Happy NYC Pride Week, Caftaners! Ugh, I just checked the forecast and this coming weekend is looking soggy. Well anyway, next Tuesday, I’ll start traveling for most of July and even though I’ll try to post a bit from my travels, I likely won’t have any new Caftan interviews for you for a few weeks. Whether you’re a free or paid subscriber, please hang in there with me! In addition to getting up a Caftan interview about once a week, I’ve turned out several stories a week—primarily for HIV sites POZ, TheBody.com and Positively Aware—since January.
Plus, I was doing final edits on my novel coming out around this time next year…
…and I desperately need a midyear breather. I can’t WAIT to not be tethered to my laptop all day for just a few weeks.
As for today, I’m very honored to unveil my first Caftan interview with a woman! (I should say cisgender woman—not sure if any of you remember the interview I did last year with young trans poet and party thrower Kay Gabriel, who, a day after I put it up, asked me to take it down.)
Is it not fitting that this Caftan first is with Robin Byrd? I’m sure most of you are familiar with this legend. Now 71 and basically retired, the NYC native hosted The Robin Byrd Show on NYC public-access TV from 1977 to 1998, becoming a late-night NYC-area legend in the process.
For those of you who don’t know, Robin was a twentysomething 1970s swinger/porn dabbler who kind of inherited this show from a guy shortly after it began and turned it into an eponymous institution featuring both male and female strippers and porn performers dancing in a garish light with orange-tanned skin (the white ones, anyway) and then snuggling and chatting with Robin, who always wore a macrame bikini. At the end of the show, she and her guests danced to “Baby Let Me Bang Your Box” as she mugged for the camera while grabbing her guests’ titties and penises and pretending to stick them in her eye or mouth.
Like many others, I discovered this show on Channel 35 late at night upon moving to NYC in the early 90s. I was cringingly mesmerized by it. I didn’t find it arousing at all. The guests were, again, always orange with bleached and/or highly processed hair, and when the guys danced, their unerect penises would flop around like miniature windsock puppets.
But the show was so fun because Robin was so goofy, with that braying voice and Woody Woodpecker laugh of hers. She was full-on sex positive but still always promoted safe sex (condoms), which, along with her featuring plenty of gay dancers, endeared her to the queer community.
This coming Tuesday, June 30, HBO will debut Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story.
One of the producers, my talented friend Greg Scarnici (with whom I did a recent Caftan chat about himbos), has been working hard on this project for a few years now. He was telling me about it back in the summer of 2021 or 2022. I’m so proud of him! (Sarah Jessica Parker is also a producer.)
I loved the doc! The archival footage of the NYC sex industry in the 1970s through the 90s is, as you might imagine, amazing. But it’s the love story between Robin and her husband of about 50 years, Shelly, who now has dementia, that is the doc’s true heart.
I’m sad this interview is so short for a Caftan chat. When I set this up with the PR guy, I asked for “at least an hour”—but I made the mistake of never confirming exactly how much time I’d get. Well, turns out it was EXACTLY an hour, because Robin had been lined up on Zoom interviews all day. And hence I was too chatty and relaxed with Robin at the beginning (I’ve cut a lot of that idle chitchat). But even once we got started, Robin is a circuitous storyteller…and there is so much I wanted to ask Robin I didn’t get a chance to.
Despite that disappointment, I think what we focused on here will shed more light on the doc if and when you watch it. The doc glosses over her childhood and young adulthood, but I think they’re key to understanding her. I have two gut feelings about Robin. One is that she’s just a naturally open, exhibitionist extrovert without a mean bone in her entire body. But that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have a hurt bone—as people who crave love and attention often do.
So there we go! I hope you enjoy what’s here. Also, I’m curious: I started Caftan as a project by, for and about older gay men. But I have my private list of women (and trans and nonbinary people) I’d love to interview, because their lives intersect with that of older gay men in powerful ways. Are you gents interested in that? Let me know in the comments, or on Substack Notes…and, if so, let me know whom you’d love to hear from.
I will see y’all soon! I may even nab some Caftan chats while I’m away—we’ll see! And meanwhile, I would be remiss if I did not say it’s time to LIE BACK…GET COMFORTABLE…and enjoy this chat with the iconic Ms. Robin Byrd!
Robin! I’m so honored.
I’m your first woman interview!
That’s right. And there could not be a more perfect one.
I always say that I’m a gay man in a woman’s body.
Oh, girl, I know! I’m one of the many people who discovered you one lonely night in my nineties youth. So congrats on the doc! What’s a typical day like for you right now with all this hoopla including the openings in NYC and Provincetown?
It’s exciting that my story is being told by me. My typical day is like yours—I get up in the morning, have my coffee, scrub my teeth, take a shower, make sure Shelly has his breakfast and goes to the gym. But the film has ruined my routine. I like my retirement and not having to do anything except for walking the beach and doing my tea dances.
I can hear Shelly talking in the background. [This is in their Upper East Side apartment, although in summers they spend most of their time in their house in Cherry Grove on Fire Island.]
Are you balancing the film stuff with looking after Shelly?
Yes. I don’t usually stay away more than 24 hours—overnight. I leave the dog, Omom [pronounced “ohm”- “ohm,” like the Buddhist chant], with him. If Shelly gets into a black hole in his mind because of the dementia, Omom will sit on his legs.
Sarah Jessica Parker is one of the producers of this documentary. How did that happen?
She’s not exactly sure, it turns out, but she tells me this story…
Years ago, in the eighties or nineties, they were having an afterparty for a movie she was in with “Sex” in the title. [Tim: There’s no SJP movie with “Sex” in the title except for the 2008 Sex and the City movie, so not sure about this…] The publicist called me and said, “Hey can you supply some boys in jockstraps or Speedos?” I said, “Sure—no problem.” No payment or anything. Back then, we did things for fun and publicity.
So we were walking around the restaurant and we passed SJP’s table. And I heard her say, “What is she doing here?” And I turned to her and said, “Because you have a movie with sex in it.”
So I always thought she didn’t like me—for 30 years! So on the red carpet [for the new documentary], I told her that story and she was like, “No!” I didn’t realize how much she did like me. When somebody sent me her interview red carpet, “She really does love me!” She said some amazing things about what I’ve done for her and the world.
The economic model of porn has changed so much since you started the show in the late 1970s. Did you watch [the 2017-19 HBO series] The Deuce by any chance?
They asked me to be a consultant and I was going to. I don’t know what happened, but they got Annie Sprinkle instead. I was insulted! [laughs] So I didn’t watch it.
Oh, okay! Well, porn is kind of a gig economy now, with OnlyFans as the Uber of porn. What do you think about that? Do you think it’s better for women, that they can be their own boss in a sense?
I was always self-employed, so I don’t see that. Back in the day, you did a film and got a contract. But I never did that. I just got paid by the scene or by the day.
Once your show started gaining momentum, did you continue doing porn?
I did 15 films and was never offered more. So I did go-go dancing in New Jersey because you didn’t have to take your clothes off. And I stripped once or twice a year at Show World. I loved doing it during Fleet Week! The guys were so appreciative. I love giving pleasure to people. And I was a great dancer.
The very last line of the doc is you saying, “My detour was to make people happy—to give them the love that I wanted.” I thought a lot about how your childhood affected the rest of your life, especially after your adoptive dad, whom you loved, died, and you were left with your mean adoptive mother.
My adoptive mother was loveless—gimme, gimme, gimme. She was a Scorpio, so I always looked at her as a bad witch. She never hugged me. I had love with my dad. My mother adopted me because she wanted to keep her marriage together, because she couldn’t carry a baby. It was the fifties. [to Shelly] Stop! [to me] He’s clapping for some reason. [to Shelly] Go outside!
Did you ever meet or learn anything about your biological parents?
Yes. Shelly wanted children, but I didn’t. I’m an empath and I didn’t want to bring any child into this world. I saw the future—not pretty. I’m not a breeder—I’m sorry.
But Shelly wanted to find out who my biological parents were. And I wanted to know, too. I didn’t have a birth certificate—only my adopted name. I was taken away the split second I was born. So Shelly and I would go to the genealogy section of the library, going through records of the year I was born, 1955. It was a closed adoption, so we couldn’t ask the agency to reach out to my biological parents. Even the hospital where I was born, Beth David [which became Grand Central Hospital in 1959 before closing in 1963], was no longer around.
I had a biological great-uncle who lived on Sutton Place, where my adoptive father had an antiques store where he only sold to celebrities like Liberace. This great-uncle was always at my dad’s store. He was Jewish, like my biological mom, who went off and had a fling with a hot Italian man and [later, after she birthed and gave away Robin] had an arranged marriage.
So you’re half Italian and half Jewish?
Yes. So so my great-uncle, a lawyer, arranged the adoption. So years later, Shelly and I went down to see him in Florida. He opened the door to us—strangers!—and he told me more than I’d ever known about my adopted dad. I think this was the early eighties. He didn’t tell us exactly who my biological parents were, but he gave us enough clues to figure it out.
So Shelly and I went down to Florida—Boca Raton. My biological mom lived in a doorman apartment building on the ocean. I brought the paperwork with me. The doorman said we could go upstairs, but I asked him to ask her to come down. And so she did. She was blonde and short and old. I said, “Hi, my name’s Robin. And my birth name was so-and-so. I was adopted at childbirth.”
And she blew up! “It never happened!” She denied, denied, denied. She’d been arranged to marry a prominent doctor—so she probably never told anyone to me.
Shelly interjections something about telling her not to give away her personal information.
[To Shelly] No! My personal information is out in the open.
Okay, I won’t keep us on this. But how did you feel when she reacted that way? Was that the end of the conversation?
If they didn’t want me, I didn’t want them. I said to her, “I don’t want anything from you—I just want my medical information.” I showed her the paperwork and she threw it back at me. So just like my adoptive mom, I thought, “You don’t want me? Goodbye!”
How did you feel walking away from that?
I didn’t really care who they were. I built myself.
Right. OK, thanks for sharing that. So how old were you when you left your adoptive mom?
Thirteen.
Wow. Where did you go?
I slept in Central Park a couple nights. But then a girlfriend—a girl who was a friend, but we experimented together later on in life—said she could hide me from her parents in her basement. Until they found out they were feeding five instead of four. Then I met an older boy and lived with him and his mom for a few years. But he was Cuban and abusive and his mom didn’t want me there. She’d curse me out in Spanish.
So I left and took my GED and got into Borough of Manhattan Community College and slept on a lot of friends’ couches. I was interested in film. I wanted to be a director. But film was expensive. I had a part-time job at a place where I was a production coordinator in charge of the black-and-white video cameras. And one day I walked in front of the camera and saw myself on the monitor and thought, “Hey! I look good on camera. This is cool.” But I didn’t think much of it.
I had friends involved in the adult business. I was now about seventeen, eighteen. So I was the orgy queen and had a friend named Golden Superman who had a share in Robbins Rest [a small community] on Fire Island.