EARLY IN THE biographical documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the actor Paul Reubens makes a statement about his sexual identity that even in 2025 feels jarring to hear. As he discusses his years as a budding performance artist, he reveals for the first time that, soon after leaving California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s, he began a romantic relationship with an attractive artist named Guy. They moved in together and started to build a life; Reubens introduced Guy to his parents. And then he came to feel that he was losing his identity. The relationship ended and, soon after, Reubens, who would later come to be better known as Pee-wee Herman, made a decision that would shape the rest of his life — a professional choice with a great personal cost: “I was as out as you could be,” he says. “And then I went back in the closet.”
The moment feels painfully confessional — all the more so because it isn’t clear whether Reubens, who died at 70 in 2023 after living with cancer for six years, knew he wouldn’t be alive to experience the public reaction to it. The revelation isn’t that he was gay. In the first minutes of the film, which will air on HBO on May 23, he teases that fact with droll self-amusement. (“I was extremely sensitive and romantic. … I like to decorate,” he says. “Whatever that suggests to you watching, go ahead — make those connections!”) The shock is that, out of what he acknowledges was “self-hatred” and “self-preservation,” as well as ambition and the practical impossibility of surviving as an out Saturday-morning children’s star in the 1980s, he hid his true self even from many close associates and friends. It turns out that Reubens, a figure of irrepressible joy as Pee-wee, felt that he was harboring a dark secret — and decades later, he found himself trying to explain not homosexuality but a lifetime of concealment.
I first heard that Reubens was gay when I started covering television as a reporter in the early 1990s. As he notes, it wasn’t exactly a shock. Pee-wee, who could code-switch from guilelessness to arch bitchery in a millisecond and possessed a John Waters-level aptitude for camp, had a huge gay following, and those fans were alert to every hint that was dropped in the 1985 movie “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” (1986-90), the beloved cult TV hit that followed. I found out Reubens was gay only because a gay colleague told me, and he found out only because a gay colleague told him and so on; that was how it usually worked. For upward of half a century starting in the 1950s, those morsels of information constituted a kind of currency, routinely passed in gay media circles, sometimes as scandalous gossip but more often as a kind of on-the-spot clarification of the record, often in brutally blunt terms. When the name of a putatively queer celebrity was brought up, the gay journalist who told me about Reubens would, as a casual interjection, remark, “huge queen” or “major homo.” It allowed him to both claim kinship with and implicitly rebuke someone who was unwilling to self-identify.
Sharing information about celebrities with one’s gay friends may have been a way of asserting insider knowledge, but it was also a contribution to a kind of ever-evolving group project, a map of homosexuality that you could help make a little larger and clearer, one name at a time, in an era when most gay public figures would not or could not stand up and be counted. One effect of all that dish was to turn the idea of the closet into something more complex than an in-or-out binary. It was widely understood that there was a third category, “those who know know,” that nodded to the existence of a gray area in which one could be out in certain circles while remaining reasonably certain that the information wouldn’t penetrate to the wider world. That was the zone in which, for a long time, Reubens lived — a closet, but a large one, with free access to a safe perimeter that surrounded it.
Still, “back in the closet” is an especially sad phrase, one that bespeaks a biography defined on one flank by the threat of condemnation from homophobes and on the other by accusations of opportunism and selfishness from activists. It’s also an ominous reminder of how terribly recent, and perhaps overconfident, the idea that we live in a post-closet era is — assuming, given the current renewed vigor of the assault on L.G.B.T.Q. rights, that we’ve arrived there in the first place. Maybe because of our collective certainty that (at least in America) having to live one’s life in secret is a relic of gay history, there’s been little candid discussion of the subject in the past couple of decades. It’s no surprise — in fact, it’s almost definitional — that it’s difficult to talk publicly about being in the closet. It’s challenging to come up with a single meaning for the phrase, which is still used interchangeably, and blurrily, to describe a natural part of the journey that precedes coming out, a state of psychological distress when one is not out even to oneself and a decision to live a double life as publicly straight but privately gay. “Closet,” as an umbrella term used to connote those very different states of being, is absurdly inadequate.
PERHAPS THAT’S UNDERSTANDABLE, given that the metaphor of the closet seems to have originated outside the gay community, and with cruelty in mind. One of the earliest uses I can find is in a headline in a 1953 issue of the scandal magazine Confidential that promises to reveal “The Lavender Skeletons in TV’s Closet!” Used that way, “closet” was defined by the threat to heterosexual sanctity it contained, not as a word that signified the only safe place for gay people who would otherwise have been publicly demonized. The headline’s sneering second word did the rest of the work — this was the era of the Lavender Scare depicted in the 2023 mini-series “Fellow Travelers,” a panic over homosexuals in the State Department and elsewhere that resulted in mass firings and a pervasive terror of being exposed.
As Reubens probably knew, children’s television was almost as ripe a target as the government; it was a genre that was easy to sensationalize as a malign influence, especially if one fomented the suspicion that it had been colonized by gay men. The Confidential article included on its Lavender list a “co-hero of a ‘space drama’ for kids.” That category was so small that the show, “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” (1950-55), would have been instantly identifiable to readers eager to root out its purportedly gay actor, who went unnamed because the magazine knew how to tread a careful line; its hints had to be specific enough to fuel fear and mistrust but sufficiently vague to keep it out of court. The gender imbalance that was established around this time — gay men were viewed as creepy menaces, possible spies and national security threats, and lesbians as peculiar anomalies — was in part a function of the paranoid fantasies of the men who were calling the shots; in any case, the idea that gay men (including in the arts) were dangerous would persist for decades, and would make secrecy feel even more essential.
Back then, there was no word needed for being in the closet because its opposite, “coming out” — not just the phrase but the state of freedom it conveyed — was nowhere on the cultural radar of most Americans. The closet wasn’t one of two options; for most gay people, it was the only conceivable reality. In movies of the 1940s and ’50s, the closet itself was in the closet. The gay men in anguished denial about their orientation in Tennessee Williams’s play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955) and in “The Lost Weekend” (1944), Charles Jackson’s novel about an alcoholic writer, eventually landed at the center of film adaptations that retained the inner torment of the characters but were forced by Hollywood’s Production Code to completely omit its cause.
By the 1960s, “in the closet” was coming into more widespread use in gay communities, and closeted men began showing up onscreen with some regularity, though almost always as lunatics or walking nervous breakdowns. The military men played by Marlon Brando in “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (1967) and Rod Steiger in “The Sergeant” (1968) are uptight, grotesquely tense and prissy control freaks, driven to sadism and disintegration as soon as a handsome young man comes into their carefully circumscribed lives of repression and demolishes their fragile faux stability. Others, like the ambitious married senator played by Don Murray in the political drama “Advise & Consent” (1962), choose suicide over the exposure of a past same-sex relationship. Still others, like William Windom in the police drama “The Detective” (1968), are driven by their self-loathing to murder and mutilate other gay men, popularizing a smirky aha! trope — the homophobic killer turns out to be a closet case — that would prove frustratingly durable.
In the 1970s, an end to secrecy became a political rallying cry for gay men. “Out of the closet and into the streets” was one of the first post-Stonewall slogans of the newly energized and outspoken gay liberation movement. The decade was marked by a fierce backlash against gay rights, with legislative initiatives targeting gay schoolteachers, a wave of discharges of gay servicemen and women and the birth of an alliance between the stridently anti-gay religious right and conservative politicians. Nevertheless, it was also the first moment when a large number of gay Americans started to view the closet as a choice rather than a necessity, and the willingness to stay closeted as tantamount to a decision to sit out, or even to ally oneself with the enemies of, a revolution. Suddenly, being gay meant being a stakeholder in a new community. Remaining closeted meant refusing that stake and, in the most pathetic cases, vilifying people who were just like you. “My following is straight. I’m so glad,” the clearly embittered game-show and sitcom regular Paul Lynde said in 1976, lashing out to a People magazine writer and adding, in a way that inadvertently put to rest any lingering doubts about his own homosexuality, “Y’know, gay people killed Judy Garland, but they’re not going to kill me.”
Gay artists and entertainers faced one hard choice, and gay pop culture fans faced another: We wanted to know we had our own roster of celebrities, but we understood that by coming out they could still lose their standing, opportunities and employment. So performers and their fans found their way to a compromise: an expanded “those who know know” zone in which the famous could reside and even flourish without identifying as gay, as long as they didn’t explicitly lie and claim they were straight. That uneasy silent pact between stars and their queer followers would more or less hold steady for about 20 years. But as early as 1975, social pressure to come out began to push back against professional pressure to stay in. That year, Time magazine’s editors felt bold enough to approach Lily Tomlin with the offer of a cover if she would use the story to reveal that she was a lesbian. (She declined, got a Time cover anyway two years later and eventually came out on her own terms.) It took another 20 years for Time to get the “Yep, I’m Gay” cover headline its editors had always wanted and, by then, Ellen DeGeneres had turned the idea of coming out into a skillfully engineered seven-month tease, joking with Rosie O’Donnell on the latter’s daytime talk show that they should both own the fact that they were “Lebanese”; playing herself in an episode of HBO’s “Larry Sanders Show” that spoofed the will-she-or-won’t-she frenzy surrounding her; and making jokes about it on “Ellen,” her ABC comedy series, even before her character Ellen Morgan came out. “I was in the closet!” Morgan exclaims to a real estate agent in one episode, after she emerges from behind a door while looking at a new apartment. “I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time in there!” At the point when the real and fictional Ellens both made it official, DeGeneres’s closet — what was left of it — appeared to be made of clear glass and surrounded by floodlights.
“PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF” doesn’t address whether, at the moment when DeGeneres was being nationally cheered for her decision and movie audiences were laughing at a closeted small-town schoolteacher (Kevin Kline) having his homosexuality revealed in the hit comedy “In & Out” (1997), Reubens might have had second thoughts about the path he had chosen. In the celebratory mood of that era, it was hard to process its strangeness: Simultaneously, America was bearing witness to a fictional character approaching early middle age and understanding for the first time what her attraction to women meant; to a well-known star who was already out to her friends, family and co-workers deciding to go public; and to a calculated decision to yoke those two events together as if they somehow paralleled each other. No wonder the whole idea of staying in the closet and of coming out suddenly seemed to have air quotes around it — was it a private act, a public rite, a performance or all three?
It must have been strange for Reubens to witness, from the sidelines, this pop culture event, the culmination of which — a widely seen and ecstatically reviewed hour of television that won an Emmy — suggested that the whole issue had been resolved once and for all. At that point, he was in his mid-40s, and his career was in a period of semi-eclipse; he appeared eager to leave Pee-wee Herman behind and take other acting roles, but perhaps he felt, by then, locked into a decision he had made more than a decade earlier. Or maybe he thought that his particular fan base wouldn’t understand, or that the media, which had lingered over every detail of the 1991 arrest for indecent exposure in a porn theater that had almost derailed his career, would finish the job this time. Or maybe he believed that it was just too late. After all, the longer a public figure is in the closet, the more there is that eventually must be explained.
After “Ellen,” movies and television started to treat the idea of the closet the way the culture then treated Reubens — as an interesting but slightly quaint historical phenomenon. Men in the closet were now appropriate subjects for period pieces; they were heartbreakers from our troubled past, like the tortured husband and father (Dennis Quaid) living a secret gay life in Todd Haynes’s excavation of McCarthy-era mores “Far From Heaven” (2002), or the sheepherders Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, playing out an agonized, impossible love story in the American West of the 1960s and ’70s in Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” (2005).
That’s still the case today. His portrayal of Roy Cohn in the 1970s-to-80s biopic “The Apprentice” (2024), an enduring example of how the closet has always been capacious enough to accommodate the stunning hypocrisies of human monsters, won Jeremy Strong an Oscar nomination earlier this year. The upcoming third season of HBO’s costume soap “The Gilded Age” will feature the ongoing struggle of the closeted young New York aristocrat Oscar Van Rhijn (Blake Ritson), who, somewhat ahistorically, bewails the fact that “my mother wants me to have everything — except a life.” And one of the most acclaimed dramas at this year’s Sundance festival, “Plainclothes,” set in Syracuse, N.Y., tells the story of a not-quite romance between two closeted men. Lucas (played by the British actor Tom Blyth) is an undercover cop whose specialty is entrapping gay guys in the bathroom of a local shopping mall; the older man he falls for, Andrew (Russell Tovey), turns out to have his own formidable set of secrets. The film, which will be released later this year, is notable for its refusal to either excuse or condemn its emotionally and morally compromised characters. Although it’s a period piece set in 1997, only the lack of cellphones and social media gives it away; in many ways, it feels joltingly contemporary.
To some, it also feels — there is no way to express this that is culturally or politically defensible, so let’s lay that aside for the moment — kind of hot. Many people get off on the transgressive, and there’s an argument to be made that today, being gay isn’t, but being closeted is. Films like “Plainclothes,” or Haynes’s “Carol” (2015), an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s pseudonymously written novel “The Price of Salt” (1952), about the affair between a young photographer and the elegant older woman she meets in Manhattan, understand the electric charge of furtiveness and secrecy, of dangerous trysts and of pursuing an erotic liaison when the whole world feels like your enemy. On popular cruising apps like Grindr and Sniffies, closeted men are just one more kink among many — a turn-on for guys who are interested in adding a sense of the forbidden to their hookup, and for (yes, this is also a thing) men who enjoy pretending to be closeted.
Still, the closet is obviously not a part of gay history to long for, to feel nostalgic about or to sentimentalize. So why the current obsession with one of the bleakest aspects — and a not-very-distant one — of the gay cultural landscape? It’s probably not an accident that it’s happening when it’s happening. Today gay men live in a world in which our struggles, our issues and our challenges are no longer seen as central to the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement. A look at the headlines on almost any given day is a reminder that the fight right now, and very likely for some time to come, is for trans rights and acceptance. And gayness itself is no longer the identity that is most central to the movement, as it was through the liberation years and the first decade-plus of AIDS. A February Gallup poll showed that “bisexual” is now the most frequently claimed label among L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, with 5.2 percent of people opting for it; only 3.4 percent of people call themselves either gay or lesbian. For many younger queer people, coming out versus staying closeted is an antiquated choice, a form of pigeonholing with little resonance in a 21st century that’s more defined by a long drop-down menu of identity options, including “prefer not to say,” a choice that, for some of them, has none of the political weight that it might have carried right after Stonewall, or in the middle of the fight against the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies that were adopted by the American military in the 1990s. To evoke 1974 or 1985 or 1997 onscreen is, for a couple of hours, to allow older gay men to forget our contemporary diminishment and the minimization of our history — to return to a world in which we were at the heart of queer culture and discourse. There is, undeniably, drama in oppression and romance in fighting it. We were the cause then. Now, not so much.
Perhaps stories of the closet are just a way to claim that our struggles still matter, although the tough-mindedness of many of these accounts suggests that something else may be at work. Every advance in the struggle for L.G.B.T.Q. rights has been predicated on gay people being willing to own their identities publicly and risk the consequences. That’s true on the macro level — marches, rallies, demonstrations, even riots — and on the micro level, where everything can come down to one individual decision to say, “This is me. I am this.”
We know those stories: Among their subjects are the people who end up on our personal Mount Rushmores. Yet it would be absurd to claim that either self-declaration or the realities of the closet belong in some museum of gay history. Plenty of gay people who consider themselves basically out still sequester that part of their lives at least some of the time, out of a desire to just get through the day without hassle; they’re out but not to their building super, or maybe their boss or perhaps that one troublesome aunt they only have to see when they go home for the holidays. Are they closeted, or are they just making a kind of private decision that straight people can live their entire lives without ever having to entertain?
But any type of “those who know know” compromise is, even for the nonfamous, a slippery slope at a time when many MAGA Republicans are eager to preside over a rollback of rights; to declare trans people both morally unfit to serve the country and biologically nonexistent; and to announce that Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that established the right to same-sex marriage 10 years ago, was nothing more than a mistake made by an old Supreme Court and correctable by a new one. It doesn’t require some imaginative leap into an Orwellian dystopia to conjure an America in which trans people are divided into those who can pass and those who can’t, or in which gay people must once again deny their identities in order to hold on to their jobs, apartments or children. Peering into the closet isn’t important only as a way of exploring the dark mirror image of the liberatory history of coming out. It’s a reminder that the decision to keep one’s hand unraised, to remain silent, to say nothing, is just as momentous and reverberant as coming out is, just as likely to change your life and to ripple, with effects that cannot always be anticipated, through the ensuing decades.
That’s one reason “Pee-wee as Himself” is ultimately as moving as it is; it may be the first documentary to explore how a celebrity feels about not coming out when he looks back through the entirety of his life as it draws to a close. Those who are expecting a self-justification from Reubens may be surprised at how cleareyed he is, starting with his distaste for the possibility that he’ll be seen as “a victim in some way” and his insistence on taking full responsibility for his decision. Yes, times were different then, and the pressures he faced were complex and unique, but in the film, he seems fully aware that some people will still dismiss him as someone who fled rather than fought, and who will insist that he has only himself to blame for any later sorrow. He doesn’t appear to disagree. “I was conscious enough to know being closeted would have some kind of effect on me. I was just like, ‘OK, put your blinders on — you’re not having any kind of traditional relationship,’” he says. “I kept who I was a secret for a very long time, and that really worked for me. Until it didn’t.” There aren’t many people, famous or otherwise, who get to write their own obituaries in that way. His is a hard one to hear.
Read by Eric Jason Martin
Narration produced by Krish Seenivasan
Engineered by Zak Mouton
The post Why Has the Closet Taken on a New Allure? appeared first on New York Times.
