The HBO revealed the official trailer for The Stroll, a documentary on New York’s Meatpacking District told from the point of view of transgender sex workers who lived and worked there.
Directed by Kristen Lovell, making their directorial debut, along with Zackary Drucker (HBO’s “The Lady and The Dale”), The Stroll world premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and debuts on HBO with a release date of Wednesday, June 21 (9:00 pm ET/PT). The film will also be available to stream on Max coinciding with LGBTQ Pride Month.
When Director Kristen Lovell moved to New York City in the 1990s and began to transition, she was fired from her job. With so few options to earn money to survive, Kristen, like many transgender women of color during this era, began sex work in an area known as “The Stroll” in the Meatpacking District of lower Manhattan, where trans women congregated and forged a deep camaraderie to protect each other from harassment and violence.
Reuniting her sisters to tell this essential New York story from their first-hand experiences, Kristen’s intimate narration and interviews bring an astonishing array of archival material of bygone New York from the 1970s through the early 2000s to life. As much as the documentary is a film about transgender life, it is also a startling account of gentrification, as New York City Mayor Giuliani enacted “quality of life” initiatives that ramped up policing in the city and pushed the sex workers out of the neighborhood. Despite the forces that threatened their survival, Kristen and her sisters fought back. They no longer have “The Stroll,” but they are at the center of a movement to protect their rights; activists recently reversed legislation dubbed “Walking While Trans,” which enabled police profiling and harassment of transgender people for decades. In this new era of visibility and activism, The Stroll reminds us that trans women of color and sex workers continue to forge a path forward, thriving through their resilience, community organizing and sisterhood.
Watch the official trailer for The Stroll.