by Kai Wright

A 28-year-old Moroccan man arrived in the United States five years ago, having fled violent beatings at the hands of his own father and imprisonment by the Moroccan government because he was Gay. Years earlier, when he was 16, his parents had shipped him off to work overseas with an uncle, hoping that separating him from his boyfriend would end his homosexual desires. Instead, the move gave him the opportunity to meet a friend who pitied his situation. And when political unrest forced Moroccan nationals to flee that country, the friend arranged for him to acquire an U.S. visitorís visa.

A month after arriving in the U.S., he met another man, fell in love, and began the process of putting his life in Morocco behind him. When he notified his family that he did not plan on returning home, they disowned him. It was difficult, he recalled, but he could not go back and face the repeated arrests and beatings for being Gay.

"I cannot go back to Morocco because I do not want to be imprisoned and tortured again. I am not going to stop being a homosexual, and if I am caught with another man or engage in any homosexual activity, I will be severely beaten," said the man in an affidavit accompanying his application for asylum in the U.S. The man agreed to share his court documents with the Blade on the condition that he not be identified. The documents tell his story, including how his father bribed police to leave the youth alone only to tie him up for days on the roof of their home and burning marks into his buttocks as reminders not to see his boyfriend again.

Last fall, after five years of living in the U.S. without legal permission to stay here, the man developed the courage to approach lawyers at a law firm in Washington, D.C., to get help applying for asylum based on persecution because of his sexual orientation. On Jan. 27, an asylum officer approved his application. His lawyers said that a major factor in gaining the approval was the testimony of doctors confirming that scars on the manís body are consistent with the abuse he described being subjected to.

But if the man had waited until April 1 of this year to step forward with his story, his application would have been automatically rejected. New regulations, enacted April 1, 1997, require anyone seeking asylum in the U.S. to file an application with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) within one year of their arrival in the country. The law gave anyone already in the States until April 1, 1998 to come forward. The new rule came as part of a now infamous bill, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, pushed by the White House and Congressional Republicans in an effort to stiffen immigration regulations.

The problem with the new law, according to Gay asylum experts, is that it often takes several years for a Gay person fleeing persecution to decide to come forward. Most Gay refugees, activists and lawyers working on Gay asylum cases argue, do not know the option of asylum exists. Those who do know must also overcome their fear of acknowledging their sexuality to officials of any government or even to their friends and acquaintances in the communities of other immigrants they join here in the U.S.

Lavi Soloway of the New York office of the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force, said that, in the over 50 Gay asylum cases heís worked with since 1993, only two people came forward with their stories within a year of arriving in the States. He declined to guess the average time it takes for a Gay refugee to come forward but said it is "certainly years, not near twelve months."

Usually, in order to file an application for asylum based on persecution for being Gay, or even be in a position to learn about that option, refugees must first come out to people in their immigrant communities for help, explained Heather McClure of the Chicago-based Midwest Human Rights Partnership for Sexual Orientation. McClure and her organization do work with Gay asylum cases in addition to a variety of work with grassroots Gay human rights groups in Latin America. The threat for many Gay immigrants, she said, lies in the real possibility of losing an invaluable support network once they are out.

"The fact is that there are many cities that have small immigrant communities. Thereís a very great chance that, in many of these cases, if they were to out themselves [within those communities] they would be abandoned," McClure said, noting that many refugees speak no English and depend upon someone in the community for things such as employment and housing.

McClure added that this fear can be especially profound for Lesbians, who, in many countries, must fight restrictive gender roles which make women in general more dependant on men for basic survival needs. That dependency, she explained, can also hurt a Lesbianís asylum application.

"If there are Lesbians who make it to the States, they may not have had the kinds of experiences that get you asylum," McClure said. "Many Lesbians, certainly poor women will marry. They may still have a [secret] same-sex lover, but for economic reasons, for cultural and practical reasons, they will marry." By cloaking their sexuality in this way, they ultimately hide the evidence for any Gay-related asylum claim.

The Moroccan refugeeís attorney Ladan Mirbagheri-Smith said it took a great deal of coaxing to get him to admit that he fled Morocco to avoid being beaten for being Gay. The man worked in a D.C. restaurant at which Smith and her colleagues regularly ate lunch. One of those colleagues, Javier Peres, is a Gay law student working at the firm. After learning that Peres is Gay, the man eventually approached the firm for help. But he still fears revealing his sexuality within his community.

"The fact is that theyíre not going to discuss this with someone in their immigrant community, or even in the Gay community," explains Soloway. "The usual victim psychology plays into it."

Gay refugees also must overcome a fear of authorities before coming forward. Many have left behind experiences such as those of a 27-year-old Colombian man who came to Smithís firm last year after living in the U.S. illegally for four years. His case is still pending, but his lawyers spoke to the Blade on the condition that his name not be used in this story. According to the affidavit accompanying The Colombian manís asylum application, the man was hunted down and kidnapped by death squads on two occasions after his sexuality became public in his hometown in Colombia. But on both occasions, after being rescued --once by bribing the killers and once by friends who entered into a gun battle with his captors-- the police declined to investigate and told him that they could not be "bodyguards for faggots."

"They basically ignored my request to conduct an investigation and treated my allegation as a joke," he explained in the affidavit. "In fact, several of the police officers at the station indicated that I had no business coming to them for help because whatever was happening to me was my fault."

Unlike the Moroccan man, the Colombian refugee filed for asylum shortly after arriving in the U.S., through a lawyer he met in his immigrant community. But he did not acknowledge being Gay and claimed instead that he was being persecuted because of political opinion.

"I was afraid of saying that I was Gay," he told the Blade through a translator. "I didnít feel comfortable with telling them that. [Admitting my sexuality] was why I was being persecuted [in Colombia]."

An Arlington, Va., asylum officer "referred" the case, sending it up to an immigration judge for hearings. But the original lawyers have since disappeared. According to his current lawyer, when the man eventually amended his application last fall to reflect the true cause of his persecution, the conflicting claims damaged his credibility in the eyes of the immigration judge and his application was rejected. The manís lawyers are now appealing the rejection to the Board of Immigration Appeals while seeking other routes through which he can immigrate.

Beating the clock

Solowayís Task Force and McClureís Midwest Human Rights Partnership have joined with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) in an "emergency campaign" to get Gay refugees in the U.S. with viable cases for asylum to file before April 1. As part of that effort, McClure and Soloway, with lawyer Chris Nugent, have authored a manual to help inexperienced lawyers wade through Gay asylum claims. The Task Force and IGLHRC, with the help of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, are coordinating training sessions for asylum officers around the country to help them understand the nuances of a Gay asylum case. And all the groups are trying to get the word about the deadline out to Gay refugees. The Task Forceís New York office is coordinating what Soloway called a "handbill campaign" in immigrant areas and the group has opened up its offices around the U.S. as free legal clinics. The Task Force is also publicizing support groups for Gay refugees designed to combat the ir fear that, if they come out as Gay, they will be abandoned by others in their communities.

But refugees of all sorts have another good reason to be hesitant about coming forward with an application: Those who canít make a strong enough case, which is difficult to do, expose themselves to the INS for deportation. According to INS data, the agency granted approval to only 22 percent of the total asylum applications received in 1996. In the Moroccan manís case, Smith said she almost advised him not to apply. Moroccoís laws, inherited from the French legal code imposed during colonization, appear on the surface to be relatively progressive in dealing with Gays. The sort of police harassment and family violence that the man suffered, explained Smith, does not show up in legal statutes and, thus, can be hard to prove by the exacting standards of a typical immigration judge. Moreover, persecution at the hands of groups or individuals other than the government, such as a family member, is rarely accepted as a reason for granting asylum. A person must prove not only that persecution exists, but that he or she can go nowhere in his or her home country to avoid it.

According to INS officials, no concrete data exists on the number of Gay asylum applications submitted and approved in the U.S. The INS doesnít track Gay cases, but instead counts refugees granted asylum based on persecution for their sexual orientation among the larger category of "social group." The U.S. grants asylum to people who can prove persecution, or a well-founded belief of persecution, based on one of five categories: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or "membership in a particular social group." These five categories were officially adopted as U.S. standards by the 1980 Refugee Act and were gleaned from international standards created in treaties following World War II. In 1994, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno officially opened the "social group" category up to Gay refugees seeking asylum in the U.S. by declaring a judgeís 1990 decision to grant asylum to a Gay Cuban man a precedent.

IGLHRC has made the only real attempt to track Gay asylum cases, both in the U.S. and in the 13 other countries which have granted Gays asylum. IGLHRC program director Sydney Levy said the group puts the number of cases granted in the U.S. in the ballpark of 170. But Levy warns that this number is based wholly on the number of information requests the group has received from people preparing asylum claims. The number could be considerably smaller or larger, no one really knows.

But IGLHRC no longer wants to discuss past numbers.

"The most important thing happening in asylum today is not the 170 cases, but that on April 1 these numbers are going to diminish rapidly," explained Levy. "Even when we talk about torture and rape and abuse, we, the U.S., are going to tell people, ëyou have a really sad story, but, sorry, you missed your deadline.í"