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If I lived in New York City During the 1980s and 1990s, and you happened to watch Channel 35 after 10 p.m., you would see it: a busty woman with dyed blond hair and a black fishnet bikini, beaming as she spun around, facing a man. Adult movie Star or simulated blowjob on a half-naked male stripper.
You knew her theme song (the rockabilly hit “Baby, Let Me Pop Your Trunk”), and you could repeat her catchphrases (“Lie down, get comfy,” “Don’t forget to put on your rubber gear,” etc.).
That woman was Robin Byrd, now 71, a former porn 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 set of garish heart-shaped and decades-old phone sex advertisements, Robin Byrd Show Bird is shown interviewing a porn star or exotic dancer, who then performs a full striptease with unnecessarily long close-ups. She would close the show by dancing to her theme song (during which Bird would, for the most part, playfully juggle a pair of huge breasts). The show was charmingly low-budget, with Bird giving her guests tapes of the show rather than paying them: “I called it ‘Tit for a tit and a dick for a dat,’” she told me.
As beloved as Byrd is in New York City, he’s new HBO The documentary makes clear that her influence was much broader. Directed by Gillian Gunther and Stephanie Schwam (two self-described “Byrd watchers”). Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Storyairing on HBO Max Tuesday, pays tribute to Bird as a positive sex symbol who championed free 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 film is also a love letter to the era of analogue obscenity, with Bird becoming a meme long before the dial-up era.
WIRED spoke with Byrd about the documentary, internet pornography, her advocacy, and of course, how she wears boobs as a hat.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
EG Dixon: When Stephanie and Gillian approached you with the idea of doing a documentary, what was your initial response?
Robin Bird: I had received many offers before, but it was not going well. Stephanie and Gillian were Bird watchers (Byrd’s term for fans of her show). I raised them. They were sneaking it in when they were teenagers. They got it. It was during Mercury retrograde, and Mercury retrograde involves communication. It is time to renew, rethink and rethink. I realized that I wasn’t getting any younger, and that my story had to be told by the right people.
New York Magazine compared you to Mister Rogers. Did you ever, in a million years, expect to be compared to him?
Well, I compare myself partly to him, and partly to Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson. There was a lady named Shari Lewis who owned this lamb chop doll. I grew up with that. I was raised by television. And look at that, I’ve become television.
Your show ran for over 600 episodes. Do you have a favorite guest star or episode?
The first time I met a trans person, no one in the studio knew that she had a penis and that she was incredibly beautiful. And I had a gay actor, and when he saw her, they got into a big fight on camera, so I had to sit in the middle of them. It didn’t make sense to me, and I didn’t know he would act this way. But there was discrimination in the gay world, just as there is discrimination in the gay world.
