“We are everywhere!” proclaimed the manifesto for the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979.

The same could be said for the woman who coined the phrase: comic and activist Robin Tyler.

She’s like the Zelig of the LGBTQ+ rights movement: look closely enough and you’ll find her.

Since the 1960’s, Tyler has blazed a trail for LGBTQ+ rights as the first out comic to perform on national television; as an organizer for three of those National Marches on Washington; and as one half of the first same-sex couple to file to legally wed in California.

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Along the way, she’s been shot at, stabbed at, thrown off stages, and made headlines like this one in the New York Post, after she was arrested at a drag bar in 1962: “Cops Grab 44 Men and a Real Girl in Slacks.”

The 20-year-old alerted the media herself.

Tyler made her name in the late 1960s as one of the comedy duo Harrison & Tyler, with her then-girlfriend Patty Harrison. The “radical political comics” toured the comedy circuit and put out two groundbreaking, often hilarious, albums.

The pair had a talent for stirring controversy. During a talk radio appearance in Los Angeles, they told listeners they were nude in the studio. The audience was “livid,” Tyler recalled, “as they didn’t want to ‘hear their nudity.'” Police had to escort the comedy team to their car.

A faux-fight on the Tomorrow Show by the duo, inspired by “very boring” host Tom Snyder, caught the attention of ABC programming chief Fred Silverman. Cigar in hand, Silverman told the pair, “You’re going to be famous” and signed them to a rich network contract.

It was a turning point for Tyler in a 60-plus-year career on stage and behind the scenes, advancing the causes of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights — and sticking a needle in the eye of the establishment wherever she found it. She’s still alerting the media.

The 83-year-old emailed this publication about her availability to talk.

Tyler is having a moment after wowing audiences with her appearance in the Netflix special “Out Standing” last year (The New York Times called the lesbian standup “a standout”), and she’s the subject of a documentary in production.

In several phone calls and scores of texts, Tyler shared some memorable moments from a life and career that live up to her mantra, first heard on the Washington Mall so many marches ago.

“It was true then, and it’s still true,” she says.

On Donald Trump

So now we have Donald Trump. He’s difficult to do, by the way, because, first of all, he’s — and I’m not saying this to be funny — he’s obviously mentally ill. He’s obviously challenged. I mean, he doesn’t have a huge vocabulary, and he doesn’t have cognitive thinking ability. And I don’t think it’s his age. I think he’s always been unable to, you know, formulate.

Humor is a razor-sharp edge of the truth. It’s anger and pain made funny. And I’m so angry at Donald Trump. I can do some lines on him, but there’s not enough to do to make up for what he’s done to us. It’s like doing Hitler jokes, you know?

I mean, you could do his hair because he only has one strand and manages to make it into like a hairpiece, but how do you make fun of closing the Social Security offices or killing babies because he cut off USAID? You can do stuff like, “Donald Trump is to Christianity what paint by numbers is to art.” I mean, there’s stuff, but it’s nothing.

We all know, like, apparently his penis is shaped like a mushroom or whatever. Who cares? You can call him a preemie, which is a premature ejaculator. I can do all the one-liners on him, but it’s so shocking what is happening right now that even I have a difficult time making it funny.

I don’t want to give him any more time. I don’t want to give him any more space, to be honest.

On that 1962 New York Post headline

Well, I promised Terry I would go to a drag show. Terry was my drag queen friend, so I went to a drag show. And, you know, of course, when they were arresting all these men, I said, “Officer, why are you arresting them?” And he said, “You don’t fool me. You’re one of them.” And he threw me into handcuffs, which is how I got into bondage.

I had one phone call, but I couldn’t call my mother. Can you imagine? “Hello, Mama, I’m in New York, arrested for female impersonation!” “Oyyyy,” my Jewish mother would have killed herself. And I couldn’t call a lawyer, I couldn’t afford it. So I called the press.  

On “We are everywhere”

When you live in a closet, it’s a vertical coffin, right? And when you live in a closet, they can picture you and paint you any way they want to paint you, because you’re the boogeyman. That’s why they wanted us in the closet, so that people would be scared the minute we came out. But people got to know us. We were their nieces and nephews and cousins and aunts and brothers and sisters. So, when I started doing “We are everywhere,” it was because of that, because if you come out of the closet, you’ll see that we were everywhere.

And they started making signs of it and marching with it and it just caught on. It was true then, and it’s still true.

On marriage equality

I produced the mainstage for the 1979, 1987, and 1993 Marches on Washington. And in ’87, two men wanted to put on a marriage ceremony, and the march committee — it’s always the same — “No, we don’t want it. People don’t want it.” I said, “Well, if they want to do it, who are we to say no?”

And I think the ’87 March was the change. I think we went from being a gay liberation movement focusing on sex to a gay civil rights movement focusing on civil rights. You know, they always said, “We don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom” — obviously they did, but they always said, “We don’t care, as long as you keep it to yourself.” So now, if it’s not about sex, it was about the right to love, the right to marry, the right to every other civil right that they had that we wanted.

In the movement, when people said about marriage, “Oh, well, that would be the same as patriarchal marriage, a patriarchal institution, and we don’t want a civil right,” that’s ridiculous, because it gave federal rights. If the guys during the AIDS crisis had been able to marry each other, they would have gotten insurance for each other because they were family. Many families came in and totally wiped out the lover, the houses, any assets that the lover had, because they had no formal recognition of their relationship.

So I think to have formal recognition — I don’t care what it’s called, marriage, whatever — is important. If they didn’t want to get married, don’t get married, but don’t tell people they don’t have the right to have a civil right. I believe that march with the AIDS quilt and the marriage ceremony was a transition.

By the way, there is no such thing as same-sex marriage, because after marriage, sex is never the same.

On starting the marriage equality fight in California  

So Diane and I sued for the right to marry. Gloria Allred was our attorney. She did it pro bono. It’s the first Latin I’ve ever learned. It meant “for free.” If I’m going to learn Latin, that was a good way.

The morning we filed, [then-San Francisco Mayor] Gavin Newsom married a bunch of people up in San Francisco, and that got all the press. But it was really a civil rights demonstration, because the California Supreme Court negated all the marriages because we didn’t have the right to marry. But everybody thought that the California marriage case started in San Francisco. It didn’t. They consolidated all the cases later, but it started in the bastion of gay liberation, Beverly Hills.

Diane’s grandfather was the former governor of California, Culbert Levy Olson, and her father was a judge, and she was raised in Beverly Hills. So, you know, we are everywhere, so we went back to home turf and filed where she grew up.

On being “out” on stage

In 1970, Patty and I went to Vietnam for a USO show. We drew huge crowds, because there were so many gay people out there. And they knew we were gay: Patty and I said it on stage.

When we came back, we were in Jane Fonda’s FTA show, her “Free the Army” show. And we were performing at Fort Bragg and Patty and I kissed on stage. In 1970, “Love Story” was the big movie. And we kissed on stage and said, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” And we actually got thrown out of the show for doing that. Jane, years later, apologized to us, but we were open even then.

On David Brenner in tears

In the 1970s, I was in New York performing at Catch a Rising Star. David Brenner, a straight male comic, did a “fa***t joke.” But 80% of the audience were gay men who had come to see me, and they were booing. Morty Manford — one of the original members of the Gay Activists Alliance and very radical (his mother started PFLAG) — Morty stood up and said to him, “Get off the stage.” And Brenner was being booed so much that he left the stage. I went on after him — of course, it was my audience. When I went back into the dressing room, David was crying. He could not understand why they couldn’t take a joke. And I told him that we could take a joke, but not when the joke’s on us.

On being the first out lesbian comic on national television

I said to Phyllis Diller, I said, “Could you introduce me as a lesbian?” “Well, no,” she said, “I can’t, Robin.” And she said, “But I’ll tell you what. I will introduce you as a feminist, because we all know all feminists are lesbians.” Ha! I said, “Oh, Phyllis, no, that’s not true. Gloria Steinem isn’t.” She said, “Well, maybe a few aren’t,” and then she walked away.

On her pilot deal with ABC

When we signed our contract with ABC, we said to Fred Silverman, “We’re lesbians.” He said, “Oh, that’s okay, just don’t tell anyone.” You think? And then we made him take the morals clause out of our contract.

We did four pilots and then we started the Kroft Comedy Hour, which was a children’s show. So that night, I was speaking about Anita Bryant and right afterward, the news carried a story, “Avowed lesbian takes on Anita Bryant.” In the 70s, you couldn’t just be a lesbian. You had to avow it. “I swear I’m a lesbian! I swear!” They didn’t include the joke, though. The joke was, “Anita Bryant is so homophobic that she quit the church she was going to because they sang ‘Go Down, Moses.'” So, of course, we lost our contract.

And people say, “Well, you lost your contract. That’s terrible. You could have been big stars.” Yeah. Well, let’s go back to closets, our vertical coffins. I feel bad for all the people that were big stars that had to stay in. Paul Lynde, you know, Liberace, all these people that were big stars. Kaye Ballard, fabulous actress. Can you imagine? I just refused to be in the closet.

Because how are you funny? What should I do? Jokes on my boyfriend? So, there’s no way. First, we did the feminist comedy, then I did the openly gay comedy, and only then was I good. Otherwise, when we did anything else that negated who we were  — which we didn’t do much of — it wasn’t funny. So, we didn’t have a choice.

LGBTQ Nation: I think they call it authenticity.

Yes! That’s a good word! Good for you. That’s a big word (laughing).

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