A small stretch of New York City’s 14th Street becomes more than just asphalt, signage and sidewalks in the hands of Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker, the two directors behind the new HBO documentary The Stroll.
To these filmmakers, this stretch of street, called “the stroll” by the transgender women who used to practise sex work for decades on its streets, is a piece of both trans history and New York City history.
Addressing what Lovell calls a “50-year gap” in trans history between Stonewall and present day, the documentary is also a revision of the record as it comes to trans people and sex work. Throughout their time in New York City’s infamous Meatpacking District, the women featured in the film, as well as many others like them, were often harassed by police in the nearby 6th precinct and subject to hostility from the people in the neighbourhood.
By telling their stories ― many of whom are close friends of Lovell, who herself worked the stroll when she first arrived in New York ― the film chronicles major events in the city’s storied history as it applied to this collection of women, including major events such as the election of Rudy Giuliani, gentrification in the Bloomberg era and even 9/11.
Lovell and Drucker spoke to HuffPost about why this was the moment to tell this quintessential Big Apple story, how residents received them then and now as they filmed, and why they included stories of trans activism in the present.
Early in the documentary when you’re kind of introducing everyone who’s going to be speaking, Kristen, you’re on camera and you’re talking to them, and it’s clear that you have this long history with them. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like to be a filmmaker and then turn the camera on people who you knew personally and had that long history with?
Kristen Lovell: It was empowering. I had very intensive conversations with a lot of the subjects in regards to preparing them for their story being a major thing, and just guiding them through the process of — “it’s time.” We all know that these stories have been swept under the rug and not wanting to be talked about. And everybody’s like, “Yes,” and, “It’s time,” and, “We must do this now.” Everybody felt the same way I did. We knew that there was a missing link in what is referred to as history.
We’ve jumped from the days of Stonewall and Sylvia Rivera, but there’s a 50-year gap of trans history and the policing and the impact of that and why we’re so mobilized today.
When I was watching it, I was really taken by how you presented so many of the events in relation to broader events that people know about, like the election of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11. And then you bring it back down to how this affected real trans women’s material lives who were on the stroll at the time. What was your strategy when it came to placing these stories in historical context for the documentary?
KL: It was important to have an intergenerational approach. I wanted to make sure that you have the elders, the ones that were younger than them and then the ones that came under us. Like those are like three generations of trans women right there. And so it was important to have those conversations because like we always hear through word of mouth and storytelling on the stroll about the different time periods and what it was like. It’s sort of like an oral history that we pass down to one another for our protection and safety, things that we should do and how we maneuver in society.
Zackary Drucker: There’s so often these universal things happen and people are not thinking of trans folks and how that impacts their lives. Trans folks are always this tertiary kind of outside of culture on the margins — and everybody has a relationship to 9/11. All New Yorkers have a relationship to the Giuliani era and the Bloomberg era. And truthfully, all New Yorkers have a relationship to the trans women of the stroll. They were a known population and any one who was in New York in the ’80s, ’90s or aughts will tell you a story about walking to the Meatpacking District and coming in contact with the trans women who were there.
What’s interesting is that there’s a tremendous amount of personal guilt that people feel ― long-term residents of New York ― watching this, perhaps realising that they were passive witnesses to young people having to fend for themselves and be vulnerable and exploited in the streets. And ultimately, those mayors, those historical events, are anchors and signposts that people can reference in their own histories.
It’s fascinating how many people even said, “Oh, well I can recognise the benefits of the Bloomberg era, but policing and incarceration was not something that I had really had a close encounter with until watching this film.”
When you were shaping it, how much did you think about it not only as a story of people but of place as well, as sort of a quintessentially New York story?
KL: I definitely was. When I was an Artist Academy member at Lincoln Center and I got to attend the New York Film Festival, I was at a talk and Martin Scorsese was in the room, and he was talking about cinema, about storytelling and about New York. And New York City is a story all in itself and that’s when it clicked to me. I was like, “Oh, my God. What better New York story to tell than the one in the Meatpacking District?” And I was a co-producer on The Garden Left Behind, which is also a New York story. But when I was ready to make The Stroll, that was part of the inspiration. I heard Martin Scorsese and I know exactly what he’s talking about and the dingy cobblestone smoke-filled streets of the Meatpacking District — that is New York! And we don’t hear any stories about that area and that history and so what better story to tell than that of the transgender sex workers that worked and lived in the area.
There’s this really powerful moment in documentary where one interviewee is walking down 14th Street now and they break down and say, “I fucking hate this place,” and start to cry. And you can feel that release. As a filmmaker and someone who lived that history, what was it like seeing someone react so intensely to what that 14th Street has become?
KL: Well, Cashmere, aka “Izzi,” was a very important part of the process. When I was writing the treatment and the synopsis, you know, trying to secure funding — this was before HBO docs got involved — we would have extensive conversations about the stroll, the reasons why they left the stroll and de-transitioned and, you know, preparing them because their stories are just as important, too. But one of the problems within our community is — just because one de-transitions doesn’t make them not of trans experience.
When we were younger, when we were in those situations of homelessness and sex work, that was my family. We would go out there together, we lived together. And when I was crafting the story, I was like, “Well, it has to be those that are closest to me.” That was me, Cashmere and Elizabeth. We formed this family; we protected one another. We cried with one another, we fought with one another, you know what I mean, to protect each other. And I never forgot that feeling because being a teenager in the streets of New York and struggling to find employment and a place to live, that’s all we had. We banded together. We were the Covenant House girls. And we fought a lot to live there and to be safe there. And so I had to start the story with these people, regardless if they de-transition or not. People ask me, “Oh, like, why do you have them in there?” It’s because regardless of what you think about their de-transition, they are still a person of trans experience.
ZD: Being in that neighbourhood today is so complicated and it’s such a human experience to have a connection to a place that’s changing, a place that also exists on the continuum of time. And spending time in the Meatpacking District is just the epitome of white supremacy and advanced capitalism; it’s become this ultra luxury neighbourhood that has surpassed the Upper East Side. In time, just with our subjects on the sidewalk and hearing their stories, we were constantly being passed by irritated residents in head-to-toe designer clothes with luxury strollers that were like from the future and designer dogs.
It was just like this cavalcade of privilege that was completely turned at being put out by a small film crew on the sidewalk with a person who was emotionally experiencing a place of their own history and with no human connection, to just witness the shameless space of late capitalism in that neighbourhood. And some of that made it into the cut. I mean, a lot of it is just outside of the screen, but it is emblematic of cities all over the place. And it is not only the story of trans folks surviving the streets ― it’s the story of New York and the story of America, the story of many cities.
Kristen, you were talking before about how the core of the story started with you and Cashmere and Elizabeth and that bond, and then I’m thinking about how many family dynamics are at work in the piece but then also it’s a workplace story and a family story and you had to tell both. Were there any nuances or particularities that were hard to translate?
KL: When I thought about it like, “What is chosen family?” That’s where the Sisterhood comes in; there were different cliques and I tried to highlight the cliques. There were the Covenant House girls, there were the 14th Street and 9th Street girls, there were the Gramercy girls, there were the Backstreet girls, you know there were the Butch Queens down the block. I tried to cover these different groups of families and that we all share a certain experience and we’re all aware of one another. Katrina, Nicole and Charisma they’ve grown up together and they’ve been friends for the past 20-something years. There’s me, Cashmere and Elizabeth and a couple of other Covenant House girls, then there’s the girls that were on the Backstreet or the girls that were old enough to know what it was like living on the pier in the shanty towns, and then Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson and their youth living in the area.
It shows that throughout these different generations, nothing really changed until we got to this tipping point of visibility and representation and now we’re in the throes of pushing back. Legislation is being written against us so it’s a powerful thing, and it’s also a reminder to young people coming up and not knowing this history and making them understand that it may seem powerless now, but this is something that has continually been going on for decades and they are in a unique position to make absolute change.
ZD: I think the path has been paved by our predecessors and we continue the work and it takes all of us doing this work side by side the rest of our lives in order to push it forward. I do sometimes hear young activists talk about how tired they feel and I think 20 years in myself that they don’t know what they have coming! It’s a lifetime of how they can eke out space for each other and it doesn’t get easier. If anything, it gets both better and worse simultaneously.
You showed the next generation too with the March for Black Trans Lives where Ceyenne Doroshow spoke. When you started, you wouldn’t have known that would happen. So did you always wanna bring it to the present day of what’s happening now? Or did that change over time while making it?
ZD: It was to go through the decades to bring it into today. We kind of jumped forward into the present, but we had to find a structure for this film and there was a lot more we could have said about sex work today, about sex workers being targeted online, about FOSTA/SESTA, about the events that led to Layleen Polanco’s death, for example. And ultimately, we had to make hard decisions about what to include and what to leave to the next documentary, to the next story.
And it’s primarily a historical document that brings the archival materials of the past to the fore. And it was such a delight to premiere this film with D. Smith’s Kokomo City as a very contemporary story.
One of the parts of the film that I love so much was there were these shots of some of the participants in Greenwich Village and it was like you had shot them with so much care and you showed them walking and the way that they walk and in that space. I’m just wondering what were your desires as a filmmaker for when it came to showing trans people in that environment now?
KL: Well, the conversation was about going back to the area and how it resonates with you. I used to be scared to go back into the area. I’m talking like 10 years later, scared to go into the area thinking whether the 6th precinct still remembers me and they snatch me up. I was terrified and a lot of people felt like that. And then for some people, they hadn’t been there in like 20 years.
Katrina for instance, lives in Maryland, so coming up for them and seeing all of this change was just mind blowing for them. A lot of the girls now are kind of scared to go into the area or feel like they don’t belong in the area because of the gentrification.
ZD: So the formal Oprah-style interview that was led with our subjects was kind of like the first building block and then visiting the neighbourhood and those veritas teams came later, and we used steady cams that had a very kind of floating-through effect. And it was magical, truly, those moments. I wish that we could have included more of them. There were some really funny collisions with the present world.
The Stroll is now available to stream on HBO and Max.