The long road to safety: gays fleeing violence abroad appeal to the United States for asylum. Refugee Flavio Alves tells their stories in a new book. (Immigration).

Police raids on Guatemala City gay bars are a normal occurrence. Everyone knows the routine: Show ID, perhaps pay a bribe, and then stay out of sight for a while. But no one was prepared for what happened one night in 1997 at a downtown nightclub.

Suddenly the music stopped. The music always stopped during a raid, but this time the room was also filled with a blinding bright light--the police had video cameras with them. The officers lined everyone up against the wall, frisking them and taking extra time to fondle the women. Then, person by person, they began videotaping, forcibly lifting the chins of those who hung their heads. Waiting in the lineup, Alejandra Vasquez knew that if the police broadcast the tape, she would lose her job as a pediatrician.

She refused. "I have the right to know why you are doing this," said Vasquez. "You're a dyke! You have no rights," said the officer. When Vasquez continued to argue, the officer dragged her outside and began to beat her. "I thought I was going to die," she remembers. "I heard one say, `We'll take her to prison and show her how to be a woman.' I knew they would rape me if they took me to prison. I either wanted to die right there or fight back rather than have those bastards rape me. So I fought."

As Vasquez struggled for her life, her friends collected money to bribe the police to spare her. They gave the police the equivalent of $20. The beating stopped, and the police left. "Now I always carry a $20 bill. I never spend it," says Vasquez. "It's a reminder how much my life was worth there. Twenty dollars."

Vasquez, who uses a pseudonym when speaking to the press for fear of retaliation against her family, knew she had to leave Guatemala forever. She came to America to claim asylum on the basis of persecution due to her sexual orientation. While the Immigration and Naturalization Service granted Vasquez asylum, it remains a rare victory for gay or lesbian refugees. To make matters worse, with the embarrassing revelation of the INS's mistakes in issuing visas to some of the terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration has ordered an INS restructuring that gay advocates worry will only make it more difficult for persecuted gays to seek asylum in the United States.

Vasquez's story, along with 30 others, is being compiled in a book of oral histories by Flavio Alves, a gay immigration rights activist who left Brazil and was granted asylum in the United States in 1998. Alves, who is now studying political science at Columbia University, spends his free time writing and running Asylum Research, an organization that documents the stories of gay refugees. "It is such a hard experience to claim asylum. No one understands," says Alves. "They talk to me; they trust me because I am one of them too."

Born in poverty-stricken Campinos, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Alves, like many poor Brazilians looking for a better life, found the military was his only option. Even though the Brazilian military bars gay men from serving, Alves says he never hid his sexuality. He excelled and quickly rose through the ranks as a radar operator in the navy, but he lived a double life: one part of it as a sailor, the other as a gay rights activist.

Frustrated with the gay rights movement in his country--"a few go-go boys on a float in Rio's gay pride parade doesn't make a movement," he says--Alves in 1997 authored the book Toque de Silencio (Call to Silence), about the treatment of gay men in the Brazilian military. The book pushed gay and lesbian issues to the forefront in a country where they often went ignored and also focused national attention on Alves. The military turned hostile toward him, and the gay men he interviewed for his book either disappeared or were found brutally beaten. Then the death threats began. He had to leave Brazil, and fast.

Alves claimed political asylum in New York. His initial application was denied; he believes it was because he spent too much time in his interview speaking of past harassment without establishing fear of future persecution. He successfully changed his tactics on appeal, winning asylum.

Vasquez and Alves were lucky. It's difficult for any person, gay or straight, to successfully claim asylum. About one third of all asylum applications are rejected, according to INS statistics. While no record is kept on how many of those are sexuality-based claims, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission estimates that out of the hundreds of thousands the to whom INS has granted asylum since 1994, only 1,000 have been gays and lesbians, the majority of them from Central and South America.

Refugees are eligible for asylum if they are unwilling or unable to return to their home country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution. Upon arrival in America, refugees have one year to apply. After a one-hour interview with the INS, a decision is usually made within four to six weeks. While a lawyer is not provided, retaining an attorney to help with the vague and confusing regulations--written in English--can be crucial. The college-educated Vasquez was lucky--she found a lawyer who agreed to help with her application for political asylum and worked out a payment schedule. But scores of other refugees, uneducated and struggling with the language barrier, find themselves at a disadvantage.

Matters are even more complicated when the refugee is seeking asylum because of persecution based on sexual orientation. Not only do gay asylum seekers need to prove that the persecution they face is because they are gay, but they also need to prove that they actually are gay. "It can be difficult because you [need to] show documentation," says Marc Generazio, a Los Angeles--based immigration attorney. "I had an Iranian asylum seeker bring in his boyfriend. I had a Lebanese refugee get a letter from a Lebanese gay association. Lack of documentation is what makes a case weak. If you have supporting documents, it makes it a lot easier." Applicants must also provide documentation of persecution, which often comes from human rights groups.

While such groups are now quick to intervene on behalf of gays and lesbians, it wasn't always so. Amnesty International has monitored gay and lesbian human rights abuses only since 1991--and with resistance from the Middle Eastern and African branches. "There was the idea that we were a Western human rights group trying to impose Western ideas," says Michael Heflin, director of Outfront, Amnesty's gay and lesbian human rights office.

But even when gay applicants are able to provide compelling evidence and substantial documentation, they are frequently rejected. For instance, Alla Konstantinova Pitcherskaia, a Russian lesbian, applied for asylum in 1993. Police in her homeland had repeatedly arrested her and threatened her with psychiatric institutionalization to change her sexual orientation. The INS argued that her story did not constitute persecution because the Russian government intended only to "cure" her, not punish her. The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund sued on her behalf; in 1997, the ninth circuit court of appeals reversed the INS decision. She remains in the United States while her case is pending.

"The threshold for cases based on sexual orientation is extremely high," says Lambda attorney Adam Aronson, who is among those representing Pitcherskaia.

Ignorance of the types of persecution that face gays and lesbians, and in some cases blatant homophobia, makes dealing with INS a crapshoot, agrees immigration attorney Generazio. "It's like a nationwide DMV," he says. "You never know what you're going to get."

But Mark Ozimek, an openly gay man who worked as an INS officer in Boston from 1997 to 2000, says that many claims of persecution are bogus. "INS officers are given a huge amount of latitude," he says. "The burden of proof is on the alien. Some have legitimate concerns for their safety, but most asylum seekers are fun of shit."

That view, Ozimek says, is common in the INS, which often ignores gay and lesbian issues. "The INS does not, in any way, train its officers to deal with gay issues," he says. At present, the officer training program, based at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Ga., educates future INS officials on a variety of issues, such as religious persecution and female genital mutilation. But gay rights advocates say the INS is unlikely to change its training procedures to include gay issues because doing so would mean taking a stance on gay rights, something it refuses to do.

It wasn't until 1994 that Attorney General Janet Reno instructed INS officials to consider gays and lesbians as a social group eligible for asylum. Now the United States is one of 13 nations that grant asylum to gays and lesbians, and it accepts more gay refugees than any other country.

Though the INS now recognizes that gay human rights abuses exist, the process of applying for asylum is nonetheless more complicated for gays and lesbians than for applicants seeking asylum for political or other kinds of persecution. Getting the proper documentation proving their sexual orientation and the persecution they've suffered because of it is only the first hurdle of many. Perhaps the most complicated and difficult step is the refugee's personal coming-out process.

"Getting your act together in one year can be impossible," says Lavi Soloway, one of the founding attorneys of the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force. "Coming out and integrating into the gay community, finding an attorney who understands these issues, and finding your own voice is difficult."

It may sound contradictory that someone claiming asylum because they are gay would have a hard time talking about their sexuality, but growing up in societies where homosexuality is punishable by death, as in Saudi Arabia and Iran, makes it difficult for some refugees to be open with their lawyers and immigration officials. To a refugee, after spending so many years in silence, exposing what was a shameful secret seems not only strange but also dangerous.

From the safety of her Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment, which she shares with her partner and their 6-month-old daughter, Vasquez remembers the first hurdle: telling her story.

Adjusting to life in the United States as a refugee was a lonely, scary ordeal. "I was so homesick," Vasquez says. Without a license to practice medicine in the United States, she took jobs cleaning people's homes. "I came to America a doctor," she says. "And then I was cleaning toilets."

Vasquez and her attorney spent six months preparing her case. "In the interview [the INS officer] just sat there with no expression, like a mummy," she recalls. After a month of waiting, Vasquez received her answer: The stoic officer had granted her asylum. "We celebrated by going out and getting a Big Mac," Vasquez says, smiling. "What could be more American than that?"

While Alves acknowledges the problems that gays face in America, he sees the United States as a place where he can live openly and without fear. "Yes, things like Matthew Shepard happen in America," says Alves. "And they happen in Brazil, but the difference is that the people who killed him went to jail. In Brazil the police do nothing. Sometimes the police are the criminals."

RELATED ARTICLE: The great divide.

Is separating the INS into two separate entities good news or bad news for gay refugees?

Big changes are afoot at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. On April 17 U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft and INS commissioner James Ziglar announced plans to divide and restructure the INS as part of President Bush's response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Its service function (which handles student visas, the immigration lottery, and political asylum cases) and its enforcement function (responsible for border patrols and detention centers) will become separate entities, though a single agency head will remain. The restructuring centralizes power and leadership at national headquarters in Washington, D.C. In addition, an Office of Juvenile Affairs will be created to deal with the growing number of unaccompanied youths who arrive in the United States daily.

But it's Ashcroft's plan to clear the current backlog of 55,000 cases within 180 days, requiring judges to hear 32 cases each workday (or one every 15 minutes), that most concerns asylum advocates. The proposed plan would eliminate most appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the exception being if the findings of the lower immigration judge are "clearly erroneous." A review by the BIA is considered by immigration attorneys to be one of the essential checks and balances in the asylum process. According to the Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights, there have been many cases in the past where immigration judges made decisions based on a misunderstanding of the facts.

In addition, most appeal decisions would be made by a single appellate board member instead of a panel, and all appeals would have to be filed within 21 days rather than the previous 30. Since many asylum seekers have busy pro bono attorneys, the lost preparation time will hurt their cases.

The proposed changes particularly concern gay and lesbian asylum advocates. "[The BIA] has really been a huge safeguard for asylum seekers," says Pradeep Singla of the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force. "If a case was denied by a tough or homophobic judge, the BIA was the safeguard. It will be more difficult for gay asylum seekers now."

The proposed changes are expected to pass through the House and the Senate perhaps as early as mid June.--S.D.

Desroches also writes for The Village Voice.