 8 year Democratic tenure of the Obama administration finally coming to an end, and feared to be replaced by the GOP.)
I had no actual income from employment and no work papers, nor health insurance, and besides was dying to live a normal, non-closeted life by now, even as undocumented, but somehow “out,” and not afraid anymore.
I haven’t had a normal human, social and love life, for 13 years now, (at least since the arrival of my husband’s family in LA in 2002, and with the brief exception of having my parents coming to see me for one last time in 2003.)
My female relations were secret, fleeting and lonely, and men continued to harass me, sexually and physically. My love life had been reduced to romanticized memories and meaningless flings because too compromised in my opposite sex marriage and my immigration status to even consider a serious same-sex relationship, while at the same time that was the one thing in my life that I wanted most, but simply not possible nor legally sanctioned under DOMA.
I have become a different person since my homelessness, but it’s also miracle that I’m still alive today.
In 2014 racial profiling in California was discouraged by the Secure Communities Act going down, courtesy of governor Jerry Brown, as well as more good news for undocumented immigrants with the start of California drivers licenses being issued in January 2015.
And 2 years to the day it happened in California in 2013, on June 26 2015 same-sex marriage finally became federal law in all 50 states, (11 long years after Massachusetts was the first state in the US to allow it in 2004.)
During my 7 years of homeless, from 2003 through 2010, The L Word had just premiered in the early 2000s, (when I first became homeless,) and was having a very successful run and I had been made visible for the first time in my entire life, especially through androgynous looking and acting character like “Shane,” and to a smaller extent “Max/Moira,” which actually helped me out a lot, and I got hooked, often having to watch the episodes on YouTube the day after they aired on TV by fans who illegally and very temporarily uploaded them, giving me only twenty four hours to rush to public internet access and catch the show.
On better days I’d catch it on some cheap motel’s HBO, and I even occasionally took the Greyhound back up to Hollywood to watch the show with cast and crew in attendance at the viewing parties put up at Falcon Bar on Sunset Boulevard, usually rushing back to Chula Vista on the very same night, so as not to agitate my husband.
It was literally the first time ever that I’d seen people on TV who more or less looked and acted like me, explaining a lot of my identity, and my resulting situation, to me, (minus any focus on being undocumented obviously.)
Maybe with the exceptions of a few independent films, featuring Lili Taylor’s character in ‘I Shot Andy Warhol,’ and Hilary Swank’s as Brandon Teena in ‘Boys Don’t Cry,’ trans- and gender nonconforming identity awareness was still pretty scarce.
And LGBTQ internet visibility was still scarce even in the mid-2000s, and so my self-awareness as a result still pretty dim, as a male-gendered/ gender nonconforming lesbian, and I hadn’t rushed to read any women studies in college, or embrace feminism immediately upon discovery neither, as these were all long, slow and painful awakenings.
But all of a sudden I was very noticeable to other lesbians as well, which definitely didn’t hurt, in terms of romantic and sexual relations. No one ever even suspected I was homeless, since I always appeared and was clean, showering and working out daily at 24 Hour Fitness, maintaining my membership along with a few other, basic bills, like phone and internet, and wearing clothes I had bought from before becoming homeless, several Diesel jackets and skinny Levi’s and a lot of Adidas gear.
I ultimately cut all my relationships short though, due mainly to having become undocumented in 1994/1997, before and during the Defense Of Marriage Act of 1996 that is, federal government discrimination in the form of exclusion-policies, and having become a victim of opposite-sex, male domestic violence, resulting in homelessness exactly.
A lot of lesbians thought I was behaving like a “Shane” instead, being a player basically, whenever I cut my relations with them prematurely short and without explanation, while that behavior is in reality far from my personal character, and having to continuously lose out on love, and hurting others in the process, hurt me a great deal, and became ultimately one of the main reasons for coming forward with undocumented status in mid-2015, an old crush from my semi-stable working days in 1998 in particular.
I came out of the shadows in July of 2015, after 23 years here, and because of a woman, because of how wide the gap in our friendship had become when we got briefly reacquainted with each other in early 2013, and she found out all of these secrets about me, my undocumented status, and gender nonconforming and lesbian identities, and my feelings for her, all of which I had only hinted at when I briefly lived with her in late 1998, and all of which she seemed to approve of then, but strongly rejected now.
After that I felt the need to explain myself, since I hadn’t tried to come back her into her life at all and our reacquaintance was entirely coincidental, but she moved on quickly and broke my heart. I certainly hadn’t realized back then what a gigantic task and burden it would become to “come out of the shadows,” and stay “out” from there on, as undocumented in the US.
It took me at least another 2 brokenhearted years to properly prepare myself for this life altering “confession,” (even though I’ve done nothing wrong, and immigrated here absolutely legally,) for once you’re out as undocumented you are decidedly not “one of us” anymore, but all of a sudden “one of them,” an extremely alienating experience after having experienced the US as my home for most of my life, and yet I’ve always been quietly aware I wasn’t truly ever “one of us” of course.
So, still stuck in my abusive, opposite-sex dead-end marriage by the time of witnessing same-sex marriage become federal law, I decided it was finally time to spell it out, and 2 weeks later on July 9 I came out fully, socially as well as online, as “Queer and Undocumented.”
After the initial high of not having to feel like a ghost of my former self anymore I had to come to terms with the fact that I gave up my privilege with it as well, the illusion of privilege anyway but which had kept me financially alive, the illusion of the privilege of being seemingly well-adjusted to American “culture,” or whatever passes for it, (meaning basically speaking English without a foreign accent.) I had now empowered myself and further alienated myself at the same time, an emotional burden had been lifted and I had become more visible but with it felt more vulnerable as well, and I was plagued by uncertainties regarding my future, regarding love as well as a roof over my head, simply income.
In early November of 2015 my father passed away, knowing I was out and becoming proud of me himself after years of reluctance, from both my parents, and my mother evenmore so.
My father died of a heart attack, (the last of several,) in the same hospital in the town of Leiderdorp where I was born, which might have very likely flashed through his memory before he passed. We were fairly close, considering our distance geographically and our difference in opinions, though were also similar.
Because of my undocumented status I was unable to attend the funeral but I did get to write his eulogy, fittingly as a writer.
He had even joked about a week before how close to Hollywood he in a sense was, being he had just been hospitalized next to Los Angeles based Dutch director Jan De Bont’s brother.
My parents got to witness my transition from artist to activist. My father encouraged me to stay on in the US to continue my fight for full equality under the law.
The fact remains today that without a pathway to US citizenship as the single most highest priority in any attempt at fair and comprehensive immigration reform, one simply cannot only be an individual person and immigrate legally and stay legally to live and work in the US.
Such a pathway or line does not exist, and there is no “real” line for family, and only a “broken” line to nowhere for employees.
To not have the individual right to pursue income, like not having the individual right to keep one’s earnings, is a real form of slavery.
The US has also never been transparent regarding the fact that any work visa at all, low or high skilled, does not lead to US citizenship in this immigration system so that most people can only rely on one thing realistically if they want to be and stay here legally and that is marriage, and heterosexual exclusively that is.
It is specifically therefore also that I am pinpointing my personal situation down to DOMA, claiming that if it hadn’t been for LGBTQ exclusion from marriage, and so immigration sponsorship, I would not have been in this situation, undocumented.
If same-sex marriage would have been legal all along, if LGBTQ would have had full equality under the law all along, if the Violence Against Women Act existed to from the beginning of the Marriage Fraud Act, and had included LGBTQ people, I would not have become “illegal,” undocumented.
Men could have still harassed me of course, and probably would have, but if I would have been legally validated as LGBTQ person and woman from the start I at least would have had legal recourse to protect and defend myself.
And so now, going into 2016 openly “out” as “queer and undocumented,” without the right to pursue income, which in actuality is slavery, I feel the need to bring attention to the hypocrisy of the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendment Act of 1986, with its’ 2-year “Conditional Status” requirement for foreign spouses, allowing for an enormous amount of control and power in the hands of the US citizen spouse in charge of the sponsorship, and in reality practically setting things up for abuse and violence to be able to take place.
No one wants to talk about this, and the narrative has only ever been brought up in the media in extreme and negative terms, continuously blaming the “scheming and gold digging foreigner” of taking advantage of the “innocent and hardworking American.”
Marriage fraud and domestic violence are simply not part of the immigration conversation, and I feel this really needs to change. Forced marriages exist and are real, and already severely compromised people, people fleeing violence and persecution and poverty, are not hard to be forced to begin with.
(One has to always view the overal history of something to even get close to understanding the big picture, for example such one simple, harsh fact as even the idea of marital rape as a real and punishable thing only becoming a reality as late as 1993 in the US itself. Before that it was simply assumed that men had legal sexual acces to their wives, and consent simply was not necessary, as the “I do” promise should have covered it.)
The Immigration Marriage Fraud Act Amendment of 1986, (enacted by the Reagan administration in 1986 after the last big “reform” to date, legalizing some 3 millions immigrants at the time,) is an unfair, rigorous and ultimately dangerous law for even heterosexual people, and women within that in particular, but for LGBTQ people during the existence of DOMA, amounted to nothing less than LGBTQ abuse; an opening in the law for LGBTQ- and women’s abuse to take place, (for at least those first 2 years after the American spouse has filed the application for citizenship sponsorship, up until the foreign spouse’s “Conditional Status” is removed by immigration through an interview.)
Or as in my case with my husband not sponsoring at all the abuse can go on indefinitely, and specifically because the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, the only defense existing against abusive marriages under immigration, had never qualified for LGBT people before, (and only does for same-sex marriage couples since 2013.)
But the Marriage Fraud Act of 1986 punishes those LGBTQ immigrants who specifically became victims of abusive, heterosexual US citizen spouses, (that is really specifically lesbians married to American men,) in “mixed orientation” marriages (where one of the spouses is heterosexual, the other homosexual.)
And it also punished any LGBTQ American who happened to fall in love with a foreigner of course.
How does a government even define marriage fraud when it cannot even accurately define marriage, and thinks of it exclusively in heterosexual, heteronormative terms, as the union of one man and one woman, and ultimately for the purposes of procreation?
So ultimately I realized that I am specifically a “victim of my time in LGBTQ history,” for if I had come here, to California, after DOMA article 3 went down in 2013, or anywhere in the US after DOMA went down in all 50 states in 2015, I would have had really no problems studying, marrying who I wanted legally, and working, under spousal law immigration.
After losing money on a laywer in 2015, I am set to file for both the U-Visa and VAWA, (both kept extremely secretive as options throughout ones immigration process, as well as the combination of both as a possibility,) with an immigration lawyer in early 2016, yet under the Violence Against Women Act ones marriage still has to be “bona fide,” and not solely for immigration purposes, so in essence I technically still have to evade questions and lie in answering anything regarding my true sexual orientation, (and my gender identity does show, with or without medical procedures, which I don’t feel I need since feeling more gender nonconforming than solely male or female,) and so is still retroactive punishment as post-DOMA backlash.
Ultimately it entirely comes down to this, your ability to be and stay legally in the US, because of the Immigration Fraud Act of 1986, depends solely on your ability to fall in love and have an American citizen fall in love with you, and stay in love enough to be married and get sponsored and remain in marital bliss for at least those 2 required years of “Conditional Status.”
Your ability to be and stay in the US legally as LGBTQ person is completely cancelled out under the Defense Of Marriage Act of 1996.
And so even post-DOMA an LGBTQ person, who was in fact married, has to prove they did not marry for immigration purposes.
Because VAWA visas are not “capped,” or limited, according to a quota, and I technically am married I would still like to see if I’d qualify under this, (as well as the U-Visa for which I definitely qualify,) but the very reason it is hard for me to apply under the Violence Against Women Act is not because it is hard for me to prove that violence took place, but that the marriage was “bona fide,” and not solely for immigration purposes.
The marriage being “bona fide” is a major requirement to qualify, (and the VAWA application also has to be filed within 2 years of a possible divorce, so there is a considerable time limit and element of danger involved in this process.)
But most of the violence took place exactly because I was lesbian, and not even “just” because I was a woman, as he was actually trying to “straighten” me out, “make me heterosexual,” by holding immigration law and LGBTQ discrimination against me. It is very hard to report someone who has threatened to “out” me (as homosexual to immigration,) exactly as a way of “extortion,” when all along that constitutes marriage fraud, (a federal felony, under the Immigration Marriage Fraud Act of 1986.)
Yet being lesbian in an opposite sex marriage does not make me a fraud, but a victim exactly, of anti-LGBTQ legislation and of the individuals who enforce it, (and I never even lied to my husband about my sexual orientation nor my legal status neither so I did not deceive him in any way, nor did I strike a deal which is irreconcilable with my sexual orientation and gender identity as the conscious idea of this as only possibility would have killed me.)
In reality I have been in a 20 year opposite sex, abusive relationship that has felt like psychological rape and murder, (8 years of it married, and without sponsorship nor divorce,) and my husband has managed to live off of me increasingly more to eventually completely entirely that whole time, and he simply would not have been able to stay in Los Angeles himself to pursue his own creative ambitions if it had’t been for me.
He knew fully well I was lesbian from the start, (out since 1994, and he was around for it himself, and only increasingly “closeted” again at work through his involvement,) and he also definitely knew I wanted to be as far from him and his family and their religious fanaticism and their hometown as possible.
He knew that as an undocumented and gay person I could not marry to adjust my immigration status and had no legal recourse at all, (as this isn’t hard to figure out, and most people who don’t know a thing about the immigration process have figured this out more or less subconsciously,) but which he often, and consciously enough, threatened me with, (from female desperation to marriage fraud, detention, deportation, psychiatric hospitalization, etc.,) often using a combination of heterosexual, male and US citizen privilege in his argument.
And his family has been aware of his behavior throughout but have kept quiet and supported it in all their ignorance, even because profiting themselves, like with me paying his share of the rent at their music rehearsal studio. And a good amount of my family’s savings, given to me for lawyer fees and maintenance until my eventual legalization, got switched into his name when he bought a 1972 muscle car without my approval and without my name on the paperwork, and which I am still maintaining.
I am also still paying for all his bills and he has basically moved back into my office, since January 2015, although not on my lease, and occasionally sleeping in the car.
He has controlled me through immigration law since 1995, by picking up where my first husband left off with the divorce and unfinished sponsorship, and finishing off the job, or rather if it hadn’t been for LGBTQ rights happening in the US. Delusional and alcoholic he ultimately wanted for his artistic ambitions to pay off without putting in any real work, and was more than willing to sacrifice any women, for some male attention and sex, in the process for it, and his brothers thought exactly the same and encouraged it.
When he didn’t follow their will enough they threw him out of the band and the studio, and this is the only reason he is back in my office and my life full-time again, playing his guitar while I keep paying our bills.
When I don’t follow his will enough, meaning supporting him entirely and exclusively, emotionally and financially, like I am both his housewife and biggest groupie or something, he starts controlling me through his moods, from sober and depressed and to belligerently drunk, getting away with it in my own office, until I actually file my paperwork and pay the accompanying lawyer fee in 2016.
Whenever I have asserted my sexual orientation and gender identity, and according needs and goals, throughout the years I have always been met with resistance from him, as well as from society at large, and previously with the government legally sanctioning LGBTQ and women’s discrimination, (and in many states still does.)
But post-DOMA, (especially federally in 2015, since US immigration is primarily internationally conducted and so is a federal issue,) the very fact that DOMA has been proven unconstitutional by the Supreme Court has given me considerable leverage in my argument to prove “mixed orientation marriage” during DOMA does not automatically translate into marriage fraud, and more likely is the result of force by the American party and severe compromise out of grounded fear of deportation by the foreign party.
The official police reports of my husband’s two arrest for domestic violence against me, in 2004 in LA and in 2006 in Chula Vista, are fortunately also easier to obtain now that the Secure Committees Act is down in California, due to Governor Jerry Brown, since 2015 and local police authorities now are required to assist immigration abuse victims rather than arresting them and allowing ICE to place holds on immigrants they would normally release.
But all the copies of paperwork given to me at the time of my husband’s arrests, (still only my “boyfriend” at the time and reported as such,) I still have in my possession, safely put away in a storage facility locker out of my husband’s legal reach, along with all my original documents still, (passports, visas, IDs and tax forms, marriage and divorce records, and enough proof in the form of mutual bills and correspondence, including pictures, videos, recordings, texts, and social media to establish the validity of our 20 year relationship.)
Whenever I reassert my identity and my will now, in my own office paid for by me, he leaves to sleep in my car in endless cycles of repetition.
He holds on to my belongings, both my property and income, as his own, including when he leaves for his homeless drinking binges supposedly caused by my “fights,” for my own autonomy, and he will leave for days with my housekeys on him, the spare set he holds onto as his own at least, despite not being on the lease with me, and he will even influence my neighbors to turn them into potential witnesses on his side.
(Of course joint leases are also a crucial important piece of paperwork to establish marriage validity but he does not want contractual responsibilities, since he has to no intention of upholding them, and I thus cannot afford to put him as cosigner on anything of mine, effectively erasing my own proof in the process but preferring that to him having us evicted and back on the streets again.)
Restraining orders are hard to follow up on as well since there is a realistic fear of retaliation involved, including from his family, as they have retaliated for his two previous arrests as well.
I have had no chance at furthering my formal education since I do not have 3 years of high school in this country but instead graduated from high school in the Netherlands, which is not recognized for undocumented immigrants to be students but I have acquired 25 years of experience on my own and the only thing that is standing in my way of my feature documentary becoming a reality, legally that is, is the work permit that would come with the VAWA petition, which I could realistically receive within just 1 year of applying and being approved.
While this would only be the first step in a total 14 year process to US citizenship, and not include a travel visa for the first 4 years, it would however be the single most important one as the right to pursue income means having a way to be free in ones life, and to pursue anything else after that.
My documentary would qualify as educational and so for nonprofit purposes, and aside from the work permit that would make things like fiscal sponsorship possible for me, I have laid all the groundwork and paid for everything out of my own pocket already, and so a complete manuscript and fully insured and paid off film and editing equipment sits in my office awaiting a crew for a 2016 shoot.
Despite not having a work permit I am allowed to hire American citizens myself so that won’t be an issue, nor would crowd funding and online campaigning be.
Since his 2004 arrest prompted our 4 year move to Chula Vista, in an effort of my husband to lay low from the LAPD, and he generally has done everything already to erase my whole identity and life, including our past together, and with it also proof of my existence and my moral character, so he can live like a carefree artist, who uses female groupies for money and sex and company, he certainly would not want any police investigation that would come with the VAWA petition. It would also expose how his family, (the true culprits behind his behavior, in their desperate need for fame,) have been using deportation threats against me for years in order to live on my family’s money, of which they have spent thousands.
The VAWA accompanied police investigation would in a sense reopen the case of his first arrest against me in 2004 and the false testimonies in his defense that resulted in the dropping of his charges. It could at last expose the true circumstances around the arrest, and which I have been writing about all along.
A truthful testimony, and so one in my defense, could have resulted in a U-Visa back then but was made impossible through my husband’s intimidation and that of his brothers.
The abuse, the arrest and the move, made a forced marriage possible, and one without sponsorship, and could have resulted in a VAWA self-petition in 2007 when it occurred in Chula Vista, if it wasn’t for me being unemployed, destitute and homeless below immigration checkpoint by then, and completely unable to hire a lawyer. But both the U-Visa and VAWA are slated to be filed in early 2016 and with it a police investigation might open with whatever consequences may come for either one of us.
In hindsight, at 43, and after 25 years here, I don’t think my move to Los Angeles came from an unhealthy need for fame and fortune but really just a basic need for happiness, which in my case, as a “woman” or female-bodied individual, as well as a member of the LGBTQ community, also necessarily meant the need for visibility, only precisely because history has rendered us invisible, and our lives as not our own unlivable.
When I initially moved to Los Angeles in 1992 as a naive, idealistic and romantic 19 year old aspiring filmmaker, no internet existed, and no digital video and if one wanted to be a filmmaker one went to Hollywood, as far as I understood, and that is what everybody I admired myself did, from James Dean to John Cassavetes and while certainly struggling they never became “illegal” though, to be persecuted by the government for it.
Male dominated government and society’s attempt at controlling women’s choices and erasing female history as valid, and my own husband as prime example within it and trying realistically to erase me still, makes me me all the more motivated to stay on in the US to self-petition for citizenship with an immigration lawyer, and moreover to make the film finally that I was meant to always make, to present the whole truth around my circumstances and my true identity and set the record straight on “becoming undocumented” in a “broken” immigration system.
And ultimately I have only acquired more identities and statuses, and beyond being an undocumented bi-racial gender nonconforming lesbian writer and filmmaker, can add activist, feminist, and abuse and rape survivor to the list; openly and without pride nor shame but in the name of justice needing to be served for the violation of my basic human rights.
I have always done everything to fight him off, both mentally and physically, but won’t leave him, since there is no relationship to leave, so leaving him would translate into leaving Los Angeles or the US, essentially requiring self-deportation. I’d naturally have to give up my film, all my film equipment, my muscle cars and my production office in Hollywood in order to leave him.
I however qualify for the Violence Against Women Act and the U-Visa and am working on legalization with an immigration lawyer right now. I can’t divorce prematurely or else I will lose those options to legalization.
So, in a strange twist of events, he has become my cameraman and soundtrack person instead, after having experienced, slowly but surely, a change of heart regarding women and LGBTQ people, and angering with this his wanna-be famous, Trump supporting family to the point where they have completely cut off contact with him.
And ultimately of course the very reason I don’t qualify for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is that I came here legally, and not illegally, and over the age of 16. (I made several trips over here when I was under 16 years of age as well but only legally on tourist visas, to vacation only, so I’m not a childhood arrival, since I came here at age 19 as a film student on a 5-year visa. And I paid up to $15.000 to do it right, which I’d saved up through working in the Netherlands myself, to cover the required full-time status at out-of-state tuition fees, and the English tests and full medical exams while still in the Netherlands, and the proof of finances for living expenses throughout one’s study, etc. And of course I also paid for my Adjustment-Of-Status the moment I married in 1992.)
And so I did everything legally, and therefore want only justice, not compassion or pity. I got married to the opposite-sex, a US citizen husband, completely against my will and after forced sexual contact I didn’t dare to report, only to become a longterm victim of opposite-sex, (heterosexual/hetero-normative) domestic violence, which was thus primarily gender nonconforming lesbian abuse, and I didn’t even marry the same-sex, which would have been in violation of DOMA, and so could never experience true love in the process neither, losing all my girlfriends along the way.
And why does one have to get married to a US citizen, (family law immigration sponsorship as only legal pathway), to attain US citizenship at all? Why isn’t the US a “land of opportunity,” while it falsely promotes itself to be exactly that?
A land of opportunity would come with the right to pursue income as individual immigrant, not as a spouse of an American, (as natural part of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.) I have naively thought that was the whole idea behind the US, individual rights, as opposed to Europe, where family relations have traditionally been everything instead.
But Europe in reality has an immigration system based on merit, a point system, which does not require a “who you know, by relation,” but “what can you do, as individual” mentality.
(The visa quotas and principles regarding a country’s acceptance of refugees is an altogether different matter than immigration, although often mixed up with it, and should instead be agreed on under international, human rights law, by the UN’s standards.)
Why not create a US immigration system not based on marriage at all? Just merit, (intellectual and emotional intelligence-based, but on the principle of individual rights,) and just leave marriage to people who actually love each other instead.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
My name is Gabriella Bregman, I am a Hollywood-based Writer, Filmmaker and Producer, currently in production of a Feature Documentary about LGBTQ US-Immigration Exclusion-Policy, including my personal story of US immigration discrimination during DOMA, (Defense Of Marriage Act, of 1996–2015,) titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights,’ through my film production company Bregman Films.
The 2001 John Cassavetes Film Retrospective ‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective’ at the Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles is a Bregman Films Production.
I am also the Founder of a Nonprofit Film Organization Queer Female Filmmakers Los Angeles — A Media Site & LA Film Mixers (2018.)
In 2018 I am publishing my story and essays in a book, titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights & Other Essays.’
I identify as a Gender Nonconforming Lesbian, “non-op” Trans-Masculine, and Bi-Racial, from the Netherlands, Los Angeles-based.
My pronouns are: they/them/theirs.
Please check out my other articles on LGBTQ- and Immigration Issues, the State of Women and LGBTQ People in Film, and Lesbian/Queer Film as well as Queer Female Sexuality and Gender Identity at medium.com/@gabriellabregman
A few titles:
Resume/FILM BIO: Gabriella Bregman (2018) (2018)
2018 Update on Documentary ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights’ (2018)
A Note on the State of Women in Film (2016)
A Few Notes On LGBTQ Filmmaking (2017)
Some Thoughts on the State of Lesbian Filmmaking in the US (part 1 of 5) (2018)
John Cassavetes Film Retrospective (2001) (2018)
On ‘Moonlight’ and the Subject of Positive Representation (2017)
My 2018 Oscar Pick for Best Picture (2018)
In Defense of Rationality (2018)
In Defense of Individual Rights (2018)
A Few Notes on US Immigration Exclusion Policies Towards Women- and LGBTQ Immigrants (2014)
The Root Cause Of Misogyny, And The Necessity Of Free Will (Gender Binary System notes, part 1 of 7) (2016)
The Male And Female Brain, And “The Cause” Of Transgenderism(Gender Binary System notes, part 2 of 7) (2016)
The Gender-Binary System Was Created For Population Control And Slavery, Including Sex Slavery (Gender Binary System notes, part 7 of 7)
All Articles Written by Gabriella Bregman (TM). All Pictures Owned by Gabriella Bregman (TM). All Rights Reserved (2018)