Porn star turned late-night TV icon Robin Byrd: ‘Sex is a form of magic’ | documentary

Robin Byrd has no doubt about where her life’s archive should end up. “I think it should be in the Smithsonian,” she said. “I like to think big.”

But is this thinking “big” or just silly? After all, we’re talking about Robin Byrd, the self-described “orgy queen” who famously promoted the acts of strippers and porn stars on a no-budget public-access television show she ran in the 1980s and 1990s that looked like it had been filmed by someone eating mushrooms who had an advanced case of glaucoma.

However, for dedicated “Byrd Watchers,” there is much more to this star than any description of her show might suggest. “She’s connected to a lot of important issues,” said Gillian Gunter, who co-directed a new HBO documentary about Byrd, named after the theme song to her show Bang My Box. “Robin represents sex positivity and body positivity. She is a gay icon, fought for her rights in the First Amendment, and was the precursor to YouTube and all the platforms we have today.”

The film’s other director, Stephanie Schwam, added: “There are layers and layers to her story.”

One of the most influential of these was a free speech case she launched in the 1990s that became so controversial and consequential that it reached the US Supreme Court, which ruled in her favor. She also became an ardent and effective advocate for safe sex at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when relatively few people approached the disease, or sex itself, with anything other than terror and dread. By contrast, Bird kept things upbeat and encouraging, relentlessly promoting the use of condoms and dental dams while demonstrating their proper use in dozens of episodes. In the process, she became what the documentary’s filmmakers call an “accidental activist.”

“Remember to wear your rubber!” As Bird always says on her show, she exudes an endearing mix of motherly care and wicked pluck. This line summed up her whole approach to sex as a fundamentally playful endeavor, and was delivered in a tone of almost child-like exploration and wonder. “That’s my position,” Byrd said. “Sex is a form of magic, but a lot of people don’t seem to know it.”

This attitude was evidence enough when we met for the interview at the loft in co-director Gunter’s Soho, New York, apartment. When she arrived, Bird was wrapping up a photo shoot that featured her and the directors simulating a threesome in bed. “Come and join us!” she said at one point. (I politely declined.)

For her solo photos, Bird, now 71, repeatedly volunteers to pose with her legs wide open. “I’m actually wearing underwear today!” she shouted, although I got the impression she wouldn’t have cared so much if she hadn’t. During filming, Byrd laughed and giggled uncontrollably, just as she did on her show. When we moved to another room for the interview, she spoke honestly and openly about every aspect of her life and unexpected career. She also fills in details not in the movie, some of which expand on a key part of her story that the doc covers but that few fans know about. For nearly 50 years, the ‘orgy queen’ has been happily married to a man named Shelley, who is now 87 years old. And you won’t be surprised to learn that this is not a traditional marriage. “Whoever has a husband films his wife having sex with her [porn star] Jeff Stryker?” Bird asked, laughing. “Shelly was fine with it.”

For many years she and Shelley were part of a group with another woman who has since died. “She and I are going to have sex with him,” Bird said. “He loved it!”

Shelley appears in several parts of the film, although he has been suffering from dementia for the past few years. Byrd said she never asked him if he wanted to be in the movie. She said: If I had asked him, he would have said no. But “I’m the boss.”

She said she wanted him to be on camera because he was an important part of her story. On screen, he looks both funny, funny and beautiful. “Fortunately, he still has the personality he had his whole life with me, which was happy and funny,” Byrd said. “Dementia magnifies who I used to be. If he wasn’t a nice person, I would definitely put him down. I have a lot of self-esteem.”

She needed to develop a lot of it early to deal with a difficult childhood. Byrd was adopted at birth, and raised by a couple who lived on New York’s Upper East Side. Her adoptive father was an antiques dealer who sold pieces to stars like Jackie Gleason and Liberace, who loved her unconditionally. “I was Daddy’s little girl,” she said. But her mother “should never have had children.”

Bird believes she adopted it because the marriage was falling apart, and she thought it would bring it together. “This is the stupidest thing anyone could do,” Byrd said.

The family even adopted another girl, whom Byrd described as a “bad seed.” (The sisters are not in a relationship now.) Regardless, the couple separated and when Byrd was eight years old her father died of a massive heart attack. He was 39 years old. “He smoked two or three packs a day, and he drank whiskey because my mother made him a wreck,” she said.

After his death, Bird’s mother became more malicious, telling her she was ugly and would never amount to anything. Today, Bird believes some of it was “because my father loved me more than her. Jealousy is an ugly thing,” she said.

She admits that part of her decision to build a life around the joy and sensuality of the body was “the challenge. I’m going to prove you wrong!” she said.

As a teenager in the late 1960s, she ran away from home, taking in Central Park with other wayward children. “I was a little hippie,” she said with a laugh.

That’s when she discovered she was bisexual. For a while, she had a girlfriend who lived with her family, but then she explored sex work to make money, an experience she in no way regrets. “I knew what I had to do to survive, and since I loved sex and instilling pleasure, it didn’t bother me,” she said. “I could erase the fact that a man was ugly and fat if he had a lot of money.”

In the late 1970s, she appeared in a few pornographic films, including, most notably, Debbie Does Dallas, a hit in theaters and one of the biggest sellers in the booming home video market. Its introduction to the small screen came at the dawn of public access to cable television. To recognize the growing medium, the FCC required cable operators to set aside channels for public use to democratize programming. What happened next was less sublime than they expected. Upon public access, anyone could have their own soapbox, foreshadowing the tower of chatter that is social media and YouTube today. The development of inexpensive portable video equipment made it easier to access. One interesting feature of the new format was the introduction of full nudity in shows that appeared after 10 p.m. The creator of one such show, called Hot Legs, invited Byrd as a guest, and that’s when she found her calling. “Wow!” she remembers thinking, “I like the way I look on camera. I was made for TV!”

She transitioned into the medium so well, in fact, that she created her own show in 1977. The Robyn Byrd Show debuted on New York’s Channel J where she established her trademark look, featuring a black crochet bikini and white nail polish, which she still sports. At that moment, she made history as the first woman to bring adult entertainment to television. It was also new at the time for viewers to call in to speak with the host directly. “For years, your TV has been telling you what to eat, what to drink, what to buy,” she said. “Now you can answer via your phone – without any delay!”

The message Bird sent to viewers was always warm and inclusive. After asking viewers to “lie down and rest with your loved one,” she would add: “If you don’t have your loved one, you’re always with me.” The show’s camera work, which I supervised, was cheesy and shaky by design, creating a sort of intoxicating psychedelia. “I liked the blur of it,” Bird said. “I leave things open to your imagination.”

It also gave the show a certain appeal, along with the sexy nudity, that attracted gay men. To serve this audience, she began featuring male strippers in a regular segment called “Guys for Men.” At some point, she also started modeling for pre-op transsexual strippers. “Women with sausages!” Bird said. “Since I’m bisexual, it’s the best of both worlds!”

The show was shown nightly and attracted such a large and loyal cult following that, although it was only shown in New York, it was parodied nationally on Saturday Night Live. The success also spawned tabloid stories that Byrd was secretly married to the then-closeted Barry Manilow. Meanwhile, the show’s popularity and racy content put it in the crosshairs of conservative politicians like Jesse Helms. He called it “inappropriate” and tried to ban her show and others like it, including Al Goldstein of Screw magazine. Despite this, Byrd said she never doubted she would prevail. “I really believe in the rule of law,” she said. “The court has considered for years and years that the human body is not obscene. Nudity is not obscene. It is a form of expression.”

While the court ended up upholding her, she remains angry at the justices who did not, including Justice Clarence Thomas, whom she now refers to simply as “that pig.” Her fight against these enemies was a harbinger of today’s attempts by Trump to cancel Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert’s shows.

Despite its victory, Time Warner Cable made it difficult for it to maintain the show by moving it up and further from the dial while also changing the rules of the technology it could use. Its last program aired in 1998, although you may find it in reruns on the cable channel 1820 in New York. In the years since Byrd’s retirement, the world she knew has changed radically. She longs for the sleaze of old Times Square. “It’s more like Las Vegas now, more for tourists,” she said.

She also yearns for the sex positivity of the 1990s, an attitude she shared with Madonna at the time, although Bird argues that “Madonna followed I!

For her, it’s sad that young people today say they have less interest in stunts than their former counterparts. “Except for gay men, I don’t see people having sex at all,” she said. (Byrd has a front-seat view of such action from the home she owns in the gay section of Fire Island called The Pines, “right next to the meat rack!” she tweeted.)

The conservative nature of today’s Supreme Court also worries her. She believes they are unlikely to support her case now. “Everything I fought for and achieved was erased,” she said. “You can’t get birth control. Abortion laws are changing.”

Which helps explain why she hopes viewers of the documentary — especially gay viewers — will appreciate the history it covers. “The gay community today takes its freedom for granted,” she said. “I’m glad they do but I want them to know and respect their history.”

At the same time, she found personal peace, although the scene in the film that proves it took some convincing on the part of the directors. When they asked her if she would expose her naked body on screen at her age, she hesitated at first. “I didn’t want people to see me that way,” Byrd said, noting her plump 71-year-old figure. “But then I said to myself: Who am I, a hypocrite?”

Her subsequent decision to put herself out there brings full circle to the message of self-acceptance that always lies beneath the bumps and grinds on the surface of her presentation. “What you see is where I am today — exactly as I am,” Byrd said.