With Robin Byrd, you form of needed to be there. There, on this case, being the red-orange dank no-man’s land of late-night Manhattan public-access cable TV within the ’70s and ’80s. That’s the place Robin Byrd, in her black-crochet bikini, along with her caramel-blonde hair and white-as-Elmer’s-glue fingernails and spaced-out grin, was the beckoning host of her personal proudly cheesy and sex-positive showgirl and showboy fantasy kingdom.
She would nonetheless be powdering her nostril throughout the present’s opening moments (that’s how understaffed they have been), and she or he would repeat her catch phrases (“Lie back and get comfortable,” “If you don’t have a loved one, you always have me”), after which she would introduce the primary performer of the evening — what have been then known as strippers, although this was the one present the place that may be a porn queen in a G-string or a blueboy wearing skimpy biker leather-based. Within the age of triple-X leisure, there was nothing that racy about it. The marginally outrageous enjoyable is that you simply have been watching this on tv — and the enjoyable, as effectively, was there in Robin’s harmless, giggly, pushy, in-on-the-joke-but-not-quite persona.
“Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story,” which just lately premiered on the Tribeca Festival (and can drop on HBO on June 30), is the form of documentary that now will get made as a result of…effectively, simply because. As a result of 40 or 50 years after the peak of porno stylish, or what you would possibly name the Renaissance Age of the intercourse trade (assume “Boogie Nights” and the hipification of the AVN Awards), a universe that was as soon as regarded as a responsible pleasure, with performers who offered a service that was the furthest factor from respectable, is now taken greater than slightly severely. The folks we then known as strippers are seen as having fired salvos of flesh in opposition to Puritan America. On prime of that, the post-#MeToo world has reclaimed intercourse staff as liberators who have been unfairly discriminated in opposition to. One of many producers of “Bang My Box” is Sarah Jessica Parker, and the truth that she would lend her identify to a film about Robin Byrd makes a mythological connection that feels proper (although some time again it may need felt slightly “Say what?”).
In fact, the opposite cool motive to make a documentary about Robin Byrd is that although she was on the market, baring all of it on TV, main a parade of pleased exhibitionism, she herself was fairly a thriller. She stored her life non-public; nobody knew a lot about her. It usually appeared, from her affectionate kissing and nuzzling of the feminine performers on her present, that she was queer, however it seems that in 1976, as she was gearing as much as enter the intercourse trade, she connected with Shelly, an promoting artwork director, and married him. They’ve been collectively ever since. (She declares within the movie that she’s bisexual.)
As a result of her reveals have been broadcast in infinite rotation, our first picture of Robin Byrd at present is a jolt. She appears a lot older than she did (within the documentary, we see her flip 69 after which 70, all the time celebrating her birthday with an ice-cream sundae on the completely old-school Serendipity 3 on the Higher East Facet), and that’s as a result of she’s a showbiz performer who selected to not get work executed. That makes her a rarity and perhaps one thing of a heroine. Along with her lengthy graying hair and bangs framed by a bun she pins on prime, she appears like a heat and cuddly earth mama, and acts like one too. However sitting round within the overstuffed duplex she shares with Shelly, who’s now an historical white-haired man declining into dementia, she gestures towards the wall of tapes of all her outdated reveals and says, “These are all our children!” She doesn’t know what to do with the tapes (there are 600 of them). However by the top of the movie, she’s been made to see that they’re paperwork of a time, and she or he agrees to archive them. Can somebody’s graduate thesis at Oberlin be far behind?
In the event you have been there, watching Robin Byrd on TV, you already know that there was one thing ineluctably successful and charming and sincere in its vulgarity — and horny — about that period, and the individuals who grew to become the celebs of it. Robin began out in porn, showing in 13 movies (together with “Debbie Does Dallas”). She took over a present known as “Hot Legs” and, in 1977, modified the identify to “The Robin Byrd Show.” Most of her visitors, like Porsche Lynn and Candida Royalle and Samantha Fox and Annie Sprinkle, have been porn actresses who she would interview and humanize. The message of the present was, “Porn stars are people too.”
As a result of the present was reside, you possibly can name Robin and speak to her, proper there on the air. All of it felt very fringe, however on Channel J, the primary public-access channel the place you possibly can lease time and promote advertisements, it grew to become a cash factor when she started to promote phone-sex social gathering strains. Her present leaked into the mainstream like punk. Cheri Oteri parodied her on “Saturday Night Live”; that can make you well-known. And as Robin advanced into an ally of the queer group (her present was beamed every week into the West Village homosexual bar Julius’), she grew to become an activist voice amid the onslaught of AIDS.
She grew to become a unique form of activist within the ’90s, teaming up with “Midnight Blue’s” Al Goldstein to file a lawsuit in opposition to Time Warner when their public-access reveals have been banned for being obscene. This was a freedom of speech case, relatively just like the one launched and gained by Larry Flynt, and it went straight to the Supreme Courtroom. Goldstein and Byrd gained theirs too, however watching all this now you assume: With the present Supreme Courtroom, is that how it could go at present?
At a compact 79 minutes, “Bang My Box,” directed by Jyllian Gunther and Stephanie Schwam, packs in every little thing that you must find out about Robin Byrd: how she was adopted and grew up in Manhattan, doted on by her antiques-dealer father, who died when she was eight, and the way she ran away from house to flee an abusive mom, escaping into the hippie ’70s. The photographs of her on the time present a wise leonine lady — the Norma Jeane model of herself. Then she went blonde and have become a high-camp reply to Marilyn Chambers. She was a comic at coronary heart, which is why TV agreed along with her. She produced and directed her personal reveals, creating herself as a personality.
We in all probability shouldn’t take Robin Byrd too severely. Her public-access present was erotic kitsch, and she or he knew it. It could all the time finish with that week’s gallery of performers gyrating and clowning to “Bang My Box,” a rock ‘n’ roll track Robin recorded (“Baby let me bang your box”), along with her because the ringmaster clown. On the finish of the documentary, there’s a montage of Robin at present dancing round Manhattan, and she or he’s as harmless as could be, however she expresses the identical spirit she did in these closing sequences of “The Robin Byrd Show,” laughing, with erotic abandon, at her personal pleasure.
