We begin in the water. It’s daylight, and there are people swimming in and out of the camera’s vision. Someone can be heard speaking in voiceover as sunlight breaks through the surface of the North Florida spring where the swimmers wade. “Don’t ever be afraid,” the voice says. “It gets really uncomfortable, right? But that’s when you know change is coming.” Almost as if the words catch the sunlight itself, a new scene appears, and we see a group of queer and trans people swimming, playing, and holding each other in the ocean off the coast of South Florida.
In the feature-length documentary “Can’t Stop Change,” queer climate stories from Florida’s front lines take center stage, and water and queerness are kin, similar in their shapeshifting instance on eternality, rejection of possession, and openness to being experienced. Queerness and the environment can’t be held down, but in Florida, queer people and the more-than-human queer world are under attack.
The voice in the documentary’s opening credits belongs to Valencia Gunder, a community organizer and cultural worker born and raised in Miami. The film interviews a dozen other organizers, who, like Gunder, are dedicated to the project of world re-making through the perspective, experiences, and wisdom of queerness. This isn’t a queerness defined by who one loves or has sex with, though these are important definitions. In “Can’t Stop Change,” the word queer is a noun, verb, and adjective: people can be queer and people can queer how they understand something.
“Queerness is an invitation to think differently,” said Vanessa Raditz, the film’s co-director. In “Can’t Stop Change,” queer is a politics and an interrogative, demanding we ask further and better questions of the ways that environmental harm pervades queer and trans life, illustrating how queerness can build bridges between groups of people. The documentary encourages viewers to challenge the dominant narratives of how we’ve been taught to think about climate change and who or what is rendered disposable.
According to the film’s collaborators, Florida’s legislature and governor have undertaken a project of enacting anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-climate legislation—and the violence done to both the queer community and to the environment comes from the same source. In 2022, Florida was the first state to enact “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, which prohibits teachers from discussing gender and sexuality with their students. As Prism reported, this kind of legislation bears a disproportionate impact on young Floridians of color.
Throughout his term as governor, Ron DeSantis has also repealed critical environmental regulations, approved permits to destroy undeveloped land, and openly questioned the role of a fossil fuel-based economy in protracting climate change. In the aftermath of widespread legislative refusal to address the root causes of climate change, hurricanes, storms, and flooding have grown more severe, caused more damage, and cost more money—all while restrictions on queer and trans life have ballooned. But the documentary takes this likeness—how governing bodies attempt to legislate out of existence queer communities and environmental autonomy–one step further.
“The intensification of these hurricanes, as well as the intensification of a kind of cisheteronormativity that has always been present within settler colonialism, seeks to control particular bodies to form particular social functions that maintain its existence,” Raditz said.
Where legislation attempts to create sameness, the more-than-human world, combined of bacteria, animals, ecosystems, and biomes, is strong because of its variability. In “Can’t Stop Change,” collaborators underscore that humans are a part of the natural world, just one species among thousands. The world doesn’t exist as a mall from which humans may consume.
It was important to Elias Acevedo, one of the documentary’s editors and co-collaborators, to put “viewers in the space with the collaborators.” The network of care and mutual aid portrayed in the documentary evokes the many webs of relationship inherent to nature’s functioning: We hear from Lakey Love, organizer and co-founder of the Florida Coalition for Transgender Liberation. For their activism, Love received death threats and was ultimately pushed out of Florida. We drive with Robin Harris of Central Florida Mutual Aid to Orlo Vista, an unincorporated community in Orlando, where residents still haven’t recovered from flooding from Hurricane Ian. We learn how Jimmy Dunson, the co-founder and co-coordinator of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, built a permanent network that could respond to disaster “from below in the spirit of solidarity.” In the queer world of “Can’t Stop Change,” institutions are nowhere to be found. It’s queer people who look after their queer communities, it’s plants who support the people, and we see queer folks tend to plants with the reverence one might associate with care for an elder.
“We are part of the environment, [and] we are also the environment,” said co-director Natalia Villarán-Quiñones. “We need to start working along with it instead of against it and trying to control it, which is what a lot of people in power are trying to do.”
This attempt at control is familiar to many of Florida’s immigrant communities, Villarán-Quiñones said. “A lot of us have migrated to the U.S. trying to find stability but are met with more violence once we do,” she said. Black and Caribbean queer Floridians navigate climate and political disasters that Villarán-Quiñones explained are “tied to living in a colony.”
There’s a goliath that lurks just behind the work and words of those featured in the documentary. Everywhere community care is expressed, government is decidedly absent. And when climate change is brought up, the focus isn’t on fighting impacts of a rapidly morphing climate system. Rather, the conversation shifts to care, reciprocity, and the responsibilities queer people have to their communities.
On a walk with Harris, the mutual aid organizer in central Florida, Villarán-Quiñones surveys the land that the flooding left behind, including the now quiet residential streets few have been able to return home to. “Hurricanes do what they’re supposed to,” Harris said. “It’s not the storms that are the culprits.”
But for all of the ways the “culprits” of colonial violence loom in the background, the documentary doesn’t spend too much time shining a light on elected officials or institutions that vilify queer people. The focus, rather, stays on world-building, the shared analysis of what can be made in the wake of those violences, and reminding us that queer people can, as Raditz said, “dream bigger than this.”
Catch a live screening of Can’t Stop Change on Jan. 18, 7-9 p.m., at the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans as a side-event to the LGBTQ+ Task Force’s Creating Change Conference. The film will be available for screenings in February 2024. Contact queerecoproject@gmail.com to request a screener of the film, and follow @queers4climatejustice on Instagram for further details.
