Amid present-day attacks on immigrants, a film on the late Urvashi Vaid shows what people power really looks like.
This piece is part of an ongoing series, “Redefining Power: How Indian American Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Leadership, Identity and Care.” It explores what it means to modernize without losing our roots and features Indian American women who have reshaped culture, power and possibility.
When the 18-minute documentary There Are Things To Do premiered in Provincetown, Mass., in 2023, it was never meant to be a global statement. It was meant to be a love letter, a short community film about a long legacy. But like the woman it honors—activist Urvashi Vaid—it refused to stay small.
And how could it? We are living through a time when naturalized citizens are being threatened with denaturalization, children are being separated from their parents during immigration raids, people are crossing state lines just to access basic reproductive healthcare, and pregnant women who desperately want children are dying in homes and hospitals or on their way to seek medical care because doctors delay or deny treatment under strict abortion laws. These are not fringe headlines—they are daily realities in one of the most powerful nations in the world.
Against this backdrop, There Are Things to Do (now available for streaming on PBS) arrives like a gentle ambush. Its power is subtle, but the provocation is clear: What if the most radical thing an immigrant could do in America is not assimilate, but organize?
The filmmakers, Mike Syers and Fermin Rojas, didn’t set out to create a sweeping biography. They were answering a call from the Provincetown Film Society to spotlight influential community members.
But as they began researching Vaid’s life and talking to the people closest to her, they realized this wasn’t just a local story. It was a universal one—because Vaid was a force of nature.
A queer, Indian-born civil rights attorney, she had led the Washington, D.C.-based National LGBTQ Task Force, founded multiple intersectional justice organizations and spent her life building coalitions across movements. She didn’t just advocate for change, she architected it, believing that queer liberation, immigrant justice and reproductive freedom were all part of the same fight.
“This is a film about building community … and individual responsibility,” Syers told Ms. “That’s the universal message.”
There’s something about this film that lingers. It’s deceptively simple in structure—told through archival footage, voice-over and present-day interviews—but emotionally expansive in its reach. Yes, it’s set in Provincetown, the small Cape Cod community known as one of the earliest havens for LGBTQ+ life in America. However, its message stretches far beyond. The film tackles the questions we all grapple with: how to live in integrity, how to organize without ego, how to love without boundaries and how to carry each other through it all.
The more the filmmakers examined Vaid’s longtime romantic partnership with Kate Clinton, the more they began to see this not just as political history, but as a love story.
“It was lust at first sight,” Clinton told Ms. The two met in 1988 at a first-of-its-kind, national LGBT summit called “The War Conference: Because They Are Making War Against Us.” Clinton, a comedian, had been sent by a friend who promised she’d “get a lot of material.” Instead, Clinton met Vaid.
She was a tough audience. We challenged each other. We made each other better.
Kate Clinton
Their love, tender but relentless, animates every frame of the film. It’s a reminder that relationships, like movements, are forged through shared vision and mutual accountability. “We read our speeches and routines to each other for critiques,” Clinton says. “She was a tough audience. We challenged each other. We made each other better.”
Watching Vaid and Clinton in action—whether sitting on their porch or supporting the launch of the Commons, a community space in Provincetown dedicated to activism, the arts and public dialogue—feels like witnessing activism in its purest form: personal, persistent and rooted in place. “We felt a wholeness and strength with each other that allowed us to go out in the world and do our work,” Clinton says. “[Urvashi] said we were the marriage of comedy and tragedy. It was a genuinely fluid relationship.”
We don’t see stories like this enough—stories that recount accomplishments while also revealing the emotional infrastructure behind them. They show us not only what someone did, but how they stayed in the fight, and why.
“She wasn’t just a lesbian activist,” Rojas says. “She believed reproductive rights, immigrant rights and LGBTQ+ rights had to rise together.” That belief runs through the film like a spine.
Intersectionality isn’t just a buzzword here. In archival footage, Vaid says, “I’m a brown lesbian with left politics. Hello. Living in a capitalist patriarchy that’s racist and white supremacist. What’s the point of inclusion? The places including me are social movements.”
She didn’t soften the message to make it more palatable. She sharpened it. “She was all about connecting the dots,” Clinton says. “She cold-called leaders, mentored new organizers, made introductions. And she got hurt, by racism, by sexism, by being dismissed. But she came back more determined. I wanted to punch people in the face. She wanted to keep building.”
The more I learned about how the film was made, the more it became clear how deeply it reflected Vaid’s values. It wasn’t funded by studios or backed by investors. There were no production deals or salaried crews. Instead, it was shaped by a small group of Provincetown filmmakers who volunteered hundreds of hours, driven not by profit but by purpose. “This wasn’t a commercial venture,” Syers says. It was a labor of love from the Provincetown filmmaker community—for Provincetown.
And yet, it hasn’t stayed there. The film has now screened at more than 50 festivals across five continents. It’s being shown in classrooms, LGBTQ+ centers, corporate offices and activist spaces around the world. It’s available online, and anyone can host a screening.
“She could have the most philosophical ideas,” Clinton said in a Q&A tied to the film. “And then she would give you the list of how we’re going to do it.”
That level of consistency—that personal follow-through—is rare. But it’s what made Vaid such a powerful organizer. “She liked to win,” Clinton says. “She loved watching football. She would call the plays. One morning she woke up and said before coffee, ‘I want to crush the Right like a bug.’” Even in play, Vaid didn’t give up. Clinton recalls, “She once arm-wrestled Martina Navratilova. Got her arm crushed down. Looked her in the eye and said, ‘Best out of three.’”
I felt guilty that I hadn’t known about her. I live in the safety that people like her created.
A Gen Z viewer of ‘There Are Things To Do‘
One of the most affecting moments in the film comes when Vaid, ill but undeterred, says: “There are those of us who have cancer, and we’re still working. We walk among you. We are not invisible.”
She continued—through COVID-19, through her breast cancer diagnosis, through the very end. “She kept working,” Rojas told Ms. “It makes you ask yourself: What excuse do we have?”
One Gen Z viewer said after watching the film, “I felt guilty that I hadn’t known about her. I live in the safety that people like her created.”
The quiet power of this documentary is that it doesn’t just inform. It implicates. It invites. It dares us to move. The film’s website includes a discussion guide, links to voter registration and resources for community action. “I hope people feel love, grief, pride—and then I hope they do something,”
Clinton says, “Volunteer. Protest. Laugh together. Laugh at them. They hate that. Be bold but be bad.”
Vaid’s death in 2022 left a massive void. But her life, through this film, offers a road map. We don’t need more immigrant stories that end in acceptance. We need ones that begin in audacity.
“We were watching the news one day, just horrified at what the right was doing,” Clinton recalls. “Urvashi turned to me and said, ‘We’ve got them right where we want them.’ And then she went to work.”
This article appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Ms. Join today to get our newest issue delivered straight to your mailbox—and fuel another year of our reporting, rebelling and truth-telling.
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