Stroll Down Memory Lane

ART&CULTURE

Stroll Down Memory Lane

The co-director and cast of the powerful HBO documentary film, “The Stroll” visited Fort Lauderdale’s Stonewall National Museum, Archives and Library for an intimate panel discussion on the perils of sex workers living in the streets.

TEXT BY STEVE ROTHAUS PHOTOS BY CARINA MASK

Kristen Lovell’s path to co-directing an HBO documentary did not begin at a fancy Manhattan lm school, but in a part of town once called The Stroll, where thousands of down-on-their-luck youths like herself sold themselves for food and shelter.

“When it's freezing, when it's dead of winter in New York City, you have no more morals. You're gonna just do what you need to do to survive. And a lot of us were stuck on survival mode,” Lovell said during a recent stop in Fort Lauderdale to promote her current movie, The Stroll, which won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

At 17, Lovell ran away from her hometown of Yonkers, New York, and stayed in a Midtown homeless shelter, where she came out as a trans woman.

She spent the next 10 years on the streets, working The Stroll. In 2005 at age 28, Lovell participated in a documentary on homeless LGBTQ youth “because it became a thing, you know.”

“At the time, I was a little older than some of the young people featured. One of the girls, I sheltered her because she decided she was gonna do sex work and she’s gonna be on the streets,” Lovell said. “A lot of kids come out to New York City, and they have big New York City dreams, but New York City is not going to allow you to have that dream. Especially then. There were no opportunities whatsoever.”

Lovell, however, did nd her way out. She got a job and worked 10 years at Sylvia Rivera’s Place, a New York City shelter and service provider mostly for LGBTQ youth.

She began auditioning for acting jobs and later met and befriended director Flavio Alves. Lovell tried out for an upcoming lm he was making and instead of hiring her as an actor, he brought her onboard as a co-producer of 2019’s The Garden Left Behind.

“I learned so much about lmmaking, about the process of lmmaking, about being with the director as a producer and watching every step of the process,” Lovell said.

During that year before the Covid pandemic, Lovell conceptualized a documentary about her, her friends and their years on The Stroll.

An HBO rep contacted her by email, said the network was interested in the project and asked for preview footage.

“We submitted the sizzle reel and then, like two weeks later, we got the green light and each girl was on board. It was a fantastic journey. They weren't overbearing. They gave us full reign to do what we want, and it was beautiful.”

The Stroll was screened in January 2023 at Sundance and premiered June 23 on Max.

“The reception of the lm has been amazing. I get messages almost every other day – particularly from younger people who were born after 9/11 and don't even know what that is – thanking us for the history lesson,” Lovell said.

“It empowers them now because of what their struggles are today with anti-trans legislation and all that stu ,” she said. “This is their ght now, but [the lm] gives them a reminder that

everything that is happening now – drag bans –they’ve tried before.”

In October, Lovell and several of her Stroll costars attended a screening followed by a Q&A at the Stonewall National Museum & Archives in Fort Lauderdale.

A large audience lled the museum. “It was a very emotional response. A lot of crying,” Stonewall Executive Director Robert Kesten said. “What moved them to tears? How hard their lives were. What they had to do to survive.”

Kesten said it’s important for all LGBTQ people to know about Lovell, her friends and other queer folk who survive by living on the streets of America.

“Without their stories, we’re not telling the history of our community,” he said. “If anything, our community should be extraordinarily sensitive to the people whose stories make up our history because we’ve been excluded for so long.”

The Stroll co-star Carey Smith agrees.

“Our experience is a very unique situation. The

story is a very important story that needs to be told. I don’t want us to ever be erased. I was all for telling my story,” she said. Even though I’m not a sex worker anymore – I work at a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn – it was important for me to tell this story.”

Smith said her participation in The Stroll was for “all the girlfriends I’ve lost on 14th Street. A lot of them drug overdoses, HIV/AIDS. … I lost, personally, probably about 150 girlfriends. Through violence, murder.”

After years working The Stroll, Jamaican-born Smith finally had enough.

“I was tired. I was drained. I was on drugs. I was on crack cocaine. I was at my wit's end. I committed crimes. And I deliberately committed those crimes because I wanted a way out, which I don't care if anybody judged me. They weren’t in my shoes. And I committed those crimes because in my mind I wanted a judge to mandate me to a drug program.

“I wanted to just get my shit together. So that was the only way I knew out of The Stroll. I committed two robberies, and I got locked up and I went to prison for six years,” said Smith, a trans

woman now in her early 40s. “I got clean. Anything in life I've done, I take seriously. And when I did sex work, I took it seriously.”

The Stroll – located in Lower Manhattan’s now-gentrified Meatpacking District of upscale restaurants, boutiques and hotels – is today unrecognizable to Lovell, Smith and their friend, Elizabeth Marie Rivera.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Southern California, Rivera returned to the Northeast in 1997 at age 18 to live with an aunt in Patterson, New Jersey.

Rivera soon ended up in a New York homeless shelter, where she transitioned. In 1999, she befriended a trans woman who worked The Stroll.

“She asked if I would be interested in accompanying her,” Rivera recalled. “I asked why and she said ‘I need someone to look out for me.’

“It intrigued me. I don't think it necessarily frightened me. It intrigued me because of the courage that it took the girls to go out there and do what they were doing.”

At times, working The Stroll was fun and “felt empowering,” she said.

“Being able to connect with the girls. Being able

to not only relate to each other’s stories, but to share with each other if we needed hormones. Or if we needed some type of support through healthcare or something. Or surgeries,” Rivera said. “It helped me kind of develop not only my courage, but also develop myself.”

Most times, however, working The Stroll was demoralizing and dangerous.

“Kristen and I would occasionally go out together. I remember there would be nights where it'd be pouring rain or it'd be snowing, and how upset I would become to have to come out into the freezing cold, and to stand out there for hours and not have any action going on because it's not busy due to the weather. And you've got no money. It was just one of those things where I felt kind of tortured in the sense of feeling like, there's gotta be a better life for us. This can't be it.”

Rivera worked The Stroll for three years.

“There were girls out there working way longer than I have,” she said. “You weren't really given a choice. It was the only place that we could go to do survival sex work. There were times where you just had to pick yourself up and you had to endure. Push you through it.”

Rivera’s breaking point came one night after meeting a young john. “He was a cutie and I thought, you know what, I did good tonight, I deserve to have a little bit of fun.”

She got into his car and he pulled up to a nearby hospital.

“Two other individuals jumped into the back of the car and all three of them assaulted me and robbed me,” Rivera said.

“My instinct was to run to the ER lobby. And as soon as I ran in there, the security guard immediately told me, ‘You can't be in here, you have to leave.’ I said ‘I just got assaulted, I just literally got physically assaulted.’ And he said, ‘No, you can't be in here, you gotta go, you gotta go.’ And I just looked at him and just told him, ‘Fuck you.’ I turned around and I remember just walking back to The Stroll, crying.”

Today, Rivera has “a day job” and also does sex work on the side – and on her own terms.

“I didn't feel victimized. I became a dominatrix,” Rivera said. “You know, it was my way of transitioning from The Stroll. I took myself o the street and into a closed, controlled environment that I ran and call the shots in.”

Journalist STEVE ROTHAUS covered LGBTQ issues for 22 years at the Miami Herald. @SteveRothaus; @Steve.Rothaus on threads.net.