How ‘The Stroll’ Directors Reclaimed the Narrative of Trans Sex Workers With Their HBO Doc: “We Are Not Going Anywhere”

Filmmaker Kristen Lovell spent nearly a decade of her life on the streets of New York City’s Meatpacking District, offering her body for money. She was one of the many transgender sex workers who frequented the far west side of 14th Street, aka “The Stroll,” in the ’90s and early 2000s, long before The High Line, or Artichoke Pizza, or the newest iteration of The Whitney Museum.

“The Whitney is now sitting on top of the very strip where some of my friends lived in cardboard boxes,” Lovell told Decider in a recent Zoom interview. Lovell is telling their story—as well as her own—in The Stroll, a new documentary she co-directed with trans filmmaker Zackary Drucker that premiered on HBO and Max yesterday, after premiering at Sundance in January. The Stroll is not the first time Lovell has talked about her experience as a sex worker on screen—she was featured in the 2007 documentary short Queer Streets, which filmed her while she was living on the streets—but it is the first time she’s had control of the narrative.

“In these videos [from Queer Streets], the majority of the time, I was on cocaine,” Lovell says in her film, adding that the frustration over not being able to steer her own story motivated her to pursue a career in filmmaking. To Decider, Lovell added that while she “loved” the young student filmmakers behind the short—Sarah Feightner, Brooke Sopelsa, Alex Waterfield—she and the other girls featured in Queer Streets took issue with a scene that clearly depicted a friend who died of an overdose clearly injecting drugs on camera.

“We thought it was tactless,” Lovell said. “We didn’t even want [the short] to be shown anymore. It aired on Logo, then quietly disappeared.” After Lovell began her own journey as an activist and filmmaker—including working for the homeless queer youth non-profit Sylvia’s Place and co-producing the award-winning 2019 drama, The Garden Left Behind—she reached out about getting the rights to the footage of herself used in Queer Streets. And, she says, though it took some time, the directors “happily” allowed her to use their video in The Stroll.

Social media also played a key role. “Ten years ago, I reconnected with Cashmere,” Lovell said, referring to one of her interview subjects, Izzi “Cashmere” Starz, who now identifies as non-binary, but spent many years as a transgender woman alongside Lovell on The Stroll. “We decided to create this Facebook group specifically for the girls. They were sharing photos from back in the day.” But the idea for a documentary about those memories didn’t truly click into place until Lovell heard Martin Scorsese speaking about New York stories at a talk at Lincoln Center. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what better New York story to tell than that of the Meatpacking District and The Stroll?'”

Lovell pitched her idea to producer Matt Wolf in 2019, who connected her to Sara Rodriguez at HBO. In late 2020, Zackary Drucker—who also directed the recent Hulu documentary Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl—came on board as a co-director. “I had that fated feeling you gets sometimes, where I was like, ‘This is major,'” Drucker told Decider. She collaborated with her friend, non-binary editor Mel Mel Sukekawa-Mooring, to dig into the archival footage and put together a reel for HBO. Within a few weeks, they got the green light. “This is a film that needed and wanted to come into the world,” Drucker said.

Unlike a traditional documentary, The Stroll features less one-sided talking heads and more genuine, warm conversations between Lovell and her friends, who also happen to be her former colleagues. “The girls called Kristen ‘Oprah,'” Drucker shared, making Lovell laugh.

“We knew we didn’t want to just solely focus on the trauma,” explained Lovell. “That is always the narrative—that we are just these miserable people, who’ve transitioned and live these horrible lives. But even in the most dire situations, you need joy to persevere through it all.”

Amidst the light-hearted reminiscing about particularly peculiar clients (like the guy who only wanted a mimed blow-job, who, Cashmere quips, was “practicing social distancing”), there are plenty of painful memories, too. All the girls have stories about the NYPD’s 6th precinct, who, in their efforts to shut down The Stroll, would indiscriminately arrest anyone they perceived as a trans woman for simply walking down the street. In fact, several of the girls say, quite a few of the officers throwing them in jail were also regular clients. Lovell says she interviewed officers for the film but ultimately found their responses lacking.

“They were protecting the blue line, even though they were an LGBT officer,” Lovell said. “I found it funny, how they swore they didn’t know [the abuse] was happening—you were a sergeant, how did you not know that?  I thought he was being very evasive in the interviews, so we didn’t use them.”

Drucker agreed, adding, “Not much has changed in the West Village.” That includes the bigoted attitude of its wealthy long-time residents, including a man named Harry, a self-proclaimed activist who proudly boasts to the camera about his role in displacing the transgender sex workers who were once his neighbors. When I expressed shock that Harry used a derogatory term for trans people to the filmmakers’ faces, Drucker reveals producer Matt Wolf—a white cisgender man—handled that interview. It was a lesson the directors learned after Lovell interviewed another transphobic resident, and he refused to sign the paperwork to agree to be on camera.

“I had already made one mistake in engaging someone who may not be as trans-friendly, and we lost the interview, because we got into it,” Lovell explained. “So I understood that moving forward that sometimes I— as proud as a black trans woman filmmaker that I am—sometimes I’m gonna have to use a white face to do so.”

And yet some of the prejudice Lovell and her sisters faced came from their own community. Drag Race fans may be disturbed to see a familiar face, RuPaul, in some not-so-flattering footage from her 1991 show, Manhattan Cable, featuring the famous drag queen interviewing the “transvestite hookers” of the Meatpacking District with the dismissive air of someone photographing animals in a zoo. Lovell comments in the film that Ru “should have known better.”

“Ru is very aware of the plight of trans women,” Lovell told Decider. “[She was] at the pinnacle of her fame, and went into that area—that would have been the time to uplift others. But instead, it was almost like a punch down. It was like, ‘I’m RuPaul from Supermodel, so you’re going to allow me to come in here with these cameras and put it in your face.'”

RuPaul and Drag Race have long faced criticism from the trans community. The tension is ongoing, and Ru’s public attitude toward trans contestants has shifted, but many still remember the drag queen’s 2018 tweet which suggested anyone on gender-affirming hormones was not allowed on the show. (She has since walked the tweet back.) “Many trans people are drag performers, but RuPaul is not one of them,” Drucker said, carefully. “And it’s very revealing, I think, that clip—just in terms of what her origin point really was.”

When it comes time to discuss the renewed Republican attacks on trans rights—specifically the wave of conservative-led anti-trans legislation aimed at preventing transgender youth from receiving gender-affirming care—both Lovell and Drucker shake their heads. Lovell calls it a “temporary” setback for the community, and Drucker agrees. “We’ve been through much worse,” she says, noting that while the Obama era was “extraordinary,  in terms of the gains that were made,” she and other trans folks who came of age in the Bush era never expected all of those gains to last forever.

And for any trans youth who may be listening, Drucker offers a message of hope: “We’re here to let everyone know—welcome aboard. We will be fighting for the rest of our lives, side by side, to push this forward. It’s not going to be easy, but it never has been. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. All of our predecessors were persecuted for being who they were. The attacks on our lives are unconstitutional. They will not hold up in the long term. We have freedom of speech. We have freedom of expression. We have the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have liberty and justice for all. We are not going anywhere. Nothing can stop us from being born into the world.”