When Kristen Lovell moved to New York City in the 1990s and began to transition, she was promptly fired from her job. Facing poverty and scarce employment opportunities, she found her way to the Meatpacking District and to the handful of blocks then known as “the stroll,” where queer and trans people engaged in sex work and formed a tight-knit community built around survival and sisterhood.
That community is the subject of a staggering new documentary, The Stroll, which premieres Wednesday night on HBO and Max and was directed by Lovell and Zackary Drucker, both of whom are trans women. As a sex worker myself, I can confidently say it’s a film like no other I have seen, particularly because of the directors’ willingness to let trans women show and tell their own stories on screen. In a series of interviews with others she knew from the stroll, Lovell graciously takes us into her world to meet friends, sisters, and contemporaries of trans sex work, cementing their place in queer history.
Their stories are at once illuminating and harrowing, giving viewers a rare glimpse into the lives of those cast aside. Egyptt, one of the sex worker siblings Lovell interviews about their experiences, says of the stroll, “Some choose sex work because they have no choice. A lot of us back then did not have a choice because jobs were not accessible to us.” Another trans woman from the stroll, Lady P, explains, “People were not hiring people that looked like me.” Ceyenne, a Black trans woman and prominent activist and founder of the nonprofit GLITS, talked about how she left home and ran away to New York City without a stable place to stay, sleeping in trains when she had to. “I was safer in the street than I ever was in that household,” she says of her childhood home.
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In the Meatpacking District, however, she and others found a home where BIPOC, LGBTQIA people, and sex workers could be their authentic selves in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. As Ivy, a gallery owner in the neighborhood, recounts about the old days, “The Meatpacking District was just S&M bars, meat packers, and hookers.” But it was also a place where queer and trans BIPOC people and sex workers could find a chosen family. Tabytha, now a human rights activist in New York, says of the “stroll mothers” she befriended, “These girls taught me how to survive.”
That fight for survival is a key theme of The Stroll, which tells viewers that Black trans sex workers are harassed, assaulted, and raped by law enforcement at higher incidences than the rest of the sex working population. The women Lovell interviews about their experiences with such harassment by police is not just important, but a watershed moment for sex worker liberation. Seeing sex workers talk face to face with a camera about their lived experiences being raped by cops was, as a former sex worker myself of 20 years, enraging but empowering. Usually, we only talk about this stuff among ourselves—especially because we’re often ignored or not believed by people who refuse to acknowledge the harsh truth that, yes, a sex worker can be raped. Lovell and Drucker choosing to highlight these stories, therefore, is an act of heroism for our communities.
The Stroll is also, vitally, a tale of gentrification and discrimination. The years of former NYC mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg were not kind to the sex working communities of Manhattan, the doc notes. Lovell and Drucker include the ways in which both the gentrification of New York and the gentrification of outdoor sex work being driven to the internet changed the landscape for sex workers in the Meatpacking District. It’s a theme that, unfortunately, can be applied to more and more locales across the U.S.—as cities get bigger and more expensive, what happens to those of us who were already here? What do we as a society plan to do in our rapidly gentrifying cities with people who cannot “keep up” with the cost of living? Pushing sex workers away, as well as BIPOC folks, LGBTQIA+ people, and houseless folks, shouldn’t be the answer, but where do these communities go when there is nowhere affordable left?
For a film that asks such tough questions and covers such a fraught time in history, The Stroll ultimately left me feeling hopeful, buoyed by the vibrant tales of those who refuse to be forgotten or erased. I will never stop believing in the power of sex workers to transform our communities because we do it every day and we have always done it, even when it’s not visible to the mainstream world. It’s Pride Month, and one day I hope the integration and practice of sex workers’ rights as human rights are as mainstream as Pride has become. It’s not as far-fetched an idea as you might think, especially after hearing the stories of resilience so bravely told in The Stroll, which help to illuminate a once-dark corner of history. As Lovell keenly notes at the end of the documentary, “You can take the girl out of the stroll, but you can’t take the stroll out of the girl.”
