There’s a new HBO documentary out called Bang My Box that profiles the life and art of late-night TV host Robyn Byrd, who first became famous for hosting a pornographic call-in show on NYC public access channels in the mid 1970s. Byrd’s career spanned multiple decades of bright-eyed & bubbly political provocation, as she used her TV broadcast platform to advocate for free speech, safe sex, gay rights, trans visibility, and sex-positive feminism through the darkest days of Reagan’s regime and beyond. When the documentary crew catches up with her in the 2020s, she’s long outgrown & outlasted her signature crocheted bikini and mostly just lounges around her Fire Island home with her longtime partner, waxing nostalgic about the good old days. She’s a pure joy to be around in either timeline, but the audience is especially grateful for every frame of vintage footage from her heyday on The Robin Byrd Show in particular, which itself was a weekly document of the bigger personalities from the NYC Porno Chic scene of the 1970s & 80s, as filtered through Byrd’s personal brand of low-fi psychedelic video art. It’s no surprise at all, then, that the self-described “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle eventually pops up in both of the timelines covered by the doc, appearing as a creative collaborator for Byrd in the 1980s and as a personal friend in the 2020s. Sprinkle’s own career saw her starting as a Porno Chic starlet on the NYC scene before she moved to San Francisco in the 1990s, where she made pornographic self-help tapes that doubled as psychotronic video art in the Robyn Byrd Show tradition (most notably among them, the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop). Given their parallel career paths, a Robin Byrd retrospective documentary is just about the most likely place imaginable to find Annie Sprinkle besides maybe her own home. To find a proper recap of Sprinkle’s career in politicized porn production, however, you have to dig a little deeper than what you’ll find on the HBO Max splash page.

Annie Sprinkle was eager to reveal herself to her audience as early as her first directorial effort, the early-80s Porno Chic confessional Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle. There, she breaks the rules of pre-video porno production by making direct eye contact with the camera and verbally addressing her audience, inviting them into her bedroom. Deep Inside is more a loose collection of Sprinkle’s sexual fantasies than a true self-portrait, though, acting as a catalog of her personal turn-ons rather than a true autobiography. It does open with Sprinkle flipping through a family photo album from her actual childhood, though, which is a lot more personal than most professional pornos tend to get. The closest thing Sprinkle has to a true Bang My Box-style career retrospective is the one-woman stage show Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real, which she filmed for the home video screen in 1999. Cinematically, Herstory of Porn borrows from the meta-critical Gen-X sarcasm of Talk Soup & MST3k, placing Sprinkle front row at her local porno theater so she can comment on a Greatest Hits clip show package of her own pornographic highlights in real time through the magic of greenscreen. As an autobiographical documentary, it’s occasionally informative, especially in the earliest stretch where Sprinkle reveals that she got into the porno business while working as a popcorn girl at a theater that was screening the Porno Chic landmark Deep Throat. When her theater’s print of Deep Throat was confiscated by the feds for an obscenity trial, Sprinkle was summoned to testify in court about its exhibition, which is where she met director Gerard Damiano, who dutifully helped initiate her into the biz. It’s difficult to take insightful anecdotes like that too seriously, though, since Sprinkle spends the majority of the runtime shoving toothbrushes & rolled-up American flags up her anus, narrating a “cumshot medley” from her classic works, and performing drag queen lip-syncs to footage of herself from various scenes of Deep Inside. Herstory of Porn is relatively informative about the general shape of Annie Sprinkle’s career, but it’s also an anarchic riot meant to shock & awe the jaded off-Broadway theatre types of 1990s NYC, which is a far cry from the softcore respectability of the Robin Byrd documentary.

Maybe the most revealing snippet of Herstory of Porn is Sprinkle’s assertion that sex is “simply the most interesting subject in the world,” musing to herself “why anyone would want to make a film or a video about anything else, I don’t understand it.” She really means it too. The deeper you dig into her 90s-era video productions the more you realize how all-important sex is to her, to the point where it’s just as much of a religious pursuit as a professional one. Her self-help video Annie Sprinkle’s Amazing World of Orgasm (filmed in the 1990s, completed in the 2000s) continues the greenscreen psychedelia of the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop and the Herstory of Porn videos, with Sprinkle appearing onscreen in the pose of a local weather report girl to inform her audience about the spiritually transcendent power of the orgasm in all its many forms. She’s joined in her spatial void by a variety of experts on the subject: sex researchers, sex educators, sex therapists, cultural sexologists, regular sexologists, prostitution activists, chiropractors, poets, dominatrices, yoga instructors, and erotic touch experts. Each takes a turn describing a different facet of the human sexual orgasm in a standalone vignette: how to have one, how to fake one, what they feel like mixed with laughter, what they feel like mixed with pain, how they can occur during birth, how they can occur during death, how they can connect us to the world beyond observable life altogether. The Amazing World of Orgasm video is presented as an all-encompassing documentary on the health & spiritual benefits of sexual pleasure, but it looks & feels like a Dianetics or Unarius video — more New Age religion than quantifiable science. When it ends on the proclamation, “Happy orgasms to all!” it reads like a call to wands, inspiring its audience to change the world for the better by rubbing one out as soon as the tape concludes. It also consciously functions as an outsider-art curio, though, which is immediately apparent when the very first sexpert’s testimonial is illustrated by overlayed video-warp projections from both Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis and vintage porn from Sprinkle’s personal catalog. As sincere as Sprinkle is about the spiritual & political power about safe, pleasurable sex, she’s always careful to punctuate her rigorous research findings in that field with a sugary wink, signaling to her audience that it’s all in good fun.

As recounted in Herstory of Porn, Annie Sprinkle moved to San Francisco in the 1990s because she had earned a reputation for being too kinky for the professional pornographers of NYC. The cultish New Age hippie spirituality of California suits her well, and she’s since moved on from her “post-porn” self-help psychotronic phase to produce “eco-sexual” documentaries where she sensually fucks the planet Earth to promote Climate Change awareness (along with her wife and creative collaborator Beth Stephens). She’s also been incredibly smart about presenting & archiving her films in academic settings, where she can be primarily understood as an artist and a feminist instead of a pornographic actress, a designation that would undervalue her work in other contexts. I most frequently see her pop up as a talking head in documentaries on human sexuality these days, including the recent documentary on Fakir Musafar and the body modification movement, A Body to Live In. It may not surprise you to hear that Fakir also appears as a talking head in Sprinkle’s own Amazing World of Orgasm video, promoting body modification as a practical means for achieving religiously transcendent sexual climax. The only reason I know that is because Sprinkle maintains a subscription-based website where you can pay to access her archive of vintage “post-porn” self-help tapes online, including her must-see works: Amazing World of Orgasm, Herstory of Porn, and the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop. There’s a D.I.Y. ethos to her work in porn production & exhibition, refusing to wait around for institutions to fund, legitimize, or immortalize her art before it disappears forever. So, the most emotional I got while watching the new HBO doc Bang My Box was a scene where Robin Byrd reads a personal letter written by Sprinkle, urging her to have her personal VHS archive of The Robin Byrd Show scanned & preserved by an academic institution before that wealth of material is lost forever to time & decay. In that letter, Sprinkle stresses how important Byrd’s art is in both the realms of national politics and personal spirituality, and you can tell she means every word. Revisiting clips from that archive in Bang My Box, it became clear to me that The Robin Byrd Show was influential on Sprinkle’s signature “post-porn” video art style, and I was grateful that Sprinkle was retroactively influential on making sure that archive isn’t left to rot, unwatched.

-Brandon Ledet