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If you lived in New York City during the 1980s or 1990s, and you happened to stumble on Channel 35 after 10 pm, you would have seen her: a busty woman with dyed-blond hair in a black mesh bikini, beaming broadly as she gyrated against an adult film star or simulated fellatio on a half-naked male stripper.
You knew her theme song (the rockabilly “Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box”), and you would have been able to repeat her catchphrases (“Lie back, get comfortable,” “don’t forget to wear your rubbers,” etc.).
That woman was Robin Byrd, now 71, a former adult film star who became a local celebrity with her eponymous public access show, which ran from 1977 to 1998 (and still airs in reruns, provided you have old-school cable). Featuring a garish heart-shaped set and decades-old phone sex ads, The Robin Byrd Show featured Byrd interviewing a porn star or exotic dancer, who would then perform a striptease complete with unnecessarily lingering close-up shots. She’d close the show by dancing to her theme song (during which Byrd would, more often than not, juggle a pair of comically oversized breasts). The show was charmingly low-budget, with Byrd giving her guests tapes of the show instead of paying them: “I called it tit for tat and dick for dat,” she tells me.
As beloved as Byrd is in New York City, a new HBO documentary makes it clear her impact was much wider. Directed by Jyllian Gunther and Stephanie Schwam (two self-described “Byrd-watchers”), Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story, streaming on HBO Max Tuesday, hails Byrd as a sex-positive icon who advocated for freedom of speech and the LGBTQ community, promoted safe sex during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and led a landmark lawsuit against Time Warner Cable when it tried to censor her show. The movie is also a love letter to the analog era of smut, with Byrd becoming something of a meme long before the age of dial-up.
WIRED spoke to Byrd about the documentary, internet porn, her advocacy, and, of course, how she wore boobs as a hat.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
EJ DICKSON: When Stephanie and Jyllian approached you with the idea of making a documentary, what was your initial response?
ROBIN BYRD: I had many offers before, but it didn’t feel right. And Stephanie and Jyllian, they were Byrdwatchers [Byrd’s term for fans of her show]. I raised them. They used to sneak it when they were teenagers. They got it. It was during a Mercury retrograde, and Mercury retrograde involves communication. It’s a time to renew and redo and rethink. I realized I’m not getting any younger, and my story needs to be told by the right people.
New York magazine compared you to Mister Rogers. Would you ever, in a million years, have expected to be compared to him?
Well, I compare myself partly to him, and also Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson. There used to be a lady called Shari Lewis who had this puppet Lamb Chop. I was raised with that. I was raised by the TV. And look at that, I became the TV.
Your show ran for more than 600 episodes. Do you have a favorite guest or favorite episode?
The first time I had on [a trans person], nobody in the studio knew that she had a dick and she was gorgeous. And I had a gay male actor on, and when he saw her, they got into a huge fight in front of the camera, so I had to sit in the middle of them. It didn’t make sense to me, and I didn’t know that he was going to act that way. But there was discrimination in the gay world, just like there’s discrimination in the straight world.
