The Stroll (2023)
A moving documentary on subterranean transgender lives resurfaced and empowered
Filmmaker Kristen Lovell became a fierce advocate and chronicler after her heyday on The Stroll
The Stroll (2023)
Streaming on Max
The best social documentaries sometimes ask us to look at people and privations we’d Rather Not. Those who are different can seem too far-out. They show us stuff we have to deal with before we can honestly empathize.
The Stroll offers such a challenge, and if you take it, you might find the leap exhilarating. I know I did.
It’s no walk in the park. You’ll see body parts usually hidden from view, desperate lives marginalized almost beyond hope and the downtrodden hounded by a city and a police force that just wanted them gone.
But by the end of this documentary (winner of a Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival) you may discover a respect for those down but not out. They’re still out there. They’re always out there.
“The Stroll” refers to the far west end of 14th Street in New York City’s Meatpacking District where, from roughly the ’70s to the 2000s, transgender women, mostly women of color, did sex work in order to survive.
One of those women is Kristen Lovell, who co-directs here with Zackary Drucker, who’s also transgender.
When some 15 years ago Lovell was interviewed for a documentary on The Stroll, she said to herself, I want to tell my story, and she decided to become a filmmaker. This movie is her testament to trans women’s struggle and survival.
Lovell talks with 11 trans women and coaxes out their intimate revelations on relishing the thrills and braving the hazards of life on the street.
In the interviews, Lovell’s on-camera frankness about her personal experience prods other sex workers to open up and tell their sometimes funny, often harrowing tales of nights working hard for the money.
There are stories of abuse and violence, but these women also exude an indomitable warmth and a shared sense of struggle that’s moving and easily understood once we see them up close and hear them speak freely.
They’re simply part of the American story. Whether pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or by your five-inch-heel pumps, you deserve respect.
Archival footage of this notorious setting gives us a broad sense of the tangled, bitter yet somehow joyous history of trans identity in New York City and elsewhere.
The documentary cleverly uses this microcosm of trans history to humanize strife that ran far deeper than a few city blocks. We get a look inside these women’s minds, and their struggle for self-respect and inner peace begins to feel universal.
This is an unapologetic, defiantly trans cry of the heart, not a gallant lecture on gay uplift.
That would falsify and obliterate specific trans courage against mean cops and an indifferent big-city power structure.
The moviemakers stake a place for trans sex workers alongside “respectable” gay and Lesbian middle-class assimilation.
The mainstream gay movement often shunned and excluded them, except to pull them into marches, parades and fundraising events captured by TV cameras for the broader LGBTQ+ cause.
These moviemakers want to make sure we don’t forget a particular suffering segment of the underbelly of society’s sexual hypocrisy.
Lovell today superimposed over archived footage of The Stroll’s workers on the lookout
To this day in the USA, sex workers are harassed, beaten, arrested, imprisoned and have to fight for their lives behind bars, while the johns who seek their services aren’t ever exposed.
But the relentless focus here is on New York City and its systemic cruelty.
Lovell moved to New York in the 1990s and began to transition. Because she adopted female dress and behavior, she, like all trans women, had trouble finding or holding jobs.
Lovell was fired and, sometimes sleeping in movie theaters, in order to eat she joined other transgender women prowling the Meatpacking District turning tricks.
The women were seen as “unfit” for traditional places of employment, so they carved out a sense of community and a shaky livelihood working The Stroll.
From the ’70s through the ’90s, it wasn’t easy for transgender women, especially those of color, to get even a humdrum office job.
With no career paths, shunned by their families and society, many of these women decided it was more profitable – and much livelier – to strive on the streets rather than shuttle through homeless shelters.
There are stories of abuse and violence, but these women also exude an indomitable warmth and a shared sense of struggle that’s moving and easily understood once we see them up close and hear them speak freely.
They’re simply part of the American story. Whether pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or by your five-inch-heel pumps, you deserve respect.
This movie’s backdrop, both melancholy and vibrant, is urban renewal in the 21st century.
Its timeline shows how the vast stillness that blanketed New York after the 9/11 attacks set in motion an unstoppable wave of gentrification in this and many other neighborhoods.
The Stroll largely went silent, and when it tried to revive in 2003 it was already too late. The city was busy dismantling the community, making way for luxury living spaces and upscale shopping.
The contrast with the gritty archival imagery is haunting, and the documentary becomes a kind of recovery project for Lovell and her comrades.
Their old neighborhood has been erased, but their spirit hasn’t been quashed. There’s also animation – by AWESOME + modest – which heightens the women’s churning emotions and gives the movie a cool noirish patina.
Many were runaways from social abuse, including being kicked out by their families.
They were routinely targeted by NYPD for “walking while trans” (Article 240 of the Offenses Against Public Order act, which was finally repealed in February 2021).
You could be arrested in daylight simply going to the grocery store. This was unbridled police harassment, backed up by violence, during an era where trans rights weren’t remotely on anybody’s mind.
Officers in NYPD’s 6th Precinct (Greenwich Village) had an especially vicious fixation, and we see footage of their snarling hatred.
Gallingly, some cops were also clients. One trans worker remembers how she serviced a cop and, immediately afterwards, he arrested her. Another was arrested more than 60 times. Women were hurt or disappeared or in some cases ended up spending years in jail.
Yet the participants look back with an oddly touching dignity and willingness to accept change. Their accounts are heartfelt but not awash in sentimentality.
These people had to turn to sex work because the visibly trans were anathema to the larger society.
The Stroll is an important record of a past that might have been completely wiped away by the economic and political forces that came to the fore in New York City. Mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg cracked down on crime with harsh, willfully insensitive rigor.
With a strange, mellowed sadness, the picture is forced to chronicle the economic surge of 14th Street into what has become a luxury shopping, dining, and entertainment area. The Meatpacking District now contains only seven meat packers, from a high of around 200 in earlier years.
Lovell and her subjects hold no desire to return to the tricky, hazardous life they led on The Stroll. But that life emphatically hasn’t kept them down. One overpowering reason is the tight sense of community that helped them endure.
Many didn’t survive, but those who did now work in public health, community outreach and social services. Others became creatives, like Lovell.
And many survivors have stayed in New York. They’re giving back, in similar neighborhoods, to the city that refused to treat them as people, only as criminals.
Marvelously, we get to see them here still flaunting their jewelry, makeup and streetwise resilience.
It was society that was dressing up and pretending all those years, much more deceitfully than these tenacious women ever did.