From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 2 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)
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 he 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 Film 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.)
End of Part 2.
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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)
