Queer Icon Takes a Bow

It’s understandable that at age 70, Robin Byrd momentarily shows a rare melancholic side while reflecting on the inevitable spread and sag of a body once clad on television in only the skimpiest black crocheted bikini. But it’s triumphantly true to form that she almost instantly shrugs off those concerns and her clothes with them. She strolls down a Fire Island beach, sharing her generous unclad curves with the wind before climbing the stairs to her deck and blowing kisses to the Byrdwatchers, as her fans are known. 

Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story (surely a contender for year’s best title?) salutes a woman who for multiple generations of New Yorkers is as much a part of the city’s iconography as the Chrysler Building. For 21 years, from 1977 to 1998, the self-described “orgy queen” shared her exuberant endorsement of naked bodies, sex-positivity, esoteric erotica, free speech and the full queer spectrum on the pioneering NYC Public Access call-in show that bears her name and can still be seen in reruns.

Perhaps the most essential factor that co-directors Stephanie Schwam and Jyllian Gunther capture in their celebratory doc for HBO is that this one-of-a-kind late-night host, who culled her guest list from strippers, porn stars and sex workers, has no time for shame. 

The unapologetic candor, enthusiasm and disarming goofiness with which Byrd approached her subjects made her the most wholesome of pleasure activists. A jubilant product of the Sexual Revolution, she was always upfront about enjoying sex and advocating for others to share that enjoyment. She never moralized, her only deal-breaker being that no one should be harmed. 

In a present-day interview conducted mainly in her cluttered apartment with shelf upon shelf of Robin Byrd Show tapes — “my babies,” she calls them — Byrd skips through her path from teen runaway to artists’ model, exotic dancer and porn actor, most notably in Debbie Does Dallas, in which she played Mrs. Hardwick of the candle store. She got her GED and put herself through college along the way.

Pre-Giuliani 42nd Street and Times Square were a hub for strip joints and hookup venues like the Gaiety Theatre, the cruisy male burlesque house that operated for 30 years, until 2005. Byrd springboarded from that milieu into television when she filled in as a guest host on a show called Hot Legs, and then in 1977 parlayed that into her own show, on which she also served as producer, talent booker, and sometimes driver, picking up guests and chauffeuring them to the studio. It took a decade for the show to start making money, which was achieved primarily through phone sex lines.

One surprising revelation here is that Byrd, who identifies as bisexual, has been married for more than 50 years, though viewers of the show remained unaware of her husband Shelley. His decline into dementia prompts moments of reflection and legacy, as Robin begins — prompted by a letter from performance artist Annie Sprinkle — to consider how and where to place her vast archive of tapes and other material from the show. 

Her frisky late-night partying presence attracted a gay fanbase early on, and that intensified when the stigma of AIDS brought so much shame, soltitude and loss to the gay community. Frustrated by the Reagan administration dragging its heels in addressing — or even naming — the epidemic, Byrd began using television as a platform to share information about safe sex practices and became a fixture at protests. But on a more fundamental level, she provided a lifeline for a traumatized community, “a beacon of acceptance and openness,” as her show is described here.

In an especially lovely observation, one interviewee recalls the ubiquitous red glow from West Village apartment block windows at a certain hour, the result of Byrdwatchers tuning in to catch Robin on her bright red set, with the show’s name in a heart-shaped neon. Her popularity continued to spread when Cheri Oteri started playing her in a recurring SNL sketch.

Byrd’s sex-positive feminism may not have aligned with all factions of the feminist movement, given that many blanket-labeled pornography as demeaning to women. But as the first woman to bring adult entertainment to television, she became an important defender of freedom of choice and expression.

One of the most interesting chapters is Byrd’s clash with Time Warner Cable, which wanted to scramble all adults-only content and force subscribers to send in written requests for access. This was a direct result of the moral panic being spread by Reagan and religious-right televangelist Jerry Falwell, pushing for a crackdown on material deemed “obscene.” The resulting anti-censorship lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the federal government should keep its nose out of the cable content business.

Such a victory seems unimaginable with today’s Supreme Court, which no doubt is how pearl-clutching conservatives want it. That makes this short and sweet doc tribute to the woman once described by The New York Times as “a kitsch lady liberty for the city that never sleeps” a refreshing callback to a more open-minded era. As Byrd puts it, her only goal was to make people happy, “to give them the love that I wanted.”