Pee-wee Herman Creator Paul Reubens Was Out of the Closet—but Went Back in After He Got Famous

“This is such a dumb thing to say,” Paul Reubens, creator of beloved children’s character Pee-wee Herman, admits in his new documentary, Pee-wee as Himself. “But death is so final that to be able to get your message in at the last minute, or at some point, is incredible.”

What Reubens didn’t tell filmmaker Matt Wolf was that his time was, indeed, running out. Reubens and Wolf made the doc, which airs on HBO and Max on May 23, while Reubens was secretly fighting a six-year battle with cancer. He died on July 30, 2023, at age 70—only a week before his final scheduled interview for the film.

The tension between his flamboyantly public career and his deeply private personal life is at the center of the documentary, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Wolf shaved down 40 hours of interview footage with Reubens and 1,000 hours of archival material to examine how Reubens’s gray-suited, red-bowtied, strangely voiced Pee-wee Herman went from a subversive character born in the Groundlings improv troupe to a mainstream icon of film (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure) and TV (Pee-wee’s Playhouse). In the film, Reubens also officially comes out as a gay man—then jokingly retracts the statement. “You can’t depend on anything I’m saying, all this gay stuff,” Reubens says, looking directly into the camera. “I was sleep-deprived. I didn’t have food. If I said I was gay, I know I could leave earlier,” he adds, a knowing twinkle in his eye.

“Paul told me from the onset that he wanted to come out in a documentary, but he was very ambivalent and anxious about me being a gay filmmaker, as a point of connection and a point of friction,” Wolf told Paper magazine. “I think he was concerned I might overly focus on his sexuality or try to depict him as a gay icon, which was not how he saw himself. It was a dance between us.”

Reubens does speak candidly in the doc about coming out of the closet, then going back into it at the height of his fame—as well as the late-in-life legal battles that threatened his livelihood as Pee-wee. Ahead, a look at the biggest revelations from Pee-wee as Himself.

Paul Reubens was openly gay and dressed in drag as a young man.

Growing up in Sarasota, Florida, Reubens (born Paul Rubenfeld) explored his gender expression. For Halloween one year, he dressed as a princess alongside his sister Abby Rubenfeld, who went as a lumberjack. “He was so uncomfortable being gay, and I never was,” she says in the documentary.

Although Reubens introduced at least one woman to his parents as his girlfriend, when he eventually came out as a gay man, “both my parents were extremely supportive immediately,” he says in the film. “My father did write me an incredible letter and said, ‘Son, if you are homosexual, I want you to know that I hope you’re gonna be the greatest homosexual you can be.’”

While studying avant-garde theater alongside classmates like Katey Sagal and David Hasselhoff at the California Institute of the Arts, Reubens sported dark, waist-length hair while playing Jesus and a Cher-inspired mermaid in school performances. “If you saw me sitting in the dorm at two in the morning in drag just hanging out, you might think I was a drag queen,” Reubens says in the doc. “And you could be right.”

Throughout the film, Reubens nods to his identity as a gay man. “I like to decorate. Whatever that suggests to you watching, go ahead, make those connections,” he says at one point. “Yes, there’s a gay subtext to Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” he admits at another.

Reubens lived with a long-term boyfriend before going back in the closet.

In Pee-wee as Himself, Reubens describes falling in love at first sight with a painter named Guy at a party shortly after graduating from Cal Arts. The couple moved to Los Angeles together, where they lived in an Echo Park apartment. Reubens even credits Guy with inspiring some of the voices and jokes in his comedy act.

“We had this incredible time—and then we didn’t,” he says of their eventual breakup. “I lost my entire personality and myself in being with somebody else and being part of a duo. I was really confused by it, and I got so freaked out. I didn’t want to be emotionally involved with anybody in that way.”

When the pair split up, Reubens swore off any future romances. “I not only wasn’t gonna be openly gay, but I wasn’t gonna be in a relationship. I was gonna advance my career because I could control that. So it was extreme,” he says. “I was as out as you could be, and then I went back in the closet. My career would’ve absolutely suffered if I was openly gay, so I went to great lengths for many, many years to keep it a secret.”

Reubens later reconnected with Guy just before his former partner died of AIDS, claiming in the documentary that he “never had another relationship that matched it.”

Reubens thought he would get famous from playing a “full-on racist” character.

Reubens tried out many onstage personas before finding lasting success with Pee-wee Herman. During his stint on the 1970s variety series The Gong Show, he introduced a Native American lounge-singer character named Jay Longtoe. “This doesn’t say much for the audience,” Reubens says in the doc, “but the audience ate it up and went crazy. So I was like, Hey, I’m getting laughs.” Decades later, Reubens admits that the performance was problematic. “I had no clue it was like a billion percent—not even borderline racist—I mean, it was full-on racist,” he says in the film. “Until Pee-wee Herman came along, I thought that was my ticket. I thought I would be propelled to stardom as a Native American lounge singer. Thank God that wasn’t the case.”

A failed Saturday Night Live audition led Reubens to fully commit to playing Pee-wee.

When Reubens first crafted Pee-wee Herman, he would stay in character for long stretches of time—taking the schtick to an episode of The Dating Game and Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie. But after missing out on an SNL slot—he believes the show hired the similarly statured Gilbert Gottfried instead of him—Reubens decided to put all his chips in Pee-wee, “and the rest of these characters and Paul Reubens are gonna disappear,” he says in the film. “I think in a way I decided I was no longer pursuing the Paul Reubens career: I was pursuing the Pee-wee Herman career.”

Reubens was a self-identified “weed head.”

Pee-wee Herman may have had a squeaky clean reputation, but the man who created him did not. “I hid behind an alter ego,” says Reubens. “I spent my entire adult life hiding the fact that I was a huge weed head,” as well as “many secretive relationships” with men at the height of his fame.

While writing Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, a 1985 feature film centered on the character and directed by Tim Burton, Reubens says he engaged in some illicit activity on the Warner Bros. lot. “I’m gonna leave out the part where we did enormous amounts of drugs,” Reubens says in the film, before looking to camera: “Oh, I didn’t.”

Reubens was jealous of Tim Burton after Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.

When searching for someone to direct Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Reubens consulted his friend Shelley Duvall. She recommended Tim Burton, with whom she had worked on the 1984 short Frankenweenie. “Tim could oddball me under the table sometimes—sometimes,” Reubens says in the documentary. Both he and Burton, who appears in the film, speak warmly of their creative collaboration. But Reubens admits that he longed to get more credit for the movie’s success. Pee-wee Herman is credited as “Himself” in the film’s acting credits; Reubens himself is credited only as a cowriter.

“I was so incredibly jealous of the recognition that Tim got for the movie, because people had no idea what my involvement was past starring in the movie as Pee-wee Herman,” Reubens says. “People didn’t know Paul Reubens was me.”

In 1988, it was Pee-wee Herman, not his creator, who got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “On Big Adventure, I feel like I didn’t get recognition for my creative role—and I wasn’t going to let that happen again,” Reubens says of making that year’s sequel, Big Top Pee-wee, helmed by Grease director Randal Kleiser. But more creative input didn’t lead to industry triumph. “It was not well-received, and I didn’t see that coming,” Reubens says of the film. “It was the first time in my run of success that I wasn’t Midas with the Midas touch.”

Reubens held grudges against some close creative collaborators.

In 1986, Pee-wee’s Playhouse—a fantastical, subversive children’s TV show—began playing Saturday mornings on CBS. Reubens is forthcoming and rueful about his controlling behavior on the show, as well as during the second Pee-wee movie. “Paul had conflicts with most everybody he worked with,” Wayne White, an artist who worked with Reubens on Playhouse, says in the doc. “He was such a perfectionist and so driven to make something that matters. It takes a lot of negative energy that gets there too. You have to throw people under the bus. Everything’s transactional. Paul could hold a grudge. He didn’t forgive very easily.” Case in point: When Hartman left Pee-wee’s Playhouse for SNL, Reubens admits that the pair became estranged.

Fallout from Reubens’s 1991 arrest lingered in his final years.

Reubens’s carefully constructed anonymity failed him in 1991, when he was arrested for indecent exposure at an adult movie theater in Florida. Reubens pleaded no contest to the charge. “It really backfired when I got arrested and people had never seen a photo of me other than Pee-wee Herman. And then all of a sudden I had a Charlie Manson mug shot,” he says in the documentary. “I lost control of my anonymity. And it was devastating.”

While Reubens intentionally retreated from the spotlight, he continued to take acting roles in films including Burton’s Batman Returns and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—costarring his friend David Arquette, who also appears in the doc. “Since it was the first film he was gonna do after his arrest, he had to put it in his contract that he could look as much like his mug shot as possible,” Arquette says of the 1992 movie.

According to the documentary, Reubens stayed at the home of Arquette and his then wife Courteney Cox in 2002, after police charged Reubens with misdemeanor possession of child pornography for imagery they found in his sprawling collection of vintage queer erotica. In 2004, Reubens pleaded guilty to a lesser obscenity charge, hoping to avoid trial while he cared for his dying father. He was sentenced to three years’ probation. In Pee-wee as Himself, Reubens and his representatives deny that he exposed himself in 1991, or that the photos police found in 2002 depicted children.

In the documentary, Reubens admits that the arrests are “still a gigantic footnote” in his public legacy. “And 30 years later, I still feel the effects all the time.” But he doesn’t want his life to be defined by these painful events. “I feel like it’s very easy to turn my story into ‘I’m a victim’ in some way, or I’m the man behind the mask, the tears of a clown,” Reubens says in the film. “I know a lot of what it is, and I rebel against it.”

Reubens died before his documentary was finished.

After decades away from his most iconic character, Reubens reprised the role for Broadway’s Pee-wee Herman Show in 2010, then cowrote and starred in the 2016 Netflix film Pee-wee’s Big Holiday. But in the documentary, his post-arrest comeback is largely narrated by friends and colleagues—because, “after a year of filming, Paul stopped cooperating with the production,” a title card in the documentary reads. “He delayed completing a final interview about his arrests.”

A week before another scheduled sit-down for the movie, Reubens succumbed to his battle with leukemia and metastatic lung cancer. But friends say in the documentary that the final years of Reubens’s life were fulfilling, and that he was even “in a loving relationship” at the time of his death.

As the film reveals, the day before he died, Reubens dedicated some of his final moments to recording an audio message that revealed his hopes for the documentary.

“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. I wanted somehow for people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love and my desire to entertain and bring glee and creativity to young people, and to everyone.”