26 June 2025

The Stroll (2023)

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 colour during this era, began sex work in an area known as “The Stroll” in the Meatpacking District of lower Manhattan.

In The Stroll, Kristen and co-director Zackary Drucker trace the history of transgender sex workers there, from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Sharing her own firsthand experiences, Kristen reunites with her sisters to illustrate how trans women protected each other from the violence, harassment, policing, and gentrification that lead to a movement for transgender rights.

The Stroll won the 2024 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary and Best TV Documentary or Mini-Series from the International Documentary Association, as well as prizes at Sundance and Cinema Eye.

The HBO documentary has a 95% critics' rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety calls the “personal, archive-driven doc” “a wonder”, “poignant” and “thrillingly revisionist” – “a powerful piece of trans history-making, a document that feels wounded, lived in, and yet joyfully alive.”

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