‘The Stroll’ Review: Personal, Archive-Driven Doc on NYC Trans Sex Workers Is a Wonder
Queer history is an act of excavation. Telling stories about the LGBTQ community — and of transgender people in particular — necessarily requires sifting through archives that are outright hostile to those they document. In “The Stroll,” a new HBO documentary directed by Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker, the filmmakers excavate decades’ worth of images to tell the story of trans sex workers in the Meatpacking District of New York City. Ostensibly a slice of local history of an increasingly gentrified city that sees marginalized folks as handily disposable, “The Stroll” is an empathetic portrait of a community still fighting for its own survival.
The film opens on footage of a young Lovell, taken from the 2007 doc “Queer Streets,” in which she speaks about how she first turned to sex work to make money — more money, in fact, than what she made at her day job. Her eyes are a bit glazed and she keeps looking away: ashamed, perhaps, of what she’s matter-of-factly describing. We then witness the filmmaker, all these years later, assessing those shots in an editing bay where she further explains how she was likely on cocaine when she had cameras following her close to two decades ago.
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Looking back on how Lovell’s own story was framed, audiences are keyed into the why and how of her desire to chronicle the history of “the Stroll” — the name given to the streets that she and her peers covered — from her own point of view. Only, of course, it is not solely her story and perspective that the documentary includes. “The Stroll” is a mosaic of tales from generations of trans sex workers who once thrived while walking those streets looking for johns and found, in turn, a welcoming community that has since been pushed out by the city’s ever-evolving gentrification. There are stories of strife and of struggle here, but also of joy and community, of sisterhood and resilience.
Lovell’s project understands that a city’s history — the way neighborhoods evolve, whether by policy or policing or both — tells only one side of its story. While documentaries and newscasts over the decades have grappled with and portrayed the Stroll as a seedy, crime-riddled space in need of cleaning up, Lovell and Drucker begin their historiographical project by reframing such impressions. Archival photographs of trans women walking the streets and sensationalized news reports tinged with questionable ethnographic impulses (including one led by RuPaul, who plays the entire segment for laughs) here become mere representational matter, with which the filmmakers illustrate how that area became a safe haven for so many trans women looking for ways to survive and even thrive.
To flip that script and to really capture the expansive history of the Stroll, reaching back to the early days of gay liberation and all the way through a post-9/11 New York City, Lovell stages candid conversations with a number of trans women who reminisce about their experiences in the streets. These interactions have the feel of well-worn chats between old friends, using shorthand and basking in each other’s glow, and lend “The Stroll” a warm sense of intimacy. This is a trans history project created by, and in service of, the trans community — a community that can collectively account for why its story merits telling, even if it’s fractured and fragmented today. (The film’s team had to actively seek out many of its subjects, some of whom had spent years in jail, or had moved on and out of the city, while one had even detransitioned.) Throughout, audiences are welcomed not as interlopers or as voyeurs but as curious queer kin.
Shuffling between archival images, intimate testimonials and even animated sequences that bring to life storied tales of encounters with police and johns, “The Stroll” has the hallmark of a cohesive choral project, excavating the past in order to make sense of both the present and a possible future. Watching Lovell and her subjects walk through the glittery streets of a now extremely bourgeois, tourist-filled Meatpacking District, the concept of the Stroll’s history as now existing only through these embodied memories becomes an urgent call to action.
The evanescence of such safe spaces, coupled with the aggression with which the police and the New York City government clamped down on the likes of Lovell and the film’s subjects, makes “The Stroll” a piece of queer history that feels unsparingly timely. One of its most affecting scenes comes late in the film, courtesy of footage from the 2020 Brooklyn Liberation for Black trans lives, where an impassioned Ceyenne Doroshow opened her speech on housing advocacy with two simple words that roused the crowd: “We’re whores!”
Indeed, what’s most astonishing about the film is the way it refuses the censuring, sensationalized gaze that has so often been used to frame and present the lives of trans sex workers. Both aesthetically and politically, it refuses the insidious call to adhere to a respectability politics that would look away (in shame, or even denial) from the fate and function of trans sex workers within the LGBTQ movement. Instead, it continually honors the dignity with which women like Ceyenne, Egyptt, Lady P and Tabytha —and Lovell too — have confronted a world that would have much rather ignored if not outright erased them. As such, “The Stroll” is a powerful piece of trans history-making, a document that feels wounded, lived in, and yet joyfully alive.
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