In one of the most notorious episodes of the popular HBO comedy “Sex and the City,” Samantha engages in a power struggle of sorts with the Black trans women she encounters after she moves to a $7,000 a month apartment in New York City’s then-gentrifying Meatpacking District. She finds them too loud. They are described by the character Carrie in voice-over as “Pre-op transsexuals. Half-man, half-woman, totally annoying.” Although they lived in the neighborhood before her, Samantha is cis, wealthy, and white and they are not. She eventually wins her battle with them after screaming at them, dousing them with water, and finally calling the cops. They then quickly disperse.
The episode, which aired in 2000, is on pretty much every listing of problematic TV episodes. Actress Laverne Cox said in a 2019 interview, “It was disappointing to me, as a Black trans woman, to see Black trans women enter the world of ‘Sex and the City’ and be so thoroughly othered.”
In the episode, the Black trans women were a punchline, and Samantha and Carrie proxies for the many whites who were starting to move into the Meatpacking District in the late 1990s, many of them resentful at having to share the neighborhood with the trans sex workers who predated them there. The new HBO documentary “The Stroll,” premiering on June 21, explores the lives of the real transgender sex workers who worked in Samantha’s neighborhood. Archival footage in “The Stroll” reveals that the war by new residents on the trans sex workers was very real and the police were, in fact, used to drive out the workers.
“The Stroll” features seven transgender women and one former trans woman now living as a nonbinary person, who all worked the Stroll for anywhere from five to 25 years. Their refrain that neither jobs nor family support were accessible to them illustrates the tragic inevitability of sex work as part of transgender women’s collective history and the undeniable role of class in their struggles.
The documentary takes about as intimate a look as one can get. Kristen Lovell, who directed along with Zackary Drucker, is a transgender Black woman who once worked the Stroll (a general term for an area frequented by sex workers to ply their trade) in New York’s Meatpacking District. She says in the film that she was motivated to do the documentary to find out “how long sex work had been part of our story.”
Lovell is often on camera: in archival footage herself, interviewing women in a domestic setting, and revisiting the neighborhood with them to highlight how it has changed. Many point out their old “corners.” One completely breaks down under the burden of the memories: “A lot of people lost their lives, trying to survive on this corner…I can’t even believe it. The things we had to do to survive. I hate this place.”
Lovell refuses to further “other” the women. Using interviews and archival footage and photos, she places them definitively as part of a larger community of business owners, residents, clients who frequented the district, the police, the gay community, artists, New York City politicians—down to the very meatpackers for whom the neighborhood is named. It’s a reclamation of history.
The break with that history comes with dramatic finality around the infamous “Sex and the City” episode aired. A few years before, with the ascension of Rudolph Giuliani to the office of NYC mayor, pressure from police increased significantly, and the streets were often virtually emptied out, the women sent to protected gay-friendly units on Rikers Island. As more people like the fictional Samantha moved in and protested, and Michael Bloomberg assumed the mayorship, the trajectory toward gentrification increased exponentially. The sex workers moved off the streets and onto the internet. “The Stroll” shows that in 2000, the murder of trans woman Amanda Milan at the Port Authority, while hundreds looked on and did nothing, became a watershed moment. It was the catalyst for the modern-day trans rights movement.
“The Stroll” illustrates that if America had a caste of Untouchables, transgender women—especially Black transgender women—would be it. The film reveals a community of women under siege, shunned even by the healthcare system. One subject recalls running to the local hospital after being assaulted by three men, only to be brusquely told she was not welcome there.
They also fought for acceptance by the gay community. There is footage of trans activist and LGBTQ icon Sylvia Rivera’s heartrending 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally speech, imploring the gay community to end its indifference to transgender lives. Five years before, it was Rivera and Black trans woman Marsha P. Johnson who put their bodies on the line to start the historic Stonewall Rebellion, which launched the gay rights movement.
“The Stroll” presents the subjects as the complex individuals they are, something too long denied in popular media. They’re contextualized as battered and bruised but strong survivors, possessed of indomitable spirits. Vibrant colors as worn by the subjects, ready smiles, and quick wits indicate a core confidence and hopefulness. The viewer won’t make it to the end without laughing out loud or welling with tears.