TRANS-MASCULINE IN HOLLYWOOD
(A New Book of Auto-Ethnographical Essays)
By Orlando G. Bregman, Sept. 20 2023
(They/He)
A Special Dedication
During the last 2-plus years off Social Media I lost my mother Gertrude “Truus” Bregman-Van Der Kloor (R.I.P.) to COVID-19 in the Netherlands, in the pre-vaccine times, on December 2 of 2020, (now buried next to my father Abraham “Bram” Bregman, who died of a heart attack in 2015).
And in the LGBTQ community we lost LGBTQ rights pioneer, and husband to the late Richard Frank Adams, my Hollywood neighbor and Australian friend Anthony Corbett Sullivan (R.I.P.) to a heart attack on November 10 of 2020.
Anthony Sullivan was, for lack of better wording, the only other Westerner I could find amongst a supposed “11 million undocumented immigrants”, who was also LGBTQ and excluded from citizenship in the US solely based on that LGBTQ identity.
Anthony Sullivan did eventually get his Green Card from his 1975 marriage to Richard Adams in 2016, along with a pardon from the Obama Administration, after DOMA was struck down as unconstitutional in 2015.
I discuss our cases in my essay On Being Mistaken For An Undocumented Immigrant, As Former F-1 Dutch Film Student.
(The same-sex marriage story of Anthony Sullivan and Ricard Adams is covered in Tom Miller’s excellent documentary Limited Partnership.)
My next essay will explain how Westerners immigrate to the US by entering the US legally and on valid papers, with usually high-skilled work visas or student visas, and only later become “undocumented” or rather Out-Of-Status, due to being LGBTQ during and before DOMA (Defense Of Marriage Act) or lack of protections against exploitation against US citizen spouses and employers, now mostly covered by VAWA (Violence Against Women Act and other Crime-based Visas.) it will also explain how actual undocumented immigrants, (and not to be confused with actual refugees) usually from poor countries and backgrounds, will change all this information around in the media, to drag Westerners (European Union members with special US-EU tax treaties included) down because of their own troubles, in some cases potentially deliberately. I stand with actual refugees and asylum seekers politically of course, as human beings have the international right to flee government persecution and war zones accordong to the 1952 Geneva Convention. And so I stand with Ukraine.
The essay is called: “All Of Them Witches” (Social Security Numbers vs Individual Tax Payers Numbers) (2023)
A special thank you to immigration lawyer Leon Wildes for John Lennon Vs The USA, which besides revealing how the powers-that-be ultimately tried to thwart his US citizenship process, (that is, Richard Nixon feared he would lose his reelection because Lennon had great influence over American youth culture, especially during the Vietnam war,) also explains a lot about US immigration law itself. And ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio and activist Bamby Salcedo of the TransLatina Coalition, for inspiration. Even Angelina Jolie for being instrumental in the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA 2022). And to a former friend, Zoe.
And always those who fought before me.
(During the Covid pandemic I discovered the story of Eve Adams, in Jonathan Ned Katz’ The Daring Life And Dangerous Times of Eve Adams, with the original text of Lesbian Love, and the videos of Nelson Sullivan, now preserved on YouTube by the 5NinthAvenueProject.)
The film world lost 2 major voices during the early pandemic times of 2020 in Jean-Luc Godard (R.I.P.) and Peter Bogdanovich (R.I.P.) And the transgender film community gained 2 major voices with Daniel Sea and Elliot Page, who also just published his memoir Pageboy on June 6.
Also more recently 2 friends I made during my John Cassavetes Film Retrospective back in 2001, Bo Harwood (R.I.P. 2022) (John Cassavetes’ Music Composer) and Lelia Goldoni (R.I.P. 2023) (Lead Actress in John Cassavetes’ first film Shadows). And my Facebook friend and fellow Documentary Filmmaker Nancy Buirski (R.I.P. 2023.)
And Rest In Power Rasheeda Williams, AKA Koko Da Doll or Hollywood Koko, of D. Smith’s Kokomo City.
NEW BOOK: TRANS-MASCULINE IN HOLLYWOOD
Over the course of the last 3 years I wrote a slim, auto-ethnographic book of essays, or “memoir,” titled Trans-Masculine In Hollywood (30 Years Of Hardship And Exclusion).
Trans-Masculine In Hollywood mostly chronicles, in essay form, my journey as a former academic international film student (F-1), from the Netherlands, and ending up being excluded from lawful US employment and so any chance of succeeding in the independent film industry, ultimately because of being both a foreigner and trans-masculine in the US, but remaining an artist throughout and becoming an LGBTQ activist by necessity in the process.
One is never truly a foreigner as a Westerner in the US, and certainly not “illegal”, even according to legal treaties between the Western countries but the US treats anyone not born in the US as “the other” regardless.
I am an auto-ethnographic essay writer, and an experimental documentary filmmaker, and I had been a writer in my youth and studied film in the Netherlands as well before moving to the US in 1992 at age 19, after getting accepted into a Film School in Los Angeles, while still working in my hometown of Leiden. My film school, or video production classes in Utrecht, the Netherlands, helped transfer school transcripts and short films.
An academic, international F-1 Student Visa, especially for Film School in Los Angeles, required a high GPA, besides plenty of money, and country of origin surely comes into play as well, with the Netherlands being a high priority country, because of our credit ranking by the World Bank as one of the 10 richest countries in the world, and the 4th highest citizenship quality, including overall human rights, quality of living and freedom of movement.
And it is one of 30 countries to have tax treaties with the US, and is part of the European Union, in fact a founder of the European Union, and a NATO country and so ally to the US, and has been so for over 400 years.
There had always been a significant American and British presence and influence in my hometown, the university town of Leiden, from its’ colonialist past in giving the English pilgrims refuge for over a decade before helping them sail out on the Mayflower. Leiden was also the birthplace of Dutch independence, and along with it the practicing of Protestantism, from Catholic Spain.
And my family was related to famous Dutch cabaret singer and stage theater impresario Wim Sonneveld, from his paternal’s grandmother’s side. He briefly worked in Hollywood in the 1950s as well, after being sponsored by MGM.
So I initially had thought that as a Westerner I was just an Expat, and as a European Union member could come and go as I pleased, and as filmmaker I was only in Hollywood to “make it, big”, and that was all there was to “immigration” for me, while I did everything legally though and it had been a lengthy and costly process getting accepted into a Film School in the US as academic international student (F-1) from the Netherlands to begin with.
An F-1 comes with work-study options however, through a Curricular Training Program, and an Optional Training Program, upon graduating.
But as I found out the hard way US immigration was considerably more discriminatory towards LGBTQ foreigners like myself and I had therefore miscalculated my chances in Hollywood.
A fellow film student at Los Angeles City College, one of the screenwriters of the original The Fast and Furious, Erik Bergquist, coerced me into marriage however, within the first school semester, right after my arrival, and without any witnesses and anyone being notified.
And he started my Adjustment-Of-Status (to Lawful Permanent Resident, or Green Card process) immediately, which canceled out my parents’ school sponsorship and my Dutch child tax credit, so my finances.
He also consolidated our finances for immigration purposes on top, leaving me without the cash I had on me to begin with, through a joint bank account.
So I got hired legally on my Employment Authorization Document, or work permit, and my Social Security Number, at the Laemmle Theatres, where I was employed for nearly a decade, the 1990s, at their Santa Monica location, and where I produced a major John Cassavetes Film Retrospective in 2001.
And in that regard my story of a lesbian and trans-masculine film student from the Netherlands in Los Angeles being coerced into an immigration marriage by an American heterosexual male after repeated sexual harassment and stalking from the beginning of school is in reality at least partially an actual Me Too story, even if trans-masculine people and lesbians and non-Americans have been kept out of the sexual assault narrative and protective legislations.
In particular, straight white male Americans, and specifically the politicians and legislation who represents them, have tried to reverse my immigration situation to simultaneously reverse my motivation for being in the US.
They had found the narrative of a legal student of film from the Netherlands, a Western country, and confident as artist and in my masculinity and my love for women, and with artist family members famous in the Netherlands, too terrifying of a prospect and had to change my motivations to suit their colonialist gazes and heterosexual male need.
They had to reverse my rejections, sexually and intellectually, of them. They had to make me out to be poor, anonymous, without high ambitions or self-esteem and from a poor and underdeveloped or uneducated or non-Western background.
They had to squeeze me out of Hollywood because of fear they’d finally recognize a true artist, someone who allows themselves vulnerability and honesty as measurement for greatness rather than primarily skills or even just connections.
This erasure of minority identities is of course the very discrimination I have been fighting against as an artist and a queer human being my whole life.
This is also how up until recently genius photographer and potential queer person and financially strapped artist Vivian Maier was reversed into a nanny with a camera hobby, and how Alice Guy-Blache as first female narrative director was stifled in the film industry, all the way down to my own fellow countryman Vincent Van Gogh, who was made into the prime example of the ultimate crazy loser who just happened to also be a genius painter. There’s also very good reason to believe he was murdered, instead of the much favored and promoted “mad genius” who committed suicide story.
This is also how they reverse the vision of John Cassavetes as a vulnerable and truthful artist of the human condition into an unprofessional drunk who somehow didn’t want to bother with funding his films the proper, expensive and wasteful Hollywood way. This is also how they had to keep my famous uncle Wim Sonneveld in the closet in the Netherlands in his lifetime and play his gay identity off as uncharacteristically Dutch flamboyance that just comes with the territory of being an artist somehow.)
Trans-Masculine In Hollywood is also simply a study of an artist at work, artistic integrity clashing with the commercial approach to American filmmaking, with some of the essays directly addressing the problems and potential solutions to the current state of the US independent film industry.
It sums up my thoughts and experiences around gender identity and sexual orientation, and art and politics and philosophy, and love, sex, drugs, etc., and follows my personal and creative life in cramped apartments, shitty creative offices and on the streets of Los Angeles.
I believe the “cause” of transgender identity mainly to be testosterone, specifically testosterone excess in the case of trans-masculinity, and lack of testosterone in the case of trans-feminine, in the brain during prenatal development.
As a trans-masculine person who loves women, basically a straight guy, but because I’m not transitioning medically, more or less a trans-masculine and gender nonconforming person and lesbian.
There is not a damn thing I’m required to do about it legally speaking, except for demand my basic human rights.
Gender dysphoria is not the equivalent of being transgender anymore than being anxious about any part of your identity is equivalent of your identity. Like one does not have to suffer from hysteria in order to prove one is sufficiently female just because some pseudo doctors equated femaleness with hysteria, in order to exclude women to their philosophical right to life by suggesting they are inherently irrational, or basically crazy.
I obviously acknowledge anyone else’s gender dysphoria as real and valid and recognize that for many transgender people transitioning is a very real and urgent remedy to their condition.
Since I personally recognize the strict gender binary to be a Christian invention, rooted in an Adam and Eve origin story, to promote exclusive and fertile heterosexuality, and female inferiority, for the purposes of population control, I do not personally feel compelled to transition, or at least do not find it very important, and certainly do not acknowledge it as the right and only way to be transgender or validly male.
These religious fables were created and recreated, by the British Crown and Church included, to “kill the Indian and save the man,” in an effort to wipe out indigenous populations to take their land and resources and bury their knowledge and wisdoms about nature, and includes their understanding of gender.
Western, or rather particularly Christian (vs. secular and even scientific evidence) misrepresentation of transgender and gender nonconforming identities exists intentionally, and was created specifically, for the purposes of population control, and ultimately resource control.
It is therefore, in my opinion, of crucial importance to identify a scientific cause behind transgender identity, for reasons of legal policy and social acceptance.
I’ve read a lot about the extreme male brain, through testosterone excess, and its’ connection to autism, by Simon Baron Cohen, knighted Sir in order to use his research for England itself rather than for the people who actually need it it seems, and I could even be high functioning autistic myself, or at least have an extremely systemizing brain that can make a lot of connections based on sufficient information input. (I would estimate that the opposite of that would be an extreme female or empathizing brain, under the influence of less testosterone and more estrogen, and which could easily lead to depression.)
These are just scientific models and neither Simon Baron Cohen nor myself equates the male brain with exclusively cis-gender males and the female brain with exclusively cis-gender females, and recognizes many variations on these models in a different people of any sex or gender.
I made the initial connection between autistic behavior and transgender people myself after recognizing a high overlap between the two based on the testimonials of self-identified autistic transgender people.
So my philosophy if you will is that of self-ownership based on rationality, that is secular, and scientific truth, (surely instilled in me by my Dutch, secular upbringing as well,) and it has always saved my life, or at least my mind. It has also saved me from experiencing any severe gender dysphoria, and any discrepancy I have felt between my masculine brain and androgynous unfeminine female body has been experienced as a disconnect but not any physical or psychological discomfort.
My only real dysphoria has been at society failing to recognize me as male and an actual artist and merit-based immigrant, besides Dutch, in the US.
Whereas when I was growing up in the Netherlands I couldn’t wait to get to the US, to make it as a filmmaker in Hollywood and live an openly queer life while surrounded by Los Angeles women, as if to escape the gender roles assigned to me at birth by virtue of being supposedly female, and live the life of the male artist with a sexual interest in women that I knew myself to be.
I came to Los Angeles, inspired by James Dean and Jim Morrison. I came here to be Jack Kerouac and Dennis Hopper and a bunch of other guys, and eventually found the artistic and personal voice of my own sensitive, trans-masculine self. In a way Hollywood was supposed to be my transition.
And while I’ve mostly up-played my film influences, and American independent film influences specifically, like Terrence Malick and Dennis Hopper and Martin Scorsese and most definitely John Cassavetes, and Cinema Vérité and Avant Garde, Wiseman, the Maysles brothers, Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, as well as the Italian Neo-Realists, Pasolini especially, and Andre Bazin and The French New Wave, and eventually Gus Van Sant and New Queer Cinema, I’ve actually gotten all my more immediate and even graphic information about LGBTQ identity, especially in regards to sexual orientation but also gender identity, from classic literature, besides other queer, underground and counter-cultures, with many artists and writers historically having been gay or lesbian or bi-sexual, or presenting as gender nonconforming.
From Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin and Artaud, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Jean Genet, Pasolini, to the Beats, Burroughs and Corso, particularly Allen Ginsberg, and beyond, to finally the contemporary queer writers, and with many centering their novels or memoirs or journals, around their identities and loves and their desires and their politics, so I as a young, queer person and an artist, initially discovering queer literature and the Beat writers in High School in the Netherlands, started journaling my own love life and sex life, and thoughts and drugs and travels all over Europe and experiences later in LA, all joy and struggles, desires, vulnerabilities and my whole politics and philosophy. All because of queer writers.
And so in a way Trans-Masculine In Hollywood is even a full circle return of sorts to my love for journaling, which started in earnest in my early days in the US in the early 90’s, when taking film classes at Los Angeles City College in Hollywood, with intention to transfer to UCLA because James Dean and Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek had attended Film School there, and while living in a European youth hostel in Venice Beach myself, just blocks away from the beach and from where Jim Morrison had lived, and just blocks away from the Small World Bookstore where they carried all the Beats.
Like Allen Ginsberg I had become a writer because I was in love as a queer person and had no where to put my feelings. In this regard, also to Zoe and others.
And sometimes I still feel I can only express love the way artists do, through the writing and the art itself.
And so Trans-Masculine In Hollywood expresses all of my love.
Three slim volumes of mostly auto-ethnographical essays, The Queer Case For Individual Rights, Notes For A New Independent Film Movement, and Trans-Masculine In Hollywood, will be independently published in 2023.
R.I.P. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2021)
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Since thematically my writing revolves around the right to self-ownership, which more or less makes me a constitutionalist, besides trans-masculine, lesbian and Dutch, I’m also most definitely on the powers-that-be shit list, and things have been increasingly dangerous and volatile.
In early 2022 I put my stuff in storage and gave up my small film production office right off of Hollywood Blvd., where I’d stayed for over a decade, to go back “off the grid”/“van life” in a ’74 Chevy, from Silver Lake to Venice Beach.
My sole proprietorship film production company Bregman Films, established in 2014, remains active, and a small, non-profit literary organization The Auteur with film producing partner, musician Mario Luza, is in the works.
And we are continuing editing on a short 20-minute documentary, titled F-1 Dutch Film Student.
The 20-plus minutes documentary focuses less on LGBTQ immigration exclusion policy, (even though that’s still part of it,) and more on my personal situation as a former film student from the Netherlands and my life as an artist in LA, and is more non-linear and loose compared to any previously planned feature version.
A new essay on film exhibition The Art Of Art House Cinema Exhibition will also be published online shortly. In the essay I basically argue that if the US took film serious as an art form, and as many other countries in the world actually do, instead of just vacant entertainment or worse, propaganda for mainly American exceptionalism, we wouldn’t be in half the mess we’re currently in in Hollywood.
In the essay I actually argue for somewhat of a return to actual independent filmmaking and film viewing. And in this essay I particularly argue for film exhibition to do its’ proper part in the creative ecosystem, and realize the extreme importance of catering to the authentic viewing needs of niche audiences through curation of its film programming, and through actual film education and media literacy.
I have much more to say about independent film exhibition, regarding programming, moderation, education, nonprofit run spaces and events, and truly nurturing niche audiences, as local community building as well as building loyal online audiences of filmmakers and film lovers.
I touch on all of this and more in the essay, on Medium soon. And I have some ideas on how to move forward.
Of course I stand in solidarity with the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes.
I will also continue to write essays about film and identity for my Publication The Auteur (on Medium).
Along with philosophical and creative essays for eventual book publication.
The Auteur is an online magazine publication about independent film and personal identity.
I would like to eventually publish selected essays from the online film publication The Auteur in print for Los Angeles-based distribution.
And I’d like to develop the publication into a Los Angeles-based film organization, or small literary organization, for LGBTQ filmmakers and writers in the future.
Orlando G. Bregman
(They/He)
All Rights Reserved (2023)
OTHER ESSAYS:
F-1 DUTCH FILM STUDENT (A Short Documentary) (2024)
3 BOOKS AND A SHORT DOCUMENTARY (& Intro. To The Essay: The Art Of Art House Cinema Exhibition) (2023)
THE ART OF ART HOUSE CINEMA EXHIBITION (2023)
NOTES FOR A NEW INDEPENDENT FILM MOVEMENT (2020)
The Auteur: An Independent Filmmakers Publication INTRODUCTION (2020)
JOHN CASSAVETES FILM RETROSPECTIVE 2001 ‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective’ (Bregman Films) (2018)
The Superhero and American Exceptionalism (2019)
A Few Notes on Montage vs. Mise En Scene (2019)
A Few Notes on LGBTQ Filmmaking (2017)
On Being Mistaken For An Undocumented Immigrant, As Former F-1 Dutch Film Student (2023)
A Few Notes on US Immigration Exclusion Policies Towards Women- and LGBT Immigrants (2014)
My Me Too Story: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (2017)
Social Security Numbers vs Individual Tax Payers Numbers, and President Biden’s Build Back Better Plan (2023)
In Defense of Rationality (2018)
The Gender-Binary System Was Created For Population Control And Slavery, Including Sex Slavery (2017)
Scenes of Idolatry and Resentment (2004)
The Importance Of Keeping A Journal (2024)
Essays Written By Orlando G. Bregman. All Rights Reserved.
All Pictures By Author (except where noted).
