Stream It or Skip It: ‘The Stroll’ on Max, a Vibrant and Essential Queer Documentary about Trans Sex Workers

After an award-winning debut at Sundance, The Stroll now makes its way to HBO and its streaming service sister, Max. The film comes from directors Zackary Drucker (The Lady and the Dale) and Kristen Lovell, herself a former sex worker who counted the Stroll in New York City’s Meatpacking District as her home territory. The film’s arrival on HBO and Max comes at the right time, during the tensest Pride Month in recent memory. If you’re looking to get inspired and educated, The Stroll is for you.

THE STROLL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: After finding herself as the subject of a short film documentary over 15 years ago, Kristen Lovell found a new direction in her life. She wanted to tell her story, the story of Black trans sex workers, from her own point of view — a point of view informed by firsthand, lived experience. The Stroll is the culmination of that work, an unflinching examination — and celebration — of the trans women who found freedom, camaraderie, and community on the streets of the Meatpacking District.

Through the use of extensive interviews, footage and photographs from the era, The Stroll recreates the vibe of what it was like to work the neighborhood. The film also examines the trajectory of New York as a city from the ’70s through to today, using the neighborhood — nicknamed the Stroll — as a microcosm. The crime of the ’70s and ’80s led into the Giuliani era and “broken windows” policing, followed by a sudden, all-encompassing tidal wave of gentrification in the ’00s as the Meatpacking District became the home of Carrie Bradshaw and the High Line.

In The Stroll, no topic is too taboo to discuss — especially since most of these stories and points of view have not been documented, at least not with this level of care. It’s with that care, that desire to preserve this often disregarded history, that The Stroll tells the story of Amanda Milan, a 25-year-old trans sex worker who was stabbed to death in front of crowds of people at Port Authority in 2000, yet received none of the mainstream news attention that Matthew Shepard’s murder received two years earlier. If you’ve never heard of Amanda Milan, well, that’s exactly why The Stroll exists.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s a bit of Paris is Burning, as The Stroll highlights an overlooked community within the LGBTQ spectrum — but, unlike Paris is Burning, The Stroll benefits greatly from being told by a person who actually lived in that community. You can also see similarities with the HBO docuseries The Lady and the Dale from co-director Zackary Drucker, particularly in the doc’s inventive storytelling techniques and visual language.

Performance Worth Watching: Filmmaker Kristen Lovell is absolutely one to watch out for, as The Stroll is a showcase for not only her storytelling acumen but her natural talent for interviewing.

Memorable Dialogue: “I refuse to let the world beat me down. Back then we just took our punches. We’ve been taking them for decades.”

Our Take: Queer history is a complicated thing. So much of it has been ignored, lost, co-opted, or legislated against. It’s history that you can’t absorb passively. Names like Sylvia Rivera or Marsha P. Johnson are not going to be referenced in sitcoms or speeches like other historical figures. If you want to know queer history, you have to seek it out.

That’s why I’m so grateful that The Stroll exists and that it exists in a form created by a person who lived this experience. There’s no co-opting here and, as is pointed out so clearly at the beginning of the film, Lovell is able to speak of life on the Stroll on multiple levels. We get the good, we get the bad, and we get the good again.

This isn’t a documentary that focuses exclusively on the hard times, like when the 6th precinct would target the working girls or when a young RuPaul would show up in the neighborhood with cameras to have a laugh. This is a doc that captures the feeling of community that these women forged. It captures the wonder of finally finding a place where you fit in, the wonder that some of the interviewees felt upon their first time seeing the Stroll.

The Stroll also serves as a layered snapshot of New York City and the rapid changes the city’s seen over the past 40 years. Anyone who moved to NYC in this century will always be a little shocked to see how their favorite nightspots or cafes or boutiques looked in the last century. But The Stroll really underlines what New York City lost when the high-rises went up. We didn’t lose shanty towns and prostitutes. We lost homes and sex workers, people who needed a place to live and a job to do and “polite society” wanted to make them disappear. Old news footage of cops boasting about expensive new gear or affluent residents shaming people for being poor haven’t aged too well, especially now that the microphone has finally been passed to the people who have long had something to say. The Stroll lets us hear from the other side of history.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Stroll is a must watch documentary — and hopefully the first of many from Kristen Lovell.