My Life in The Netherlands Before Immigrating to The US in 1992 (part 2 of 2)
(This story originally appeared on medium.com in its entirety on June 23 2016, and was republished on medium.com in 2 parts on January 28 2017.)
Click here for: My Life in The Netherlands Before Immigrating to The US in 1992 (part 1 of 2)
Click here for: My Life in The Netherlands Before Immigrating to The US in 1992 (part 2 of 2)
I graduated from High School in 1989, at 16, and went to work in factories for the next 3 years to save up the full-time, out-of-state tuition required for a Student Visa, and in 1992 enrolled in the Film Program at Los Angeles City College, hoping to get into UCLA on a visa-extension.
I had also found out that college campus jobs were allowed as well as unpaid film production company internships for school credit and that film festivals could be entered to secure distribution, so I had formed from those potential options an idea that I could possibly live and work in the US.
I’d gotten all my information from the American Embassy in Amsterdam and from the organization they had referred me to in regards to taking the TOEFL Test required for a 5-year Student Visa (F-1,) to test my English language skills. I took the English test, the required medical exam, and even obtained health insurance covering my first year in here.
I arrived at LAX airport in Los Angeles on July 14 1992, from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, psychologically practically a runaway but with all my papers in order and several thousands saved up and to be wired by my parents in increments, and checked in to a youth hostel in Venice Beach with a single backpack and some travelers checks.
After growing up on gritty images of New York in the 70s, and which started to make way for more commercial 80s fare, the 90s by comparison had almost seemed like a slick commercial for Los Angeles somehow, in both film and TV, as well as in music. On Hollywood Boulevard Guns and Roses’ ‘Paradise City’ was still blasting from every dive bar but even the whole boulevard itself was still very dive compared to the Hollywood of the 2000s and I was motivated and inspired.
(I had also arrived in the aftermath of the LA Riots though, had seen the images of Rodney King getting beaten up by the LAPD on CNN on endless replay after I had already been accepted for a 5-year student visa and had bought my plane ticket, and when I got to Los Angeles City College it was still boarded up with the rest of Vermont Ave, and so in a sense I have seen things come full circle again with police brutality against black people, in Ferguson in 2015.
The National Guards pacing up and down the Venice boardwalk fully armed in 1992 was quite a different sight from a way more relaxed scene the previous summer of ’91, the year of my preparation trip on a tourist visa, or visa waiver.)
Though alarmed by the current events I had enrolled and paid my tuition previous to those, and in the end nothing could have stopped me from moving to LA in 1992 and I purchased a typewriter and a Super 8 camera from a Santa Monica pawnshop before I even checked in with the admissions office at LACC, wrote my first screenplay at the hostel and got a tattoo on the boardwalk immediately to celebrate.
I thought I was Jack Kerouac, James Dean and John Cassavetes rolled up in one, (I always fashioned myself after male artists, entirely subconsciously, though some of my favorite artists and writers turned out to be female after all, Anais Nin, Virginia Woolf, Nina Simone, Patti Smith, Kimberly Peirce.)
I dreamed of hitting it big at Sundance after Soderbergh’s big sell in 1989, and the filmmaking talent that came out of the “Sundance class of 1992” just cemented its newly establishing reputation as “go to” place for aspiring filmmakers.
Foreigners at the Venice Beach youth hostel often came in two kinds, what I thought of as “day-trippers,” usually backpackers staying for a few days and traveling to the next destination and eventually back home, and “loners,” who were in it for the long run, traveling to escape home, and you could almost see in their faces they had no end destination, and they’d sometimes concoct quick ways to stay, or would even get excited over some prospect they’d thought was there but really wouldn’t lead them anywhere, sometimes some under the table waiting job at a Santa Monica restaurant, often times an American boyfriend or girlfriend, who wouldn’t stick around.
I personally ended up living at the hostel on the beach for almost the entire first 2 years of my stay, swimming during the day, playing soccer in the sand at night with my fellow Europeans, followed Bill Clinton’s presidential win in late ’93 and caught a first, failed attempt at blowing up the World Trade Center in New York on the shared TV in the hostel’s recreation room, and up until the Northridge earthquake of January 1994 rendered it unlivable and I moved in with coworkers the next day. But within those first 2 years in the US I would be married and divorced as well.
In 1992 Europeans in Venice Beach, (a lot of them on 90-day Tourist Visas only,) were going to the Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas to get married quickly, but I was not one of them. I couldn’t do that, and I had things planned out, with my legal admission into the US on a 5-year Student Visa, through enrollment at Los Angeles City College, to Major in CINEMA, and I had big plans for myself. If anything I wanted to be a wife’s groom, in a tuxedo, but I certainly wasn’t going to be some man’s bride in white.
I was not looking for a dress to put on nor a prince charming to take me away; I was going to be James Dean, renaissance man and total artist, sexual, androgynous and somehow able to transcend genders.
Los Angeles City College, as a community college, didn’t actually offer on-campus living, and I was to look for an apartment upon arrival in ’92, and since moving here alone and with no family, (here or there really as only child too,) and so ended up at the hostel first.
I was planning on a visa extension to transfer to hopefully UCLA, (not getting into a 4 year university directly because of having finished only Junior High, though having a High School diploma from 1989 in the Netherlands,) and the ultimate plan was an MFA in Film, a thesis short, and a feature in Sundance, to “hit it big” from there on in somehow.
But technically I never stood a chance to be, or rather stay, in the US legally though, since students are basically “unskilled people,” (and enter only on non-immigrant visas, so not eligible for work permits, or not right away anyway, other than a Social Security number for on-campus work only and unpaid internships in one’s field of study,) and so without immediate family, or opposite sex marriage only as sponsor option under LGBT discriminatory legislation like DOMA before 2015, can’t immigrate.
I would have been good to immigrate if I had left after June 26 2015 though, when DOMA got struck down and the US legalized same-sex marriage federally and so for immigration purposes as well, but even still in 2015 no individual rights will lead to a pathway to US citizenship, which is what fair and comprehensive immigration would really look like, obeying the constitution in the process.
In one of my first classes at LACC my heterosexual, white male teacher of History of Documentary Film warned us about the incredibly small chances of “making it” in Hollywood, and calculated within the first 15 minutes that out of our whole class that meant none of us would stand a chance, (and as if that was going to deter any of the international students after dropping all that out-of-state tuition for a full-time film education anyway.)
It was meant to be some hard ass speech on the harsh realities of seeking employment within the Hollywood film industry, somewhat akin to army bootcamp or so, but gender differences hadn’t even come into the equation in his speech, nor the differences in the struggle to make it in Hollywood between white people and everybody else, not to mention immigrants, real foreigners, without actual work permits or citizenship.
In hindsight this idea of artists being able to transcend genders, or at least society’s expectations of them, backfired completely on me of course, as the reality of women being actually able to work in film turns out to be so dismal in 2015 still that the ACLU had to step in to file a gender parity lawsuit against Hollywood. (And LGBTQ people within all of that have mostly only been able to work if staying in a “glass closet,” Hollywood’s version being “see-through.”)
But like I said, nothing could have stopped me from giving filmmaking in Hollywood a shot, gender parity, racial discrimination, LGBTQ invisibility nor a “broken” immigration system, and even after 25 years in Los Angeles, watching the tiring new masses of aspiring actors and directors dropping in by the busloads, and undocumented myself for most of it, and now “out of the shadows” about it, and technically without income nor means to income legally still, my savings dwindling, my energy burning out, my youth gone and love lost, I am still fighting for my one shot at it all.
In Hollywood it’s all about “making it,” “big,” and in “one shot” preferably, and with immigration it is necessarily a rush job against deadlines, rather than living and working according to natural, human development, and most certainly is a “one shot” deal as well.
Click here for: My Life in The Netherlands Before Immigrating to The US in 1992 (part 1 of 2)
Click here for: My Life in The Netherlands Before Immigrating to The US in 1992 (part 2 of 2)
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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)
