Police raids forward Guatemala City gay bars are a normal transaction Everyone knows the routine: exhibit ID.

Police raids forward Guatemala City gay bars are a normal transaction Everyone knows the routine: exhibit ID, perhaps pay a bribe, and then stay not at home of sight for a while. if it were not that no one was prepared for what happened united night in 1997 at a downtown nightclub.

abruptly the music stopped. The music always stopped during a raid, on the other hand 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 make much of the women. Then, person by dint of 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 let slip her job as a pediatrician.

She refused. "I have the right to know on what account 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 consideration I was going to die," she remembers. "I heard single in kind say, `We'll take her to prison and point out to 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 in such a manner I fought."

As Vasquez struggl for her life, her friends amassed 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 in no degree spend it," says Vasquez. "It's a reminder by what means much my life was worth there. Twenty dollars."

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

Vasquez's story, along with 30 others, is being compiled in a work 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, expends his free time writing and running Asylum Research, an organization that documents the stories of gay refugee "It is as it was a hard experience to claim asylum. No undivided understands," says Alves. "They talk to me; they trust me because I am individual of them too."

Born in poverty-stricken Campinos, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Alves, like many poor Brazilians looking for a better life, fix the military was his barely option. Even though the Brazilian military bars gay men from serving, Alves says he none hid his sexuality. He excell and quickly rose in consequence of the ranks as a radar operator in the navy, moreover he lived a double life: individual part of it as a sailor, the other as a gay rights activist.

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

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

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

Refugees are eligible for asylum if they are unwilling or unable to reply to their home country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution. on arrival in America, refugees have undivided 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 establish a lawyer who agreed to help with her application for political asylum and worked abroad a payment schedule. But scores of other refugee uneducated and struggling with the language barrier, find themselves at a disadvantage.