My paper focuses on Arab women and gay men who seek gender or sexuality based asylum in the United States. This type of asylum was introduced in the mid 1990s with two landmark cases, one of a Muslim woman fleeing female circumcision in Togo and another of a gay man escaping government abuse in Cuba. The number of gender and sexuality-based asylum applications has been growing since. The legal process requires that the applicant provide proof of a reasonable expectation of persecution. However, particular types of gender/sexuality persecution appear to be associated with different regions of the world, and thus more likely to be accepted as legitimate grounds for asylum. For the Arab Middle East, I suggest that a framework of the threat of so-called honor-killing is frequently used and seems to be well received by asylum officers and judges. Interestingly, many queer Arab men appeal to this honor-killing framework in their applications as well. This paper is based on anthropological field research in 2012 and 2013 involving 10 asylum cases in the New York and New Jersey area. The applicants came from 4 different Middle Eastern countries: Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian West Bank and Lebanon. As a volunteer Arabic interpreter for non-profit and pro-bono lawyers, I met the applicants and accompanied them through different stages of the application process and levels of appeal. I analyze how applications for asylum, particularly the required narratives of persecution in Arab Muslim society, construct a geography of gender danger. How are the narratives made to speak to asylum law, officers and judges in a context that is generally hostile to Muslim immigration? And what sort of assumptions about gender, sexuality, class, religion, culture and "country conditions" are made and challenged? What sorts of negotiations occur between client and attorney to craft potentially successful affidavits and testimony? How are bodily scars and personal histories of abuse used to carve a new space for the applicants. These deployments of gendered victimization are compared and contrasted to the asylum applications of heterosexual Arab men whose roles as good husbands and fathers are often emphasized. The supporting documents that attorneys compile concerning country conditions are similarly unpacked. Taken together these cases appear to draw an interesting map of gender, sexuality and political power.