Then one morning, Cunningham picked up a local newspaper with a front-page story under the headline, “Homosexual Prostitutes Move into Residential Neighborhood.” His address was listed below.

For days afterward, Cunningham said an angry mob gathered on his lawn hurling rocks and bricks and calling them “batty boys” – a Jamaican slang term for gay. Eventually, the pair grabbed what they could and fled on foot. Cunningham said neither he nor his boyfriend were prostitutes – the slur was just another example of the abuse gay men faced in Jamaica.

The story was one of many that Cunningham, now 32 and living in Worcester, recently shared with a federal immigration judge in his successful bid to win asylum in the United States. And it’s similar to other stories cited by a small but growing number of other gay, lesbian and transgender asylum seekers who are using U.S. immigration courts to argue that their sexual orientation makes it too dangerous for them to return home.

“I had no choice,” said Andre Azevedo, 39, a transgender man from Brazil who recently won asylum and now lives in New York. “Where I’m from, heterosexual men practice hate crimes against us like a sport, and the police do nothing to stop it.”

Since 1994, sexual orientation has been grounds for asylum in the United States. That’s when former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno ruled in a case that persecution based on sexual orientation could be potential grounds for asylum.

Until recently, those grounds have been rarely used and such cases represent only a fraction of all asylum cases.

But now immigrant and gay activists say more asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are citing sexual orientation as reasons for seeking asylum. Activists say the asylum seekers are escaping rape, persecution, violence, and threats of death from places where homosexuality is either outlawed or strongly, socially shunned.

Federal immigration law allows individuals asylum if they can prove a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin based upon race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Those applying for asylum are already in the United States, legally or illegally.

No one knows for sure just how many have sought asylum on sexual orientation grounds. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services doesn’t keep data on asylum cases won on that basis.

Still, last year Immigration Equality, a New York-based nonprofit group that helps gay clients with immigration cases, successfully won 55 asylum cases using sexual orientation as grounds, a record for the organization, said the group’s legal director Victoria Neilson. That’s up from 30 wins in 2007 and 27 in 2006, Neilson said.

And a Worcester, Mass.-based nonprofit group, Lutheran Social Services, has recently won five cases and is looking to help others.

“I think more people are finding out that this is an option,” said Lisa Laurel Weinberg, an attorney with the group.

However, not all cases for asylum based on sexual orientation have been successful. For example, a gay Brazilian man who was married in Massachusetts and whose American husband remains in the state was recently denied asylum by the Obama administration on humanitarian grounds, despite pleas from Sen. John Kerry. Genesio “Junior” Januario Oliveira had originally requested asylum because he was raped as a teenager, but an immigration judge denied the application, saying Oliveira repeatedly said in the hearing that he “was never physically harmed” by anyone in Brazil.

He was forced to return to Brazil in 2007.

Cunningham said he decided to file for asylum after working for a few years in the United States on a work visa. He conducted research online but couldn’t find an immigration group to help him with the case. “One group said my case clashed with their Christian values,” Cunningham said.

Many gay rights groups, he said, also had limited services for immigrants.

It wasn’t until Cunningham connected with Jozefina Lantz, the director of immigrant services at Lutheran Social Services, that Cunningham gained support.

To win, however, Cunningham had to revisit painful moments of running from mobs in Jamaica. Even the police would point him out for persecution, he said. In successfully arguing Cunningham’s case for asylum, Weinberg also said Jamaica’s sodomy laws banning sex between men and “dancehall” music – whose lyrics often advocate violence against gays – made life for Cunningham unbearable.

Cunningham won asylum in January 2008.

During his asylum hearing, Azevedo had to recall violent episodes in Brazil when he and a group of transsexuals were attacked in bars. He recalled a transgender woman set on fire. Each time Azevedo said he went to police about an attack or a threat, the officers didn’t even bother to file a report.

“I had such a horrific experience,” said Azevedo, who was granted asylum in July. “I was always in fear of being raped, maybe even killed.”

After winning their cases, both Cunningham and Azevedo have become advocates for other asylum-seekers by giving them counseling and directing them toward legal help.

In Worcester, for example, Cunningham has helped a Lebanese and three others Jamaicans win asylum with the legal help provided by the Lutheran Social Services’ “LGBT Human Rights Protection Project.” Another case, involving an Ugandan woman, is pending in the courts.

But while those who have been granted asylum are eager to help, Azevedo said many still haven’t resolved the pain from the past and can’t go back home to visit family – those who haven’t disowned them.

Cunningham said he hasn’t gotten over the fear that, at any moment, he may be forced to flee.

“I’ve never really owned furniture,” Cunningham said. “You just never know.”

Steven Mahoney touted himself as an expert in immigration affairs and ran Mahoney and Associates in Kent, which advised immigrants on how to stay in the U.S. He pleaded guilty in April, acknowledging that between 1998 and 2007 he filed as many as 99 false immigration documents and was paid between $1,000 and $4,000 for each.

In addition to false claims of homosexuality, he advised some clients to claim they could be tortured due to their religious practices or political views.

His ex-wife, Helen Mahoney, was sentenced to six months. Both are naturalized U.S. citizens from Russia.

First there was Gov. Mark Sanford, his, love affair, and inability to shut his trap about it. There is the state’s lieutenant governor and his supposed gay gay ways. Then last night, as President Barack Obama was speaking to a joint session of Congress, Rep. Joe Wilson squawked “You lie!”.Wilson’s town-hall antic came when the president said his health insurance proposal would not cover illegal immigrants (I’ll let the good people at FactCheck.org deal with that). If we lived in Great Britain, Wilson’s outburst would be no biggie. The give and take between a prime minister and MPs are rather legendary; however, here in the US of A Wilson’s eruption is a break with decorum. The South Carolina representative issued a statement last night, offering his regrets.

“While I disagree with the president’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the president for this lack of civility.”

Wilson apparently even called White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Good for him.

The crazies of his party will turn Wilson into a hero who faced down the fascist/Muslim/socialist/nazi Obama with unvarnished truth. If Wilson has an ounce of honor he will reject any hosannas and say what he did was out of bounds. After he does that, he can then say why he and Obama don’t see eye to eye.

We on the left will be shocked (simply shocked sir!) at Wilson’s inability to act like an adult, but let’s not turn this into a cause. If we want to mock a Republican, let’s turn our ire toward fool Michael Duvall, who when caught sharing salacious details of an affair offered this as his initial excuse: he thought his conversation was “private.”

One of 12 countries that prohibit HIV-positive immigrants from entering the country, the United States currently has mandatory testing as a part of the U.S. immigration screening process. Those who test positive for HIV are only able to enter the country with a waiver. The proposed removal would do away with both of these requirements.

“We’re trying to end the stigma and the discriminatory practice for a disease that doesn’t warrant exclusion for coming into this country,” Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, told MSNBC. “We have to appreciate this is not a threat we face from abroad.”

Active tuberculosis, syphilis, leprosy and gonorrhea are other diseases that prevent a person from entering the U.S. The sexually transmitted diseases lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV), chancroid, and granuloma inguinale are also on that list.

Read the full Iowa Dependent story here.

Rickard, 61, would have preferred to keep working at San Jose State University and sponsor her partner, Karin Bogliolo, for residency in the United States, just as heterosexual couples can. But U.S. law does not allow for that.

“If you’re going to have a system that’s designed to keep families together, it should focus on keeping families together,” Rickard said.

That could soon change, as more than 100 lawmakers in the House and about 20 in the Senate have signed onto bills that would add the United States to the 19 countries that already recognize same-sex couples for immigration purposes.

Gay rights groups are encouraged that President Barack Obama has signaled that he would like to include couples like Rickard and Bogliolo in the bills.

“In many ways, the stars are aligning to move this forward as part of a comprehensive bill,” said Steve Ralls, communications director for the advocacy group Immigration Equality. “That’s an opportunity we didn’t have years ago.”

The provisions concerning same-sex couples are part of legislation that would increase the number of visas provided to family members of people already in the United States legally.

The long-standing fight over the country’s estimated 36,000 same sex couples of two nationalities is a small but emotional part of the debate over immigration reform. But including same-sex couples in the mix could make it harder to pass an immigration overhaul.

A key ally in past immigration fights, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said it would not support a measure that has a same-sex provision.

Writing to Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., the organization said the provision would “erode the institution of marriage and family by according marriage-like immigration benefits to same sex relationships.”

Other groups say that it is often difficult to verify the validity of same-sex relationships if one of the partners comes from a country that does not recognize or document same-sex unions.

Honda, lead author of the “Reuniting Families Act,” credited Rickard, one of his constituents, for bringing the issue to his attention. Honda said his Japanese heritage contributed to his taking a closer look at protecting same-sex couples through an overhaul of the nation’s immigration law.

Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps during the fallout from Pearl Harbor and redefined as persons of enemy alien ancestry, Honda said.

“The lack of political leadership played a big part in what happened to us,” Honda said. “And that’s true in almost every civil rights case.”

Another California resident, Shirley Tan, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month in favor of a comparable bill.

Tan has been in California since arriving on a visitor’s visa in 1989. She applied for asylum in 1995 because she was afraid of a cousin in the Philippines who had killed her mother and sister and critically wounded her.

She was unaware the petition had been denied until federal agents took her away in handcuffs at the end of January. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California has since sponsored a bill that allows Tan to stay in the U.S. until the current session of Congress ends in late 2010.

“I have a partner who is a U.S. citizen, and two beautiful children who are also U.S. citizens, but not one of them can petition for me to remain in the United States with them,” Tan said.

The NAACP and the American Bar Association also spoke in favor of including “permanent partners” as part of an immigration bill, saying that current law amounts to discrimination.

Permanent partner is defined in proposed legislation as an individual 18 or older who is “in a committed, intimate relationship with another individual 18 or older in which both individuals intend a lifelong commitment.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said he doubted the legislation would pass this Congress. He said it amounts to a redefinition of marriage and would give people more opportunities to come into the United States fraudulently.

“It seems we would be creating a special preference and benefit for a category of immigrants based on a relationship that’s not recognized by federal law and overwhelmingly by most states,” Sessions said.

Rickard said she may reluctantly move to Great Britain or another country when her partner’s current travel visa expires in November. Bogliolo, however, said she would prefer to live in the U.S. for her partner’s sake.

“Judy has elderly parents and family here and she’s also lived here all her life whereas I’ve lived in many different countries,” Bogliolo said. “I think Judy would find it very difficult after a whole life in San Jose to move over to Europe, so I decided if at all possible that I would move over here.”

Fifteen years later, she walks around her two-room concrete house on Haiti’s central plateau, watching her four children play under the plantain trees. She looks healthy, her belly amply filling a gray, secondhand T-shirt. Her three sons and one daughter were born after she was diagnosed. None has the virus.

“I’m not sick,” she explained patiently on a recent afternoon. “People call me sick but I’m not. I’m infected.”

In many ways the 35-year-old mother’s story is Haiti’s too. In the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up in the U.S. among migrants who had escaped Haiti’s dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country’s population.

Instead, Haiti’s HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted.

In a wide range of interviews with doctors, patients, public health experts and others, The Associated Press found that Haiti’s success in the face of chronic political and social turmoil came because organizations cooperated and tailored programs to the country’s specific challenges.

Much of the credit went to two pioneering nonprofit groups, Boston-based Partners in Health and Port-au-Prince’s GHESKIO, widely considered to be the world’s oldest AIDS clinic.

“The Haitian AIDS community feels like they’re out in front of everyone else on this, and pretty much they are,” said Judith Timyan, senior HIV/AIDS adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Haiti. “They really do some of the best work in the world.”

Researchers say the number of suffers was initially lessened by closing private blood banks, and statistically by high mortality rates – an untreated AIDS sufferer in Haiti lives eight fewer years than an untreated American.

Well-coordinated use of AIDS drugs, education and behavioral changes such as increased condom use have kept the disease from surging back, at least for now.

Statistics are notoriously unreliable in this country of poverty and lack of infrastructure. The most telling data would be the number of new infections in a given year, but researchers say such a precise count is impossible.

Next best is to estimate the infected as a percentage of the population. From 1993 to 2003, only pregnant women were tested, and their rate of infection dropped from 6.2 percent to 3.1 percent, according to GHESKIO and national health surveys.

Researchers now test men and women aged 15 to 49, and the official rate is 2.2 percent, according to UNAIDS.

That’s still far higher than in the developed world, but it’s lower than the Bahamas, Guyana and Suriname, and much lower than sub-Saharan Africa, where the rate averages about 5 percent but spikes to 24 percent in Botswana and 33 percent in Swaziland.

But the crisis is far from over. In the Artibonite Valley, where Boston-based Partners in Health is just now setting up two clinics, the estimated infection rate is 4.5 percent.

Some in these remote regions still look for care from Voodoo priests, who ask for large sums of money or goods and use treatments doctors say can be poisonous.

Thanks in large part to UNAIDS, which awarded Haiti its first grant in 2002, and $420 million from the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, an estimated 18,000 people are on AIDS drugs, most of them administered free through GHESKIO and PIH.

That population represents 40 percent of those whose white blood cell count is low enough for them to need the drugs. It is a high percentage for the developing world, but still fails to help many too remote to reach medical care or those at for-pay public clinics.

Still, Haiti has been sufficiently ahead in prevention, diagnosis and treatment for some of its programs to serve as models for PEPFAR, the program launched by President George W. Bush in 2003 and praised for its work in Africa.

GHESKIO co-founder Dr. Jean W. Pape was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his work, and PIH’s Paul Farmer was recently named chairman of Harvard Medical School’s global health department. In May, Haiti was honored as the host of the opening ceremony of the 2009 International AIDS Candlelight Memorial.

In a country suffering from political upheaval and natural disasters, where three-quarters of the people can neither afford nor access private clinics or fee-based public hospitals, few could have imagined at the dawn of the AIDS crisis how far Haiti would come.

When some of the first confirmed cases of the strange new immune deficiency disease were found in Haitian migrants, the country was hastily and unscientifically pegged as the main breeding ground, or maybe even cause, of AIDS. Experts predicted a third or more of its population would be wiped out.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control deeply offended the country by listing Haitian nationality alongside hemophilia, homosexuality and heroin use as primary risk factors – nicknamed “the four H’s.” There was speculation that slum squalor or Voodoo ceremonies were responsible for the scourge.

By the mid-1980s the CDC’s risk-factor list was amended, but the damage was done to Haiti’s dignity and to tourism, then its second-largest industry, which collapsed and never recovered.

Yet the stigma may be what motivated Haiti to fight the disease harder, uniting squabbling officials and divided donors in a common cause, said Pape, the Haitian-born, Cornell-educated physician who helped found GHESKIO in May 1982.

GHESKIO was founded two months before the disease even had a name, hence its unwieldy French acronym for “Haitian Group for the Study of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections.”

Speaking in an office filled with health studies and signed photos from U.S. presidents, Pape said efforts to close unregulated blood banks, treat the sick and reducing mother-to-child transmissions helped curb the epidemic.

Partners in Health was founded in 1983, by two Haitians and two Americans including Farmer, as a small clinic treating infected people in the desperately poor hillside community of Cange.

Its “accompagnateur” program, in which local workers including HIV patients are paid to help the newly diagnosed adhere to physically taxing medication regimens and prevention measures, has been duplicated in Africa. So has GHESKIO’s work, such as distributing phone cards to patients to keep in closer touch with their doctors.

Obner Saint-Valain is an accompagnateur who looks over seven patients including Marie-Lourdes Pierre, a blind 55-year-old Blanchard woman who has lived with the virus since 1999. For that work he is paid $54 a month.

“If you’re giving medication to a patient, you can’t be scared of them. If the patient becomes worse, it’s me that picks them up and puts them in a car to the hospital,” he said.

While many of Haiti’s more than 9 million people cannot afford care in hospitals that require them to provide everything from medicine to latex gloves for their doctors, HIV patients get cutting-edge treatments for free.

Meanwhile, education campaigns spread the word on prevention measures. More than 51 million free condoms have been shipped to the country of since 2004 and are advertised everywhere on street murals and corner store signs.

“More Haitians know about modes of transmission than high school students in the U.S.,” Pape said.

It was in 1994 that Micheline Leon made the 30-kilometer (20-mile) trek from her home in Blanchard over crumbling roads to the stone-walled campus of Zanmi Lasante, the Creole name and flagship operation of Partners in Health.

Something felt wrong with her pregnancy – the baby was too low in her belly, she said. The baby was fine, but Leon tested positive in the HIV test given to all expectant mothers.

“My family lost hope. They thought I was already gone,” she said.

Through care, counseling and a lot of social assistance – Partners in Health also helped build her tin-roofed, concrete house – Leon survived. She is also a paid PIH accompagnateur, working mostly with tuberculosis patients.

Treatments, which in her later pregnancies included AIDS drugs, prevented the virus from passing to her children, and she was discouraged from breast-feeding. PIH stands by the practice though some AIDS doctors say that’s unwise in countries like Haiti where food is scarce.

Pape envisions a Haiti where the prevalence rate will dip below 1 percent. Timyan of USAID believes the rate has essentially stabilized but will not rise again.

Leon’s parents never did buy that coffin. For her, fear and shame have been replaced with pride and confidence.

“I’m not scared anymore,” she said.

I’ve been all fire and brimstone on the Obama administration lately– and, I think, my anger has been justifiable.

But my overarching disappoitnment with how the administration is handling most issues important to the LGBT community doesn’t mean I’m incapable of recognizing the small, positive steps they’re taking in the right direction. Last week’s ceremony offering official apology to Dr. Frank Kameny for his 1957 firing from the civil service was a nice symbolic step, for example. The administration’s decision to insist of counting same-sex marriages in the 2010 census was also a sign of progress.

And then at the end of last week, we got an action that was more than just symbolic.

The Obama administration has taken the first step toward lifting the ban on HIV positive foreign citizens from entering the United States. The administration’s Office of Management and Budget posted a notice on Friday indicating that the department of Health and Human Services should begin the work to reverse its regulation which disallows HIV positive foreigners from entering the US.

Congress passed the policy change last year, and though the bill was signed by President Bush, it has not been implemented at this point.

The implementation likely has wide-ranging effects on both travel and immigration policy. Under the current law, foreign citizens who are HIV positive canont travel to the United States and immigrants can be subject to HIV testing, and deportation if they’re found to be HIV positive. The exact changes to be made in curent regulation will be determined by the Department of Health and Human Services, but the bill passed by Congress grants broad authority to overturn the ban completely.

They had to move, he said, because there was no legal way for them to remain together in the United States.

“It wasn’t a decision that any U.S. citizen should have to make,” former Mayor J.W. Lown said in an interview from Mexico. “I left a home. I left a ranch. I left a promising political career.”

His local prominence and his run for the border on the day he was supposed to be sworn in for a fourth term caused jaws to drop, but it also became a high-profile example of the thousands of Americans who face a similar choice – separate or move abroad – because they can’t secure green cards for their partners like heterosexual spouses can.

An estimated 36,000 Americans are in this situation, said U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, citing information from the advocacy group Immigration Equality.

Bills have been introduced in Congress to treat same-sex partners like heterosexual spouses for the purposes of immigration but are likely to face a strong fight, both from gay marriage opponents and anti-immigration groups. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act prevents immigration officials from recognizing gay marriages, even from states where they are now legal.

Proponents see the issue as a basic rights question, and Steve Ralls, a spokesman for Immigration Equality, said he believes the best chance for the legislation is as part of a larger immigration bill.

But other immigration advocates want to keep the issues separate, fearful of bogging down an already tough fight. Kevin Appleby, migration policy director for U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the push for same-sex partners in immigration is about getting recognition in federal law for gay marriage – which he opposes.

“It’s an unholy marriage of the immigration debate and the same-sex marriage debate,” he said. “It’s very combustible.”

Lown’s decision last month brought the issue to an unlikely place, a town of 90,000 where ranchers and roughnecks from the vast open lands come to do their banking and send their kids to the regional state college. The town’s only other recent brush with national fame came last year when it housed the hundreds of children taken from a polygamist sect’s ranch in nearby Eldorado.

Before his May 19 resignation, Lown (pronounced “lawn”) was considered a political rising star. The 32-year-old Republican, first elected at age 26, won his fourth term with about 89 percent of the vote.

During his tenure, Lown transformed the $600-a-year, part-time job from a mostly ceremonial position to a hands-on office. He actively appeared at thousands of community functions and went to Washington to lobby for the West Texas town – spending his own money after a few residents complained about taxpayers footing the bill.

“That’s devotion and dedication,” Councilwoman Charlotte Farmer said. “He would have gone far in the political arena in the state of Texas and perhaps farther.”

Lown’s sexuality never really came up. Some people didn’t know. Lown’s godfather, Mario Castillo, said most who knew didn’t care.

“San Angelo has a live-and-let-live attitude. As long as you don’t go around waving your boxer shorts in Sunday school, people leave it alone,” said Castillo, a longtime resident who is now a Washington lobbyist.

But Lown, who worked as a real estate agent, said his prominence meant his two-month-old relationship would be scrutinized and his 20-year-old partner might be subject to deportation.

“My heart was torn, and I had to make a decision,” he said in a conference call with local reporters shortly after his resignation.

Lown has declined to identify his partner but said the man came across the Rio Grande as a teenager and attended high school and college in San Angelo. They went to Mexico – Lown won’t say exactly where – so that his partner can apply for legal residency in the United States, generally a lengthy process for Mexicans without a U.S. citizen spouse, child or parent.

“I did not want to consciously violate the law,” Lown said. “We want to make a life together and do it in the right way and follow the law.”

Lown, whose mother was Mexican, holds dual citizenship allowing him to live legally in Mexico, he said.

San Angelo, meanwhile, will be without a mayor until the City Council decides whether to appoint someone or schedule a special election.

Lown hopes to eventually return here with his partner.

“I don’t know how long this is going to take. It could take months. It could take years, but I’m prepared to wait as long as it takes,” he said. “I hope I’ll have some shred of my good name left when this is resolved.”

“I made the final decision when I knew it was the right decision to make for me and my partner and our future – and for the community,” Lown said. “I love the people of San Angelo. I know the timing wasn’t good, but the timing couldn’t be helped.”

Lown was re-elected to the position of mayor with 89.34 percent of the vote. Lown, who has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Mexico, hopes to return to San Angelo with his partner if  ”the people of San Angelo will welcome me back.”

Lown announced his resignation via a letter to City Manager Harold Dominguez in which he explained that he would not be serving his term for personal reasons.

Fellow city council members have expressed their sadness over the loss of Lown, who they consider to be a great politician. Several council members, such as John David Fields, hope that the San Angelo citizens “give him the time he might need to do what he needs to do and respect his privacy.”

“It was a choice I had to make,” Lown said. “I love the people of San Angelo. I know the timing wasn’t good, but the timing couldn’t be helped.”

Read the full GOSanAngelo story here.

Fred and his partner Mark, who both live in Harrisburg, Penn., have two children together. They have been together for over 15 years. They own a house. Yet now that Fred has used up his work and student visas, they need to move to France, where Mark is afraid he won’t be able to find work, find an employer who will sponsor Fred in the United States, or break the law.

Welcome to the strange world of bi-national, same-sex couples.

There are almost 36,000 same-sex couples kept apart by U.S. immigration law, which allows Americans to sponsor their foreign-born husbands and wives for U.S. residency, but does not give same-sex partners the same rights.

Almost 80 percent of those couples include a foreign partner whose country also doesn’t provide immigration benefits to same sex-couples. This means that thousands of gay couples have no idea what the future will hold for them – if they should buy a house or take a job, if they will be able to live with their partners and if so in what country, and even, in some cases, if they will be able to live with their children.

“It’s unjust and humane,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) in a New York forum sponsored by Immigration Equality and HRC.

Nadler, as he has every year since 2000, introduced a bill in the House calling for equal rights for gay spouses in immigration law (Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced a similar bill in the Senate). “Gay families deserve the same rights as any other family,” Nadler said.

Formerly called the Permanent Partners Immigration Act, the bill was reintroduced as the Uniting American Families Act. It would add the words “permanent partner” every time the word “spouse” appears in the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act.

Under the UAFA, permanent partners would need to prove they are committed, unmarried to anyone else, the absence of a close blood relationship, and the inability to legally marry their permanent partner.

Mark and Fred can move to France, which has immigration rights for same-sex couples (though not same-sex adoption, which might put the couples’ rights to their children in danger), but most gay couples don’t have that luxury. The Williams Project on Sexual Orientation estimates that almost 80 percent of bi-national couples include a foreign partner whose country doesn’t recognize same-sex immigration rights either.

That means that over 26,000 couples can’t live together legally in the U.S. or in the foreign partners’ country.

So what do they do? Some break the law and stay in one country or the other past their visas. Some travel on tourist visas as often as they can. Some rely on Skype and the Internet to keep in touch. And at least one has bought a third home – in Hong Kong.

Jamie, a professor in New York, and his partner John (not his real name), who comes from a small, homophobic country they would prefer not to name, have for three years bounced between Jamie’s New York home, John’s home, and an apartment in Hong Kong. There are only 19 countries that recognize same-sex partners in immigration law – Hong Kong isn’t one of them. But for professional reasons, they are both able to be there separately.

“He didn’t like it at first, because he doesn’t speak Chinese,” Jamie said. “But it’s growing on him.” “Of course we’re lucky,” he added. “I’m retired and we have enough money to do this. If I had a nine-to-five, 50-week-a-year job, it would be impossible.”

NEXT PAGE: Will Obama help the act pass?