For trans film-maker Kristen Lovell, her new documentary The Stroll – co-directed with another trans film-maker, Zackary Drucker, and premiering on HBO this week – was about including an ignored chapter of trans history, one that she herself lived. Young, Black and trans in 90s New York, Lovell was fired from her job when she began to live her truth and was forced to sustain herself via sex work. The Stroll is a testament to what she went through just to be herself and the stories of so many other women like her that she met along the way.
“It was just time to tell this story,” Lovell told me. “There was a void, a generational void, where we went from the likes of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson to this new generation that’s coming up and fighting again for trans rights, and there’s a generational gap. Trans history is something that’s not taught in schools, so the new generation really didn’t have an understanding of all this stuff.”
