Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker's moving documentary offers an excitingly revisionist slice of New York City's transgender history.
Queer history is an act of digging. Telling stories about the LGBTQ community, and transgender people in particular, necessarily requires examining archives that are utterly hostile to those they document. In “The Stroll,” a new HBO documentary directed by Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker, the filmmakers dig through decades of footage to tell the story of trans sex workers in New York City's Meatpacking District. Seemingly a slice of local history for an increasingly gentrifying city that sees marginalized people as easily disposable, “The Stroll” is an empathetic portrait of a community still fighting for its own survival.
Directors: Zackary Drucker, Kristen Lovell
Star: RuPaul
The film opens with footage of a young Lovell, taken from the 2007 documentary "Queer Streets," in which she talks about how she first turned to sex work to earn money; in fact, more money than she earned from her day job. . Her eyes are a little glazed over and she keeps looking away: embarrassed, perhaps, at what she's casually describing. We then see the filmmaker, all these years later, evaluating those shots in an editing bay where she further explains how she was probably high on cocaine when the cameras were following her nearly two decades ago.
Looking back on how Lovell's own story was framed, audiences focus on the why and how of her desire to tell the story of "the Walk," the name given to the streets she and her companions walked, from his own point of view. . Only, of course, it's not just her story and her perspective that's included in the documentary. “The Stroll” is a mosaic of stories of generations of trans sex workers who once thrived walking those streets looking for clients and found, in turn, a welcoming community that has since been driven out by ever-evolving gentrification. from the city. Here are stories of conflict and struggle, but also of joy and community, of brotherhood and resilience.
Lovell's project understands that a city's story, the way neighborhoods evolve, whether by politics, policing, or both, tells only one side of the city's story. While documentaries and newsreels over the decades have grappled with the Paseo and portrayed it as a seedy, crime-ridden space in need of cleansing, Lovell and Drucker begin their historiographical project by recasting such impressions.
Archival photographs of trans women walking the streets and sensationalist reports tinged with dubious ethnographic impulses (including one starring RuPaul, which makes the entire segment laugh) here become mere representational material, with which the filmmakers illustrate how that area is It became a safe haven. for so many trans women looking for ways to survive and even thrive.
To flip that script and really capture the expansive story of the Walk, spanning back to the early days of gay liberation and through a post-9/11 New York City, Lovell hosts candid conversations with several trans women reminiscing about their experiences. on the streets. These interactions have the feel of hackneyed conversations between old friends, using shorthand and basking in each other's brilliance, and they give "The Stroll" a warm sense of intimacy.
This is a trans history project created by and serving the trans community, a community that can collectively explain why their story deserves to be told, even if it is fractured and fragmented today. (The film crew had to actively search for many of their subjects, some of whom had spent years in jail or moved in and out of town, while one had even missed transition.) Throughout, audiences are welcomed not as interlopers or voyeurs but as curious relative strangers.
Switching between archival footage, intimate testimonials and even animated sequences that bring to life historical stories of encounters with cops and clients, "The Stroll" bears the hallmarks of a cohesive choral project, digging into the past to make sense of both the present and the future. . a possible future. Watching Lovell and her models walk the glittering streets of a now extremely bourgeois and tourist-packed Meatpacking District, the concept of Stroll's story as existing now only through these embodied memories becomes an urgent call to the action.
Comments
Post a Comment