Rodriguez is one of a small category of asylum-seekers who have won permanent residence in America because their sexual orientation put them at risk in their places of birth. Her personal account-recounted today at the release of an Amnesty International report on torture and ill-treatment of gays around the world-provided a harrowing insight into the persecution she suffered in a male-dominated society.
There was the constant fear of losing her job. There was continuous harassment from police and soldiers, who would tell her she didn’t look like a woman and that she needed to bare her breasts as physical proof of her gender. Escaping them, she recalls, “would depend on how much money I had in my pocket to give to them.”
Several incidents in the mid-’90s prompted her to flee Guatemala. First, she was caught up in a police raid on a gay bar. When she tried to resist being filmed there because she feared the publicity would cost her her hospital job, police took her outside and beat her for 20 minutes before threatening to take her back to the police station for a “cure.” Rape, she thought, was imminent. But the friends with her at the bar managed to gather together the equivalent of $20 to bribe the police for her release. “Every time I see a $20 bill, I know how much my life is worth,” she told the Amnesty press conference in New York.
Then, two weeks later, she says, a gay friend was beaten by a paramilitary group and left to die in a pile of trash. Too frightened to go to his funeral, she knew it was time to leave the country.
Rodriguez’s story is not that unusual. According to the Amnesty report, “Crimes of Hate, Conspiracy of Silence: Torture and Ill-Treatment Based on Sexual Identity,” there are documented examples of torture and ill-treatment of gays in some 30 countries, including the United States. In many cases, the harassment is government-sanctioned. In one case in Uganda, for example, five gay and lesbian activists were imprisoned and tortured in 1999 for forming a gay human-rights organization. The prisoners were blindfolded and beaten-some were raped-before being released two weeks later. In Romania, a woman sentenced to three years imprisonment for “attempting to seduce another woman” was handcuffed to a radiator and forced to stand for 11 hours without food after complaining that she was ill-treated by guards who disapproved of her sexual orientation.
In Egypt, 54 men arrested on May 11 are still in prison facing accusations of “immoral behavior” and “contempt of religion.” Karen A. Robinson, the acting director of Amnesty’s campaign department, says the organization believes the majority-if not all-of these men are detained purely on the grounds of their alleged sexual orientation.
In Argentina, Amnesty is monitoring the case of transvestite Vanesa Lorena Ledesma, who died in police custody five days after her arrest. “Amnesty International has received reports that her body showed signs of torture and the police also used physical violence at the time of her arrest,” says Robinson.
In the United States, notes the report, a group of eight to 10 off-duty Chicago police officers are alleged to have beaten Jeffrey Lyons, 39, for embracing a male friend outside a bar. Toward the end of the assault-which left Lyons with severe injuries that included neurological damage-one officer reportedly told Lyons: “Get this through your head, you faggots will never win.” The report also notes that four U.S. states-Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas-still have sodomy laws applying exclusively to homosexuals.
Since 1994, the United States has been one of 18 countries that accepts discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation as a legitimate reason for making an asylum claim. Seeking residence on this basis, however, can be fraught with obstacles, says Suzanne Goldberg, an assistant professor at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, N.J., and chairman of the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force. “It is difficult for all asylum applicants, but it is especially difficult for gays,” she says.
One reason is that many persecuted gays do not know they can claim their suffering as a basis for seeking asylum; another is that some immigration lawyers and government officials are “hostile and uninformed.” “There is a lot of misinformation out there,” Goldberg told NEWSWEEK.
The exact number of people who have been granted asylum as victims of gay persecution is not known. Overall, the Immigration and Naturalization Service approved about 21,000 of the 48,000 asylum claims it received last year, but does not keep records of what percentage of those applications were granted to specific groups. “We do not track the individual types of applications that come in,” INS spokesman Bill Strassberger told NEWSWEEK. “[But] I don’t think we’re looking at a sizable number [of gay applicants.]”
Flavio Alves, a Brazilian currently working on a book about gay asylum-seekers in the United States, estimates that between 1,000 and 2,000 people have been granted their applications in the last seven years. Alves himself won the right to live in the United States after fleeing death threats for his work on a book about life for gay men in the Brazilian military.
And while he knows he’s one of the fortunate few, that doesn’t always make his situation easier to bear. “What people don’t know about the process is when you seek political asylum you are giving up a large part of yourself. I gave up part of my culture, my family….”
Adds Rodriguez: “Sometimes I wake up at night and [think] I hear my mother’s footsteps. It kills me, to know that she’s alone-and that she’s alone because I’m a lesbian.”
