From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 3 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)
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 in, 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 particular fear that my US husband has instilled in me, especially the second one, and completely enabled to do as he pleased by this “broken” US immigration system, with its’ focus on family and spousal immigration as citizenship option entirely, is a different kind of fear altogether, and has been a gradual and subtle process.
And it’s 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.
Looking back on my life I can’t even understand how much abuse I put up with, not only because I had no choice as an undocumented person, but simply because I was conditioned by society to take crap from men. Even as individually minded as I had been all my life, as a trans-masculine person, going my own way from day one, thinking I was ahead of the game by moving to the US, while still very young, with big dreams and big ideas. Even I got conditioned to extremes to take misogynist assault after assault before I fully awoke to the principle of my basic human rights, and to feminism as a natural result.
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, 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, and I looked and dressed the part throughout my life as well, but my husband took up that much of my energy. Being around him and keeping afloat, financially and emotionally, 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 LGBTQ 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.)
End of Part 3.
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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)
