Myself as Pee-wee

Around a year or so ago, I wrote about the weird little guys that shaped me, with a special mention of Pee-wee Herman. I made note of the wonderful retrospective look at Paul Reubens' career that the YouTube channel Hats Off Entertainment made. Of course, I was eager to watch Pee-wee as Himself as soon as I learned of its existence. I also braced myself for the emotional rollercoaster I was about to embark on. And boy, did it deliver.

Pee-wee As Himself is an exclusive look at Reubens’ life, thoughts, and process. Documentarian Matt Wolf spent over 40 hours interviewing Reubens and was given access to the actor's large collection of photographs and video footage. It’s rare we ever get this much insight into someone’s life, and Wolf handled it with care and dignity by prioritizing Paul and his needs above all else.

Paul Reubens adopted an almost clown-like approach to his portrayal of Pee-wee, likely influenced by his boyhood love of the circus. Not just in his over-the-top antics, but in his ability to give himself entirely over to the character. As a result of this, for the years that Pee-wee thrived, Paul hid in the shadows.

Paul is a complicated man, admittedly a control freak, whose jealousy, spite, and fear of never finding fame fueled much of his actions throughout his career. Some could take these ingredients, stir them up, throw them into a pot, and call it an unlikable soup. I’d say it’s the most human look we’ve ever gotten into the mind of an artist; we just don’t want to admit this because it feels like giving utterance to the truth of the uglier parts of ourselves.

As Reubens is interviewed, he’s evasive, sly, and absolutely charming throughout. Despite his clever wordplay and witty ways of dancing around direct responses, there are also several moments where he’s completely candid. He never backs down from admitting when he mishandled something, didn’t attribute someone who deserved it at the time, and when he let bitterness and jealousy get the best of him. In that way, he’s better than most of us.

But no matter what—even the estrangements from friends, the fights, the lack of a social life, and its effect on his mental health, what fueled Reubens was an undercurrent of love. Looking back on it now, it’s evident that Reubens strove to offer something special with Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Not only was a show full of vibrant colors, with a wacky cast of characters, but Reubens also sought to showcase a diverse array of people and lifestyles, encouraging people to be their truest selves, even if it was outside of what people considered “ordinary.” Self-expression was paramount. Pee-wee Herman was the epitome of punk rock.

Despite the Pee-wee character stemming from his work in The Groundlings, a major feature film, various television appearances, and being a pop culture icon with multi-generational appeal, his TV series was ordered as a kids’ show; something that Reubens didn’t shy away from. He took joy in being able to deliver a message of radical self-expression and love towards a younger generation.

And yet, it was this very distinction of Pee-wee’s Playhouse as a kid’s show that would be his ruin.

When the infamous movie theater incident and subsequent arrest took place in the early ‘90s, it was exactly that moniker of being a “kiddie star” that made the story all the more salacious to the news media. And by constantly mentioning his status as a children’s performer, over time the story bent and shifted in the collective memory about the exact who, what, and where of the case. In her excellent 2024 book, I Know You Are But What Am I?: On Pee-wee Herman by Cait McKinney. McKinney, the Associate professor of media and sexuality in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, examines how the constant reiterations of Reubens in the news media as a children’s performer and the intentionality of bringing up the Pee-wee character made it nearly impossible for folks to not only divorce the two, but also how it warped the situation into a far more nefarious one.

“Reubens’s proximity to children as the actor who played Pee-wee Herman shaped the arrest story. This was, after all, the death knell of the 1980s panic over ritualized child sexual abuse. Audiences had a hard time distinguishing between Pee-wee and Reubens because Reubens was always in character, committed to the bit.”

Never mind the fact that Reubens was not arrested for indecent exposure at a regular movie theater, but instead a part of routine sting operations that targeted gay men under the guise of false information about the spread of HIV. McKinney elaborates:

“There are a few reasons why the Reubens sex scandal was so misunderstood in its time and is so misremembered today. First, this scandal happened in the early 1990s, at the height of puritanical AIDS-phobia as it destroyed the public sex cultures that made queer life joyful. This porn theater was patrolled and raided regularly by the Sarasota County Sherriff, and so were similar theaters, bathrooms, and backrooms across the United States and Canada in the early 1990s. Often these systematic raids were justified by claims that these were spaces where HIV spread unchecked (sex that isn’t solo in porn theaters is typically low risk, involving mutual masturbation or blow jobs).

As if the targeted harassment of not just Reubens, but any person visiting these theaters wasn’t enough, the news seemed positively elated to hyper-focus on the “corruption of the innocent” as they presented it, spotlighting the juxtaposition of Reubens’ mug shots and the collective’s awareness of the Pee-wee Herman character. In the darkest moment of irony, for once, Reubens was getting credit for this work as Pee-wee, but under the harshest of circumstances.

“News framing traded in the incongruity between Reubens’s trip to the porn theater and Pee- wee’s squeaky-clean public image,” McKinney continues. “An Associated Press wire story interviewed psychologists on how parents should talk to their kids about the scandal. It was reproduced widely in the United States and Canadian newspapers and included the advice, “If a child asks why Herman exposed himself, the parent can answer that he does not know, but that it was wrong.” This advice assumes that parents want to avoid honesty with their children in favor of a moralizing tone about sex, and conflates Reubens the actor with Herman the character (Herman did not expose himself— he is fictional).”

The arrest and public hullabaloo led to CBS canceling reruns of Pee-wee’s Playhouse (the show had already run its course), which harmed Reubens’ bottom line. Not only was he financially compromised, but forced into hiding, all while children were denied the opportunity to witness the wonder that was Pee-wee’s Playhouse because it was easier to give in to homophobic rhetoric than it was to elaborate on the circumstances surrounding the inciting incident, allowing them to fall victim to the sands of time and the spread of misinformation.

LGBTQIA+ activist and writer Michael Bronski had this to say in Gay Community News:

“If Pee-wee Herman was not such an intriguing creation exposing both the absurdity and the harm of traditional sexual and gender arrangements, no one would have cared very much.”

This quote was in 1991, and 34 years later, so little has changed. From the outcries about indecency over drag queen story times to the trans panic that’s plaguing and dominating conversations where facts, emotions, and recognitions of these talking points being about real fucking human beings so often gets tossed aside in favor of what’s the likeliest to cause a stir.

McKinney further explains just how much this panic is reminiscent of what Reubens dealt with:

“How we remember and relate to media from the past through our guts matters. So too does context: the early 1990s AIDS-phobic, sex-panicked logics were the conditions of possibility for Reubens’s public destruction. These politics continue in the right-wing discourse of “child grooming” today, where children are the objects of shame and regulation, experiencing sexual and gendered violence, and claustrophobic anxiety as their every gesture is under impossible scrutiny. Part of what we grieve in looking back at Reubens’s arrest and public shaming is the playhouse itself, as a space of uninhibited expression, that offered an earlier generation of kids safety, mutual recognition, and care.”

Reubens would face more charges later, when he was seemingly cherry-picked and targeted in the raid of his home that took place in 1999, during the height of Reubens’ return to pop culture, this time as an actor using his real name. Upon seizing a ton of vintage “pornographic” magazines and imagery, none of which featured anyone underage and, as quoted in the documentary itself, many of which can be found in LGBT historical archives in university libraries, the District Attorney had to admit that their seizure had been unproductive. But to make the situation dissipate faster, especially as this was taking place while Reubens was caring for his dying father, it was easier to make a deal than let it drag on in a trial. The court decided to tack on a fabricated charge of possession of sexual content involving a minor. This did not go as well-documented as Reubens’ 1991 incident, but nonetheless left him with having to register as a sex offender and yet another mark of shame on his record.

While so many straight, cis-gendered men and women can claim that cancel culture is the bane of their existence and an enemy of artistic freedom, it is our LGBTQIA+ siblings who so often take the hardest falls. While Reubens was able to, over time, rebuild his image and bring Pee-wee back to a new generation, so many of the high points of his career feature an asterisk, a reminder of the pain, sadness, and isolation that came with them. For being his truest self, for creating a safe place for others to do the same, he was targeted. For existing outside the norm, he was made to feel like a criminal.

No one, in their dying breath, should have to still fight to clear their name. Reubens deserved better than what he got in life, and the way we can change that moving forward is to bring that into everything we do, not cowering to hate speech, not giving in to absurd demands that harm others because it’s easier than standing up for what’s right.

Throughout the documentary, the issue of trust arises more than any other. We never really know at the end, though Reubens’ decision to let Wolf into his life in such a way seems to say otherwise, whether or not he actually trusted Matt Wolf. It’s understandable why Reubens would feel this way. And yet, despite his trust issues, he still managed to let people back into his life, forming new friendships over time, and treating every person that he got to know as special, sending personalized birthday messages to each person in his contact list. There is something so admirable about being able to not let the world that’s kicked you down stop you from being a good person, something so many of us need to be reminded of.

It’s hard not to see ourselves in Reubens. The flaws in him were so easily identifiable within myself. The desire to put my stamp on everything I do, the feelings of anxiety, and the pent-up frustration when I don’t think my work is being noticed. The distrust of people’s intentions towards us. All while just trying to create. As Kevin Smith said in a recent Q&A following a screening of the re-release of Dogma, “There are two pathways in life, creativity and destruction. Destruction is easier.” Anyone can tear things down, but building something new and beautiful is only for those with the strength enough to do it, come what may. But it sure as shit couldn’t hurt if we try to uplift and support those that are creating, especially those creating against insurmountable odds, instead of sitting idly by and watching the destruction happen all around us.

Pee-wee As Himself is a must-watch for any Pee-wee fans, or fans of Reubens’ work in its entirety. It’s a rare glimpse at the life of a private man that never feels exploitative or overtly biased. It’s a refreshing take on documentaries and, above all, a fitting tribute to a man, a character, and a genuinely complex and delightfully brilliant human being. I can’t recommend it enough.

PS: Today’s secret word is: Creation.