Prior to his death, Paul Reubens sat down to be interviewed for what would become the new HBO documentary, Pee-wee as Himself. “I really want to set the record straight on a couple things,” the Pee-wee Herman actor says in the film. The filmmakers knew before filming that Reubens was gay, but the actor had previously never said so publicly.
However, the filmmakers were in the dark about Reubens’ cancer diagnosis, and his clashes for creative control with director Matt Wolf left his interviews unfinished at the time of Reubens’ passing. When the film premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it served as a posthumous coming out.
Pee-wee as Himself, which premieres May 23, seeks to untangle not only Reubens as an artist, but his experience of being closeted as a public figure. His place in gay pop culture is complicated, particularly by the media circus that surrounded him after the four-season run of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. But with the film, Reubens finally speaks to his own undeniably queer artistic point of view, affirming much of what his gay fans already knew about the intent of the character he created. Even from the closet, he has always been an influential gay icon.
Pee-wee Herman began as a stage character for Reubens, growing a cult audience into multiple films and hitting a peak with the children’s program Pee-wee’s Playhouse. But Pee-wee had cross-generational appeal to kids, college crowds, and hipsters alike, adored for his honking voice, freaky imagination, and iconic gray suit and bow tie. Notorious queer filmmaker John Waters, a friend of Reubens’, summarized him in death as “a scholar of the delightful. Even fashion will never be the same without him.”
Reubens was on television at a time when queer artists were beginning to enter the mainstream, but its young audience meant he still had to work in suggestion. The sensibility of Pee-wee’s Playhouse has one foot in the heightened character oddity of Waters and the other in more coded Hollywood traditions.
To his enduring fans, there’s something very gay about the show, particularly its Christmas special–and not just because its guest stars include the likes of Cher and Grace Jones. Previously, drag superstar BenDeLaCreme told Interview magazine “His show is definitely one of the most influential pieces for how I structure my [stage] shows. It’s like this weird madcap real-life squash and stretch variety show on acid.”
In the documentary, Reubens admits to what’s underneath the silly surface: “Yes, there’s a gay subtext to Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” The art of drag is a vernacular in understanding Reubens’ work that even he himself acknowledges in the film, equating queens who pass for his creative goal of the Pee-wee character passing as a real person.
“I wanted kids to learn about being a non-conformist and what non-conformity was,” he says, speaking of the creative intentions behind the character. “Pee-wee Herman existed beyond arbitrary societal status quos and was an oddball who was embraced for his strangeness. The show taught that it was okay to be weird, that people outside the white homogeneity of the television landscape had an equal place in this world.
In eulogizing Reubens, Addams Family Values and In & Out gay scribe Paul Rudnick tweeted that Pee-wee represented something “gloriously accepting: everyone was welcome at the Playhouse. Pee-wee is exactly the sort of glorious creature who’d be banned by DeSantis and Pence. Pee-wee’s joy is the opposite of their vicious queer-baiting and censorship.”
All that and Reubens presented Pee-wee as a real person, hiding his own persona behind that of the character.
“The effect [he] had on my life is profound… His influence is all over my work,” BenDeLaCreme reflected when posting at the time of Reubens’ death, “Through him I gained not only much of my aesthetic, but the knowledge of what a fully realized character could be, and what it could do. The joy one can spread when freed from the confines of what’s ‘cool’ or even ‘acceptable.’ That balls-to-the-wall whimsey can be just as subversive as any ‘f— the system’ shock tactic.”
It can be argued, as the film does, that gay rumors and speculation fueled the media circus that followed his indecent exposure arrest in an adult theatre in 1991, after the show finished. Reubens was labeled as a sexual deviant (he denied the charges and took a plea deal) and Pee-wee became both a laughing stock and a pariah. As gay rumors lingered, an accusation was made in 2002 against Reubens that claimed he was in possession of child pornography.
The documentary details how this accusation was proven baseless when investigated, but how Reubens accepted a lesser obscenity charge to make it all go away. While the public has largely forgotten this episode due to its lack of evidence and the long shadow of the 1991 charges, the damage was lasting for Reubens.
As the film reveals, on the day prior to his death, Reubens reserved some of his final moments to record an audio message that speaks to the pain of such unfounded accusations often hurled at LGBTQ people.
“More than anything, the reason I wanted to make a documentary was for people to see who I really am, and how painful and dreadful it was to be labeled something I wasn’t,” he said. “I wanted to talk about and have some understanding of what it’s like to be labeled a pariah–to have people scared of you, or unsure of you, or untrusting, or to look at what your intentions are through some kind of filter that’s not true. I wanted people to understand that occasionally, where there is smoke, there isn’t always fire.”
This statement serves as a painful reminder of why someone stays closeted in the first place, particularly in the current moment of increased legislation against LGBTQ people. As was true of Reubens, submitting to societal pressures by staying in the closet doesn’t protect queer people from antagonism and false accusations, and the documentary makes Reubens a painful reminder of that. In the harsh light of the documentary, he also presents another type of gay figure: one broken by a culture of suspicion and harmful rhetoric.
The very idea of a “posthumous” coming out is loaded, but Pee-wee as Himself doesn’t shy away from Reubens’ complicated relationship with his own public figure. And while Reubens presents himself onscreen as evasive and combative at times, it is the most truthful he has ever been with his audience, leaving fans to call him what he always was: a gay icon.
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