Like most of contemporary Manhattan, the former Meatpacking District around the western end of 14th Street is now a sanitised, gentrified playground for wealthy New Yorkers. But in the decades before 9/11, before Giuliani and Bloomberg transformed the city into a low-crime corporate shopping mall, this area was a notorious twilight zone of S&M clubs, fetish bars, derelict warehouses and streetwalkers. Nicknamed “The Stroll”, the street became a haven for sex workers, particularly trans women of colour, marginalised outsiders even in the city’s famously permissive gay underground.
One 14th Street regular was Kristen Lovell, now an actor and filmmaker, who makes an assured directing debut with The Stroll. Her avowed mission in this timely documentary, which world premieres at Sundance ahead of its TV debut on HBO, is to accurately reclaim and represent an important chapter in trans history before it gets erased forever. Her co-director is Zackary Drucker, whose credits include the hit TV drama Transparent and acclaimed docu-series The Lady and the Dale. For most viewers, this film will be a slightly voyeuristic walk on the wild side, a nostalgic love letter to New York’s fabled sleazy heyday as mythologised in the work of Hubert Selby Jr., Lou Reed, Nan Goldin and others. But it is also an illuminating, compassionate history lesson about a fascinating period in the city’s hidden queer demi-monde.
Working both as director and on-screen narrator, Lovell builds her patchwork narrative using contemporary first-hand interviews with old friends and former sex workers, who share their memories of how they ended up on The Stroll. Most carry the post-traumatic scars of early rejection by conservative, often religious families: “I was safer in the street than I was ever in that household,” one recalls. Many have endured social ostracism, homelessness, poverty, drug abuse, routine violence, police harassment and long periods on jail. Murder and suicide figure heavily in these grim back stories, with one interviewee estimating that only around five trans women out of around 1000 who worked on 14th Street are still alive today.
Even so, Lovell and Drucker succeed in maintaining an overall tone of defiant, almost wholesome celebration. In this regard, The Stroll benefits hugely from the bulletproof resilience, flamboyant charisma and sassy humour of Lovell and her interview subjects. As one quips, in the years before the High Line park became a major tourist magnet in the Meatpacking District, “the only high line we had was a crack pipe.”
Woven into these personal anecdotes are archive clips and tributes to some of New York City’s legendary LGBT pioneers, notably Stonewall riots veteran Marsha P. Johnson and proto-trans rights activist Silvia Rivera, who established a kind of shanty town for homeless queer kids on the ramshackle piers west of Christopher Street. In the process, The Stroll touches very lightly on the identity politics battles currently raging between trans rights campaigners and more mainstream, assimilationist sections of the gay community. These schisms are ongoing, but the film-makers stick to a generally positive story arc of growing transgender visibity and validation, climaxing with mass marches under the Black Trans Lives Matter banner in 2020 and the successful campaign to overturn the so-called “walking while trans” anti-loitering law in 2021, which was widely deemed to be discriminatory.
Humane and inclusive, The Stroll is a compelling story, even if it sometimes risks painting transgender sex work as an empowering symbol of the American Dream. Lovell’s Oprah-style distillation of hard-knock life struggles into tearful group hugs and healing emotional “journeys” feels soapy and simplistic at times, particularly when James Newberry’s syrupy score tugs shamelessly at the viewer’s heartstrings. All the same, it is still hugely gratifying to see these former outcasts surviving and thriving in middle age. Happiness is the best revenge.
Directors: Kristen Lovell, Zackary Drucker
Cinematography: Sara Kinney
Editing: Mel Mel Sukekawa-Mooring
Music: James Newberry
Producer: Matt Wolf
Production companies: Kingdom Reign Entertainment (US), Polari Pictures (US)
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (US Documentary Competition)
In English
84 minutes
