Rediscovering Robin Tyler: The Pioneering Lesbian Comedian And Activist

Robin Tyler, a self-described “little prairie dyke” from Winnipeg, made headlines in 1962 when she got caught up in a drag raid at the Exotic Ball and Carnival at the Manhattan Center. The comedian used her one allotted phone call while in custody to report the incident to the New York Post. The next day’s headline read, “Cops Grab 44 in Dresses – And a Real Girl in Slacks.” That incident, and Tyler’s ability to spin it on its head, was a harbinger of the decades to come which would define her as a clever and inspired groundbreaker in a time when the homophobic mainstream was determined to silence our entertainers and bury their careers.

Fortunately, comedy trailblazers like Tyler are finally getting their due, thanks in part to the Netflix documentary Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution, which just scored a GLAAD Media Award nomination for Outstanding Documentary. The film highlights decades of queer stand-up comedy and resistance—featuring trailblazers like Tyler, now 82, who became the first lesbian comic to come out on national TV in 1979 and was a seminal figure in the LGBTQ+ and Marriage Equality movements.

Tyler got her big break in both show business and love at Manhattan’s Club 82 doing female impersonations of Judy Garland in the ‘60s. Women in tuxedos served cocktails, while men dressed as women entertained in this basement bastion of drag on the Lower East Side. Here, she met her soul-mate and future partner in love and comedy – fashion model Pat Harrison. The duo formed Harrison and Tyler, the first lesbian feminist comedy act. An early stint with the USO in Vietnam in the late ‘60s informed their political consciousness and their approach to content (to this day, Tyler has lung problems from exposure to chemical herbicides used widely by the US military). They toured campuses in the early 1970s and played at a women’s penitentiary, demonstrations, and gay pride celebrations.

From the vantage of today, given the thriving queer comedy scene, it might be hard to imagine how rough it could be. But Tyler literally put her life on the line.

“When Patti and I went on stage at The Troubadour and we were doing our second comedy album, Wonder Women (1973), one of the waiters came with a knife to stab us and we had to stop the show,” Tyler told GO. 

“And then, when we were in New Zealand, the promoter that brought us over shot at us in the hotel, because we were organizing women and doing women’s liberation material.” Patti told the man, “Go ahead and shoot,” while Tyler tackled her to the ground as he pulled the trigger. “It looks like it’s great and fun and wonderful. But it was very difficult. When I used to do The Comedy Store at the Main Room, they’d say, ‘Get off the stage, you dyke.'”  

Things got better at The Belly Room in West Hollywood where Tyler became a regular performer. She could be different there, she says. She was able to develop more intellectual humor—comedy that didn’t cater to sexism or “ugly wife” jokes. Tyler remembers one night at Catch A Rising Star in New York City when David Brenner, of Tonight Show fame, did a “faggot” joke. “Unfortunately for him, the audience was 80% gay men and they had come to see me,” Tyler explained. “They stood up and said, ‘Get off the stage.’ He ended up backstage crying, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t do that joke.”

When you’re as hilarious and committed to calling out life’s injustices as Tyler is, it’s pretty much impossible not to disrupt. In 1973, the Hollywood Reporter memorialized an “on-air nude” scandal when Tyler, Harrison, and other guests disencumbered themselves of their clothing on a KFI Radio show. The gesture was a poke at society’s insistence that women cover their breasts in public and on the beach. About 500 outraged listeners called the station to complain about the mere mention of the naked bosoms that they technically could not see.

Eventually, Harrison and Tyler had a crack at network television, but it didn’t go over well for long. “We got [ABC] to take the moral contract clause out of our contracts,” Tyler said. “We were open with Fred Silverman and told them we were lovers. He says, ‘That’s okay, just don’t tell anyone.’” But as Tyler likes to say, closets are vertical coffins, and their political humor didn’t fly in the 1970’s. Anti-gay crusaders like Anita Bryant were on a mission to “Save our Children” from “deviant” homosexuals.

Tyler countered with humor, and once joked that “Bryant was so homophobic that she quit her church after the choir insisted on singing ‘Go Down Moses.’” But when Tyler joked on The Krofft Comedy Hour, “I don’t mind them being born again, but do they have to come back as themselves?”, ABC showed her the door.

Tyler and Harrison broke up in 1974 but remained deeply close for life. They continued to perform together for a few years until disbanding. In 1979, Tyler recorded her debut solo album Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Groom. The vinyl is on collection with the Smithsonian and shows no signs of expiring. She revived the piece in 2007 and received an enthusiastic intergenerational reception last October during Women’s Week in Provincetown. The event culminated in a rally, just ahead of the November election, where attendees were warned by elder activists to prepare for what was coming. Now more than ever, looking back at Tyler’s activism, and that of many others, in the face of danger is of the utmost importance. 

Tyler once said, “Every day is Stonewall.” Just last month, the White House moved to erase references to transgender people on the Stonewall National Monument website. She was on site in 1969 at the Stonewall Uprising, when the gay community fought back against police brutality and raids. Tyler stood on the outskirts of this historic turning point, a Canadian in New York on a green card—aware that she could be deported if determined to be homosexual. That missed moment to join the fight propelled her to a lifetime of activism. To become one of our most prominent door-busters. She would never NOT fight again.

Tyler went on to produce and emcee the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979 which drew about 100,000 people, plus follow-on marches in 1987 and 1993. She and the late Diane Olsen were the first same-sex couple to sue the state of California for the right to marry, with powerhouse attorney Gloria Allred at her side. After a 7-year legal battle, in 2008, they became the first same-sex couple to wed in Los Angeles, paving the way for innumerable others. When the Supreme Court heard the federal marriage case in 2015 (Obergefell v. Hodges), Tyler and Olsen were the first to be given tickets to attend.

Beyond marriage equality, the Los Angeles resident has been a pioneer in other spaces. She produced the first International Gay Comedy Festival which took place at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Australia in 1994, and 25 major outdoor Women’s Music & Comedy Festivals, including the annual West Coast festival, which showcased icons like Casselberry and Dupree and ran from 1980 through 1994. Hers were the first festivals to include trans women, who found a warm welcome and open door. When Dr. Laura Schlessinger called LGBTQ people “biological errors” on her radio show in 2000, Tyler became the National Protest Coordinator for StopDrLaura.com; the magnitude of the demonstrations prompted Paramount to drop plans for Schlessinger’s planned television show.

For more than half a century, the comedian has maintained an ever-critical and relevant role in the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement. “Comedy is a weapon. It’s the razor-sharp edge of the truth,” said Tyler. As for those earlier years when the funniest among them got canceled by mainstream TV for simply being who she was, it might be tempting to say that she took one for the team. Tyler doesn’t view it that way.

“They weren’t hits for the team,” she told GO. “It was fabulous. I opened the door to freedom.”

In January, when Anita Bryant’s death was announced, Tyler posted on Facebook: “Her hate brought our community together and we emerged as a civil rights movement RIP”. How to explain such grace? “Actually I think she led a tragic life. When you’re a hater, you eat yourself up alive. It’s like being filled with poison.”

Tyler has always embraced herself, even if the people around her didn’t understand what she was doing or why. In 1956, she ran away the day she got her period when her mother told her she could get pregnant. “I thought I had been shot,” the comedian laughs. She hopped on a train in Manitoba and rode the rails until the Royal Canadian Mounted Police returned her home. “I never strayed from that little boy image, and I was never scared,” she says. 

A pioneer for the lesbian community, Tyler is finally receiving her flowers. Although the road to equality has been long, and continues to look neverending, Tyler does more than accept her sexuality. She embraces it and encourages you to the do same. 

“I never was in the closet, ever, ever. I didn’t come out because I wasn’t in. I’ve had a magnificent life. I always say, if I weren’t born gay, I would have chosen it…because it gave me a chance to have a free life, to choose what I wanted to be. I was just very, very lucky that I got to become part of a group that was discriminated against – because if you fight back, you get to be magnificent.”