The film stages candid conversations with a number of trans women who reminisce about their experiences in the streets. These interactions have the feel of well-worn chats between old friends, using shorthand and basking in each other’s glow, and lend “The Stroll” a warm sense of intimacy. This is a trans history project created by, and in service of, the trans community. Many of the young girls and women in the Meatpacking District during The Stroll were runaways or kicked out of their families. With nowhere to go and employment discrimination due to their transition, the transgender women of color in this area turned to sex work to make a living. It is disheartening to hear how these girls were kicked out of home when they were just 15-16 or the tyranny of former Mayor Giuliani, police brutality, abusive clients, and rampant homelessness. We also hear from Sylvia Rivera, a trans activist, sex worker, and major player in the Stonewall Inn uprising. The film pays homage not only to Rivera’s voice and legacy but also to her humanity. We see her joy, her sadness, and her home.
“The Stroll” is a mosaic of tales from generations of trans sex workers who once thrived while walking those streets looking for johns and found, in turn, a welcoming community that has since been pushed out by the city’s ever-evolving gentrification. There are stories of strife and of struggle here, but also of joy and community, of sisterhood and resilience. The project understands that a city’s history — the way neighborhoods evolve, whether by policy or policing or both — tells only one side of its story. Archival photographs of trans women walking the streets and sensationalized news reports tinged with questionable ethnographic impulses (including one led by RuPaul, who plays the entire segment for laughs) here become mere representational matter, with which the filmmakers illustrate how that area became a safe haven for so many trans women looking for ways to survive and even thrive. Many of the transwomen that worked this district were victims of violence who simply disappeared, never to be heard from again.
The Stroll is a story told with care and affection and often bites sharply at the viewer who knows how difficult it is to be a sex worker, a trans woman or a person of color, and the devastating consequences when these discriminations and marginalizations converge. It is a memorial and a celebration. It is unapologetic in its portrayal of both the hardships and the blessing, the adversity and the delight and the shared affection of the inhabitants of the Meatpacking District in the days before the gentrification took place. (6.5/10)
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