2020 Update on Feature Documentary ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights’
By Gabriella Orlando Bregman, August 22, 2020
There’s finally a glimmer of hope with the Joe Biden — Kamala Harris team gearing up for the November elections, and it was really nice watching the Democratic National Convention, but overall it has been a beyond exhausting, panic-induced time for me as a trans-masculine, gender nonconforming person and immigrant during this pandemic and the protests and police presence, and a couple of earthquakes in Los Angeles. On top I’m still dealing with pretty serious dental issues from a physical attack I suffered in late 2019 in Hollywood, and which I cannot really afford.
(Just as I had finished writing this piece, which happened to be two days before what would have been Marsha P. Johnson’s 75th birthday, and whom I was getting ready to commemorate privately by re-watching some documentaries on her, I found out three transgender women and social media influencers got attacked on Hollywood Blvd on Monday night, August 17, in front of a crowd who did nothing and even cheered on. They fortunately survived it, and two arrests were made, with one guy still on the loose. I’m very surprised arrests were even made and victims were not mis-gendered but I know that’s just the police trying to keep up their image in the name of progress. I’ve witnessed and experienced so many attacks myself in my 28 years in Los Angeles and the police did nothing for LGBTQ people.
A protest march by Black Future Project was held on Thursday evening, August 20, in Hollywood to draw attention once more to the fact that transgender people, and particularly Black trans-women, are being disproportionately abused, attacked and murdered in the US and the whole world over, and to mostly the indifference if not downright joy of everyday society. And this seriously needs to stop.)
Most of my 28 years in the US have been anxiety ridden really but this has been a whole new level of anxiety and I definitely have death on my mind quite a bit these days.
I don’t expect my American acquaintances to remember this, so I’ll remind you hereby that people without legal status in particular, and despite paying taxes (some with real Social Security numbers too, like myself,) are not eligible for benefits, including healthcare, and so did not get any financial assistance in the form of stimulus packages, business loans or unemployment money during the pandemic.
(We also can’t vote, so I doubly hope you will all partake in your civil responsibility as US citizens and vote this administration the hell out of office. Also keep in mind there are people living in the US legally and are contributing to the US economy and society who are not allowed to vote and who are still very directly impacted by everything this current president does.)
So I did not sign up for any emergency relief of any sort myself and I’ve just been very fortunate to be able to pay my bills, compared to many people, all over the country. And even compared to what’s going on in the high-rises in my immediate surroundings with moving trucks coming and going at all hours.
And in some part it’s because I’ve learned to live below my means, but this obviously does not grant me immunity and when it comes to Hollywood especially it’s not really a matter of if anymore but more a matter of when.
This doesn’t mean I have money, quite the opposite, I just don’t have the luxuries that most people in Hollywood have. In fact, I have no real luxuries at all, and in some cases not even basic necessities, not even a kitchen or a bathroom of my own. Besides my film production office, and my spouse’s music rehearsal space, I have no real home to “stay-at-home.” My “luxury” has been location only, and what that has traditionally come with, a certain access to people in the film industry that most people have not always had, though the internet had changed a lot of that dynamic already. And now with the pandemic things are looking horrible, both in the industry and in the city itself.
On some level I’ve personally practiced a certain sustainability long before I knew what that word even meant, and I just thought that was what independent filmmaking was supposed to be, keeping costs low, being practical, and most importantly keeping it real. Hollywood has of course never been kind to independent filmmakers truly, and I do realize I have been rather naive and a bit of a purist, in regards to both the whole industry and probably to life itself.
Most of my younger neighbors, and I can’t even call them neighbors even though that’s technically what they are of course, are pretty much part of the gentrification of Hollywood though and a real arrogant bunch, a lot of them internet influencers and branders and marketers. And a lot of them aren’t really practicing social distancing and mask wearing, or clearly very reluctantly and gradually only, nor did they partake in any protests or show themselves to be on the right side of history, so I have to admit that I can’t feel that horrible that some of them are moving out. They’re not the first ones to become homeless, they’re relocating because they were living above their means.
And then there’s been a bunch of even younger people, mostly not living here but who clearly have time on their hands during the pandemic, who have been racing up and down Hollywood Blvd at night and having big gatherings and parties, because it’s still damn Hollywood.
So my day to day life is very much in danger and on many levels, and I definitely have death on my mind.
In hindsight of course moving to Hollywood to be a filmmaker and then finding it’s impossible because of all the corruption is kind of like moving to a whorehouse and being shocked to find prostitution. Once you understand how much money and power is at stake you understand that people were never going to give you a fair chance. But I really didn’t understand it when I applied for film school in 1992 at 19 and then got let in on a student visa from the Netherlands.
And once immigration “let’s you in” to the US, it actually becomes nearly impossible to get out, legally even. It’s like a marriage of sorts, except an even way more serious financial and legal contract, US Citizenship, (in which you symbolically are the foreign wife to the US government in ways, and certainly meaning not in legal and financial control over your own life,) but the more you’ve invested your time and money and energy in it the harder it is to try to walk away. And the more you get ripped off and lied to the more you decide to fight for what they stole from you.
Fighting to stay in the US for me isn’t even completely about wanting to be in the US anymore, even though I was initially in part also attracted to move to the US because of what it represented, as a land of freedom and equality and opportunity. And I would still want to believe in these things and do have renewed hope at the possibility of a Biden — Harris administration, life in the US has in fact been one long sobering reality, that’s for sure.
But in reality it also has really become the only home I’ve truly known, and feel comfortable in, and I would be extremely disoriented and most likely unhappy in the Netherlands, or Europe in general, after having lived in the US for the last 28 years. And certainly not because Europe is a worse place neither, because I know in reality it’s not, but because I have come to know and understand myself truly in the US and not Europe. The emotional, and even cultural, ties are here, and not there anymore. And then there’s travel bans to and from Europe because of the pandemic these days anyway, so I couldn’t go back if wanted to, but truly the fight is now moreover a matter of principle, for justice, for proving “your innocence as an immigrant” and getting any wrongdoing restored.
If I really had just wanted to save myself at all costs I would surely have tried to go back to the Netherlands in a heartbeat, and they would have pretty good healthcare there, which could be lifesaving at this time. And that’s still speaking from a place of privilege of course, since for many immigrants “going back to where they came from” would mean by definition being put in a worse situation, as their reasons for moving to the US are often a lot more urgent than wanting to be a filmmaker. Even if my reasons for becoming an artist, as a trans-masculine and gender nonconforming person and lesbian, were sincere and even severe in 1992.
All of this said, there is actually very little information available on the COVID-19 related deaths of undocumented immigrants in the US. Just as any deaths of LGBTQ undocumented people in the US in general are highly underreported.
In other words and to get more to the point, the bodies and identities and belongings of undocumented immigrants, and particularly LGBTQ ones, are made to disappear. And this obviously worries me a great deal.
My nearly three decades of living as a struggling artist in Los Angeles have taken a toll on my health by now, and I am still in probably one of the worst places to be during a pandemic, on every level really, in Hollywood.
But that is the choice I made in life and as always I have just tried to make the best of it. I moved to Los Angeles in 1992 for the right reasons, to be a writer and a filmmaker, not to be a celebrity or to get rich in any superficial way, but as an artist, as a seeker of truth, and yes, as someone who wants and needs to make a living doing what they love, and who wants and needs to be recognized for their creativity and talent, and as a human being. But it was never an ego trip for me personally and if I go under in this country it is ultimately because I was “murdered by society,” and certainly not because of my own moral character, for my conscience is clean.
My own survival is not even truly what’s at stake here, even though I have absolutely no wish to die. I would wish my life to be accurately remembered in death however, in regards to my gender identity and sexual orientation and the true circumstances around my US immigration that is, just as I have been fighting for many years now to have it be accurately represented in life.
But truly it’s mainly my work that I feel needs to live on, because I know it can and will help other gender nonconforming and transgender people, and artists and thinkers. Information and knowledge and proof of lived experience, and inspiration and reassurance and hope and courage and clarity, is what LGBTQ people, especially gender nonconforming and transgender people, still desperately need and they will find it in my work.
As a trans-masculine gender nonconforming person and lesbian, growing up in the 1980s in the Netherlands and moving to the US in the early 90s, my own mental and physical survival depended on it, on art, on watching art and making art.
Inclusion, visibility, representation, weren’t words in those days, not in the film industry nor in real life, and the only way to not be annihilated by society as an LGBTQ person was to “make it” somehow. Wanting to become “rich and famous” was for a gender nonconforming or transgender person, in the 1990s and before that at least, ultimately not much more than a way out of getting erased or murdered by society exactly. It’s not something you consciously thought out like that but it’s what it turned out to be for many.
And let this be known all over Hollywood, that for many gender nonconforming and transgender people creativity and filmmaking was never about role-play truly but was in fact the only way to be our authentic selves at all, because society-at-large, the world over, simply won’t let us be who we actually are.
Before medical and legal transitioning became “widely” available to gender nonconforming and transgender people, and even before language and representation actually existed, expressing our gender through our behavior is really all we had to go on.
I don’t mean to harken on stereotypes neither, and certainly not every “sensitive,” or rather non-aggressive, boy playing with dolls or dresses is a trans-woman in the making, and not every female-assigned person roughhousing in overalls ends up being a trans-man. She could just end up becoming the next worst thing according to the system, a self-sufficient, strong woman, and the “sensitive” boy just a non-violent, functioning dude.
All I’m saying is there’s a hell of lot more gender nonconforming and transgender talent in Hollywood than Hollywood could ever want to include on its’ best day, and I know that for a fact. Of course all the women of Pose just proved that at the Emmy’s this year again.
But to not be let in, in Hollywood itself, as LGBTQ people and as some of the most creative people on earth, is of course doubly ironic, and also comes as no surprise if you are honest about what Hollywood is really all about.
Most of this country has supposedly never (knowingly) met a transgender person, while in Los Angeles transgender people still live on the streets everywhere. That’s no coincidence. Hollywood, just like New York and San Francisco, has since long been an escape for LGBTQ people, and often for reasons of actual survival. Metropolitan living and creativity have been going hand in hand in LGBTQ history for a very long time, and most often out of pure necessity. It rarely pays off but it’s often better than wasting away in any place you were born but doesn’t want you there.
But moving to a big city to escape the bigotry and violence in smaller communities, and sensing and hoping to find a somewhat more accepting environment in the city, and then not being able to thrive in any creative industry at all financially, is one of the reasons why the streets of Los Angeles have always been full of poor LGBTQ people.
It’s an actual job to have to teach cisgender people to treat us with some dignity and basic respect and it’s a demeaning job at that but we have to educate heterosexual and cis-normative people on certain LGBTQ issues, because our very survival and livelihood depends on it.
This also ended up being one of the main reasons I openly took the transgender label, even though I’m not transitioning. (A risky position to take, I know.) To educate cisgender people, and even transgender people, as a trans-masculine and gender nonconforming person myself, that it can actually be okay to identify with a certain gender in your brain and to have a body that supposedly does not “match up” with it, certainly morally speaking.
And that being transgender does not equate having gender dysphoria, even if they often will exist in relationship to each other, and that it is just as okay to transition as it is to not transition or to partially transition. That transitioning should be a highly individual decision, and free from any outside pressure, medically, legally, socially, sexually, etc. and that information and education on this should be available and not stigmatized.
That there are different levels and even different kinds of dysphoria, like social dysphoria and body dysphoria, and that each is triggered by different circumstances.
That it is just a primarily hormonal condition, caused mostly in prenatal development, and varies in intensity and complexity from person to person. That it is not a mental illness but can surely create one if we don’t get treated, socially and medically and legally, for who we actually know ourselves to be.
To educate that it is not first and foremost a political identity, but only becomes one by necessity, since we have to fight politically for what are supposed to be our basic human rights. That certain non-Western cultures and pre-scientific cultures alike have acknowledged and accepted our existence for centuries.
That it is both rooted in a hormonal condition and naturally becomes a personal identity, as all sense of gender is actually rooted in sex hormones over genitalia, including in cis-gender people. (It is the very reason that sex and gender on an obvious level matter much more in adulthood than in very early age and in ripe old age.)
That the labels we use to define ourselves are only words, which can and will change over time, and the purpose of words is supposed to be to clarify, not to confuse.
And most importantly, that to strictly enforce the idea that being transgender and having gender dysphoria is one and the same thing, or cannot go without each other, and needs to be treated or fixed in order to appear “normal” is actually also a definition of being a “gender essentialist.” No different than cisgender people who claim transgenderism is a mental illness, are gender essentialists.
(These people are in fact “sex essentialists,” and not really gender essentialist but people of course don’t differentiate between being a “gender essentialist” and a “sex essentialist” for the very reason that they cannot distinguish the difference between sex and gender. Sex being a person’s biological characteristics at birth, and gender being a person sense of “gender/sex” as experienced in one’s brain, which has male and female sex hormones located there.)
Either way, gender essentialists, as all misogynists, claim basically that “biology is destiny,” biology in this case meaning purely the body and its’ existing sex characteristics, versus the human intellect, the capacity for critical thinking.
But anyone who forcefully tries to align sex with gender, and who enforces strict social roles based on sex or gender, is either way buying into a white Colonialist lie, the gender binary as only legal and valid way of being that is, which in reality was an enforced legal system for the specific purposes of (pro)creating a surplus population to serve the interests of the rich and powerful in charge.
I personally ended up creating a lot of my work as a writer and documentary filmmaker to make my case as a (F-1/ I-20) ‘legal-entry’ International Student of Film from the Netherlands and (gender-nonconforming lesbian) victim of US (heterosexual male) spousal abuse. And so to prove I was the victim of LGBTQ-immigration exclusion policies, including the Defense Of Marriage Act and the now stalled Violence Against Women Act, which has historically excluded LGBTQ people.
This is not exactly what I had in mind when I initially moved here and I actually started out in narrative filmmaking, which I still love as well, but had to make a switch to documentary, or rather personal documentary, in order to be able to tell my own story for now.
My Adjustment-Of-Status process, (that is, sponsorship to become a US citizen, through an American spouse in this case,) was started in November of 1992, just a few months after my arrival in Los Angeles and enrollment in the Film Program at Los Angeles City College and coercion into marriage, by my ex-husband E.B. (one of the screenwriters of the original “Fast and the Furious”) but was never finalized.
And this coerced marriage and half-finished US citizenship sponsorship was entered into without any lawyer or consultation or eyewitnesses even. It was never made clear to the Foreign Student Advisor at LACC, nor any Consulate or Embassy, by my knowledge, nor even my parents or anyone at all, except to his parents. Nor were his intentions very clear to me personally, at age 19 and having just barely arrived in the US, during the chaos of the LA uprising of 1992 in response to the injustice against Rodney King on top, and living in a hostel in Venice Beach in 1992.
I mean, I could understand the sexual pursuit from him, not then but now anyway, but I still can see no real valid reason for insisting on marrying a 19-year old foreigner just months after their arrival in the US. And there was no sex before marriage even. It’s not the 1950s or anything and so why insist on marriage with someone you don’t know in the slightest, not mentally or emotionally, nor even physically.
Of course today he would probably twist it all around and claim I was after him for marriage, never mind that I was a lesbian and trans-masculine, and not that I owed any explanation for my clear lack of interest in him, and never mind that I was here legally and had plenty of time to make up my mind about if I wanted to become a US citizen even. This would probably not even enter an American’s mind, that someone could move to the US, and maybe have enough sufficiency of their own somehow, financially, educationally, or even family, and might not even want to stay for good. This would not make any person by definition a good or bad immigrant or a good or bad person. There are as many ways an immigration journey could develop as there immigrants themselves. In reality, you couldn’t even truly understand where any immigrant is coming from, in terms of their reasons for moving to the US, unless you actually understood the immigration system first, as well as international business for that matter.
I mean, being a filmmaker was my dream, and Hollywood seemed to be the solution to that in 1992, and so arriving in Los Angeles seemed like the start of life itself almost, but for a 19 year old student “for good” still seems like an awful long time, and that’s what US citizenship is supposed to represent. I simply wasn’t sure how my life was going to unfold but I did go through the legal channels to get here and be here and I have never deceived anyone about my intentions.
Again, not that that makes me better than an immigrant who does not have those options neither of course, and I am still speaking as a person with considerable privilege, as a former international film student and immigrant from the Netherlands, but it’s just that a woman and an immigrant are both considered “by nature guilty,” and so this compounds for female immigrants, and even if I’m not really a woman of course, and becomes even more complicated yet for LGBTQ people and People of Color, etc.
The way the system wants you to believe it is that a woman is by nature “in need” somehow and a man by nature “self-sufficient.” Similarly an immigrant is considered by nature “in need” and the US by nature “self-sufficient.” The reality is infinitely more complicated than that, but I can assure you that I personally did not want or need to be married to this guy, regardless of whether I wanted to stay in the US for good, and that at 19 I truly didn’t even have a clue what for good even meant.
I do know this though, the only reason I don’t have an actual degree in Film is because it would have meant having to keep taking classes with my abuser every day, and so I prematurely dropped out, thereby violating the terms of my student visa, even though I was still legally married, and so not Out-Of-Status for US immigration purposes.
I pretty much got over Film School when I properly discovered John Cassavetes really but that’s absolutely no excuse. I moved to the US legally after I got accepted into a Film Program that was to lead to an Associate Degree and then would make me eligible for transfer to a 4-year university on a student visa extension. I had to go through quite a process to even get an initial student visa to begin with, and it took a lot of hard work to save up for out-of-state tuition to afford my dream of film school at the time. All of that was suddenly taken away in a coerced 15-minute ceremony at City Hall in downtown LA in ’92.
And so me and my current US spouse, (whose own conspiracy theorist right-wing family gives us enough resistance as is,) have been left to pick up this guy’s mess ever since. The mess of ultimately not having US citizenship while living in the US obviously, because of having fallen Out-Of-Status only after my Student Visa itself expired, in 1997, and by that time already divorced.
My creative partner and I are still working on our feature documentary named ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights,’ the personal story of how my trans-masculine, gender nonconforming and lesbian identity exactly ended up compromising my legal immigration status for decades and derailed my chances for any potential filmmaking career after attending film school in the US in the early 1990s, (from the Netherlands.) The film is produced through my film production company Bregman Films.
It’s been kind of weird and bittersweet editing all this footage of pre-pandemic existence actually, and I know I never even got enough and exactly the right footage to begin with. I even lost very crucial footage, mainly due to my uncertain living situations over the years, but I also have some very valuable footage still.
I also found out the hard way that when you’re transgender and a little older, definitely Gen-X like myself and generations before, you for the most part can’t really go back in your past and expect to find people who truly support you. The story of younger people coming out as transgender and getting support in their transitioning is really a newer story and not one that applies to my life unfortunately.
That’s why you won’t see any talking head interviews in my film neither, not from eyewitnesses nor experts, and the documentary has really just taken a very personal approach, featuring mostly myself and the people in my life in very organic ways. There are no real eyewitnesses to my life in the past anymore, other than my spouse (on paper) and creative partner. There are only official documents, personal pictures and letters, social media and my newer communities, and my writing and film footage.
There will still be explanations of immigration policies and discrimination, since I’ve come to understand quite a bit on it and it needs to be known, because people understand very little about immigration practices, and especially how LGBTQ immigrants have been actually discriminated against for the exact same reasons as LGBTQ Americans.
And I’m self-publishing two books still, ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights and Other Essays,’ on which the documentary is more or less based, and ‘Notes for a New Independent Film Movement’ for which l have to finish up a few more essays.
I’m also publishing an unexpected, new multi-part article on Medium soon.
Because of these prior creative endeavors I’m still taking it a little slow on the film criticism and theory publication The Auteur, to be launched on Medium later this year at medium.com/theauteur through our nonprofit film organization The Auteur.
My name is Gabriella Orlando Bregman, my pronouns are they/them.
All my work can be found at medium.com/@gabriellabregman
All Rights Reserved (2020)
(Pictures by Gabriella Orlando Bregman and Mario Luza.)
