From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 1 of 5)
(This 5-part story, renamed ‘From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented,’ originally appeared in its entirety on medium.com/@gabriellabregman as ‘Becoming Undocumented: Getting My Status and Identity Back After DOMA’s Demise’ on Dec. 12, 2015)
(The feature documentary manuscript ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented,’ on which this essay is based, was inspired by Zoe.)
I am writing this as a testament, in case I don’t reach my dream, and in case I will.
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 DREAM-Act 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, legal film student within that.
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” to be 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 success of a film that had just opened there, ‘Glengarry Glenn Ross.’
My ex-husband (E. Bergquist 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 the mid-90s, 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 the mid-90s, 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.
End of Part 1.
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For a Summary of this Story, Click the Link Below:
The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (2015)
For Parts 1 Through 5 of this 5-Part Story, Click the Links Below:
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 1 of 5) (2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 2 of 5) (2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 3 of 5) (2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 4 of 5)(2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 5 of 5) (2017)
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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)
