Robin Byrd, the Sex Godmother of Millennials, Says the Internet Ruined Porn

In the event you lived in New York City through the Eighties or Nineties, and also you occurred to detect Channel 35 after 10 pm, you’d have seen her: a busty lady with dyed-blond hair in a black mesh bikini, beaming broadly as she gyrated towards an adult film star or simulated fellatio on a half-naked male stripper.

You knew her theme tune (the rockabilly “Child, Let Me Bang Your Field”), and you’d have been capable of repeat her catchphrases (“Lie again, get snug,” “don’t neglect to put on your rubbers,” and so on.).

That lady was Robin Byrd, now 71, a former grownup movie star who grew to become an area celeb along with her eponymous public entry present, which ran from 1977 to 1998 (and nonetheless airs in reruns, supplied you have got old-school cable). That includes a garish heart-shaped set and decades-old telephone intercourse advertisements, The Robin Byrd Present featured Byrd interviewing a porn star or unique dancer, who would then carry out a striptease full with unnecessarily lingering close-up photographs. She’d shut the present by dancing to her theme tune (throughout which Byrd would, most of the time, juggle a pair of comically outsized breasts). The present was charmingly low-budget, with Byrd giving her friends tapes of the present as an alternative of paying them: “I referred to as it tit for tat and dick for dat,” she tells me.

As beloved as Byrd is in New York Metropolis, a brand new HBO documentary makes it clear her influence was a lot wider. Directed by Jyllian Gunther and Stephanie Schwam (two self-described “Byrd-watchers”), Bang My Field: 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 neighborhood, promoted secure intercourse through the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and led a landmark lawsuit towards Time Warner Cable when it tried to censor her present. The film can be a love letter to the analog period of smut, with Byrd changing into one thing of a meme lengthy earlier than the age of dial-up.

WIRED spoke to Byrd concerning the documentary, web porn, her advocacy, and, in fact, how she wore boobs as a hat.

This interview has been edited for readability and size.

EJ DICKSON: When Stephanie and Jyllian approached you with the concept of constructing a documentary, what was your preliminary response?

ROBIN BYRD: I had many presents earlier than, nevertheless it did not really feel proper. And Stephanie and Jyllian, they have been Byrdwatchers [Byrd’s term for fans of her show]. I raised them. They used to sneak it once they have been youngsters. They received it. It was throughout a Mercury retrograde, and Mercury retrograde entails communication. It’s a time to resume and redo and rethink. I noticed I’m not getting any youthful, and my story must be instructed by the best folks.

New York journal in contrast you to Mister Rogers. Would you ever, in 1,000,000 years, have anticipated to be in comparison with him?

Properly, I evaluate myself partly to him, and in addition Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson. There was a woman referred to as Shari Lewis who had this puppet Lamb Chop. I used to be raised with that. I used to be raised by the TV. And have a look at that, I grew to become the TV.

Your present ran for greater than 600 episodes. Do you have got a favourite visitor or favourite episode?

The primary time I had on [a trans person], no person within the studio knew that she had a dick and she or he was beautiful. And I had a homosexual male actor on, and when he noticed her, they received into an enormous combat in entrance of the digicam, so I needed to sit in the course of them. It didn’t make sense to me, and I didn’t know that he was going to behave that manner. However there was discrimination within the homosexual world, similar to there’s discrimination within the straight world.