The Great Escape

How a transgender woman escaped from the Middle East to work at the Center

by Gil Diaz

The life of Amanda Frontino, a young transgender woman living in the Middle East, changed completely in a matter of minutes. 

She was lost in paradise as she sat in front of her computer mesmerized by a video she’d found on YouTube entitled “A Day in the Life of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center." 

She vividly recalls what Center CEO Lorri L. Jean was saying in the video: "We’re like a one-stop center for people in our community who need… a place to celebrate… and to be free and open in Los Angeles." 

Frontino felt an instant kinship with the people who were shown in the video: LGBT people who were clearly happy and living their lives openly and honestly in a way she had never even considered.

Living in Kuwait, she was thousands of miles away from the nirvana that she imagined Los Angeles to be, with little hope she’d ever get to L.A. or the Center in person. 

Just weeks earlier, she was savagely beaten by police officers and dumped into a tiny, filthy jail cell where she recovered from the welts and bruises that covered her swollen body. Her attackers had been instructed to “beat the girl out of her brain." 

"I felt like a rag doll as they punched me from all directions,” she recalled. “At one point I was laying on my back, semi-conscious, while two officers tied my legs to a board. Grabbing both sides of the board, they yanked my feet in the air. A third officer joined them to beat my legs and the soles of my feet with a rubber baton while the remaining officers watched in enjoyment." 

These were the atrocities Frontino—a statuesque figure at 6-feet tall—had to 
endure in an Islamic society that viewed transgender people as so shameful and 
disgusting that they don’t deserve to live.

Even Frontino’s family treated her like a dog. 

“My father hates me to death,” she says. “When I was 5, I knew I was different 
from the others. I was attracted to boys, and I was more comfortable being 
around girls. I forced myself to love soccer, my country’s favorite sport. But 
I preferred playing with dolls and doing things that girls do. I tried my 
hardest to ‘be normal.’” 

During high school, her strict father pulled her out of public school and enrolled her in an all-boys Islamic private school, believing the transfer would “cure” his child. She dropped out within three months after being taunted by teachers and schoolmates as a “pervert” and a jens-thaleth (Arabic for “she-male). 

“I tried to be like a man,” she recalls. “Physically, I tried to stand up and sit down like the other boys, but it didn’t feel right to me. I felt like I was acting.” 


A FAMILY AFFAIR

Out of school and out of sight, she thought her days of being bullied and 
physically attacked by classmates were over.

But, her worst nightmares were only just beginning. 

“When I was 15 years old, my dad woke me up in the middle of the night,” she recalls. “He pulled my hair and ordered me to get dressed. We got into our 
car and he drove us to my uncle’s workplace.” 

The uncle was a colonel for Kuwait’s Ministry of Interior, Department of 
Criminal Investigations. Crying hysterically and pleading for her life, she was 
taken to a room where five plains clothes officers—the ones instructed to “beat the girl out of her brain”—were waiting. The torture went on for 20 minutes with the officers careful about not leaving any evidence of scarring on her face or body. To make matters worse, she was sexually assaulted by one of the officers during her jail stay, who threatened to have her beaten up again if she didn’t comply with his demands for sex. 

Despite these persecutions, Frontino got back on her feet each time to continue 
pursuing her transition—even going to extreme measures. At the age of 16, she 
began self-medicating with birth control pills in order to ingest doses of estrogen.

“I didn’t care if it was dangerous thing. I took the pills twice a day, and my 
physical features became more feminine. I began developing breasts, and the 
tone of my voice sounded higher,” she says. “But at the same time, I became 
mentally and emotionally sensitive. I became moody and cried easily. 
I was a beautiful woman on the outside, but on the inside, I was desperate.” 


THE PRICE OF FREEDOM

Disgusted by his transgender teen, Frontino’s father sent her to California to 
study at Sonoma State University. Rather than obeying her father’s demands to 
stay with relatives, she took matters into her own hands and contacted the manager of the school’s American Language Institute for housing assistance. A local, elderly woman named Alicia Frontino had agreed to host the Kuwaiti student. 

“Once I met Alicia, something just clicked, and I eventually started calling 
her ‘mom,’” says Frontino, who eventually adopted the woman’s last name as her 
own. 

But her taste of freedom was cut short after her finances dried up, requiring 
her to return to her homeland. And to make matters worse, she was returning at a dangerous time: The Kuwaiti government had passed a new law making it punishable for anyone to “imitate the opposite sex in any way in public.” A violation of Penal Code 198 resulted in at least one year in jail, a fine of $3,500 or both. 

Three months after the new law took effect, Frontino was cuffed at a checkpoint 
after the arresting officer realized her identification card reflected her gender as male. 

“The other officers took me away to the police station, where they physically and verbally abused me,” she says. “They slapped me over and over again. One of 
them threw an office stapler at me, leaving me with a scar on my left 
arm. On the fifth day of my stay in jail, they shaved off my long, beautiful hair." 

This type of abuse and humiliation from the prison guards went on for 21 days. They were clearly on a witch hunt for other transgender people, as they peppered Frontino with questions every day about her friends and the places where they gathered. 

After her father posted bail, Frontino was fined $3,500 and given three years 
probation. According to the judge, if she was caught posing as a woman again, 
she would end up in jail immediately for one year. 


GIVE HER LIBERTY, OR GIVE HER DEATH

It was during her probation when Frontino discovered the Center’s video on 
YouTube. After watching it—the best 10 minutes of her life, she says—she 
scribbled a list of things she wanted to achieve: buying a house and a car, marrying 
a man, having children. 

Also, dignity and career. She was convinced the only way she could get dignity was to live in America, and the only career she wanted was at the incredible place she saw in the video. 

During one of her many phone conversations with Alicia Frontino, she talked about the heinous crimes happening to her in Kuwait. The elderly woman encouraged her to come back to America. Frontino decided—with the full support of her surrogate family—she would apply for asylum as soon as she returned. 

In 2010 a civil rights advocacy group in San Francisco lobbied on her behalf and recruited a lawyer who argued that if Frontino returned to Kuwait, she might be jailed, tortured or even killed. Within eight months, she was granted asylum. 

“As soon as I received my green card, I began kissing it,” she recalls. “I was 
so happy to see my picture as a woman next to the picture of the Statue of 
Liberty! And, for the first time in my life, my ID card identified me as a female!” 

Finally able to cross dignity off her list, Frontino pursued her dream of working at the Center. In April 2013 she was hired as a medical lab assistant in the McDonald/Wright Building where she continues to work today. 

“As a proud trans woman, the Center is my community. I love my job so much!” 
she says. "I lost everything in Kuwait: my human rights, my identity and my strength. But I got it all back because of this country and the 
Center. I would die for this country—that’s how much I love America.” 

Just as she had felt when watching that YouTube video for the first time, Frontino is experiencing—in real life—the joys that accompany a day in the life of the Center. She can still hear Lorri L. Jean saying in the video: "There’s nothing like this place in the gay world…anywhere!" 

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