Paul Reubens

Pee-wee Herman and the queer ride of living in a body.

Young Paul Reubens outside the Pee-wee persona.

In the HBO doc Pee-wee as Himself, Paul Reubens speaks to the director, Matt Wolf, about two campaigns to discredit him as a sexual deviant—first an arrest in 1991 in a Florida porno theater, where he was falsely charged with exposing himself, and in 2001 a police raid on his Hollywood home, to seize child pornography that wasn't there.

The film has a strangled quality. We're not sure what Wolf loves about Reubens, and Reubens is suspicious of the director throughout the 40 hours of their filmed conversations. Perhaps Reubens knew the man he was, with all his reluctance to be known, was far more interesting than the Pee-wee character he sent into the world as his proxy. That, Wolf shows us.

Throughout the doc, talking heads make claims to the comic genius of the Pee-wee character and to Reubens’ talent. The clips we’re shown are too brief and fragmented to quite capture it. Part of the phenomenon of Pee-wee was Reubens’ ability to move people in the persona of a child-man, who could say and do anything off the cuff and get away with it—because was he serious, or joking, or both, or neither.

Pee-wee, in his costume of grey suit, red bow tie, and white shoes, was a way for Reubens to be a gay man winking from the closet—a closet he returned to publicly after becoming famous. David Letterman, who loved Reubens’ wacky freedom early on, says in a flash of insight, after Pee-wee became a huge celebrity, “You'd better get used to wearing that suit, Pee-wee!”

The camera catches Reubens’ face, cast down and unsmiling. At a point in the doc, Reubens says straight-forwardly he made a pact with the devil for fame. Wolf asks how he feels that Pee-wee received a star on Hollywood Boulevard, not Paul. “Am I bitter?” Reubens comes back, clowning and not clowning. The bigger question he’s always asking himself is if he has a right to any sort of bitterness in this regard, since moving in the world as Pee-wee, a fictional person, was entirely by his design.

Relations broke down between Reubens and Wolf before the film was completed. Reubens kept secret from Wolf he’d been ill with cancer for six years. Reubens died in July 2023. What follows is a piece I wrote in the Village Voice in 1991, after Reubens was arrested in the porno theater. It captures the flavor of sex panic in that period and the brilliant strangeness of the Pee-wee character Reubens invented.

Paul Reubens was visiting his parents in Sarasota Florida when he went out for a little wank at one of the local porno theaters that replaced the last picture show. He didn’t even take out his penis, he said.

He hasn’t been found guilty of any crime, yet CBS canceled reruns of his Saturday morning kid show, Disney yanked a Pee-wee video from its tour attraction in Florida, Toys “R” Us and Kiddie City removed Pee-wee dolls from their shelves, the tabloids and TV news have flogged the story for days, and talk show hosts have been licking snide jokes off their whiskers every night.

Newspapers and broadcasters have enlisted psychologists to advise parents on how to explain Pee-wee’s actions to their children. Last Tuesday, Entertainment Tonight invited Soupy Sales to comment. Sales was introduced as a former kid-show host, although it wasn’t mentioned that Sales himself had been tossed off the air for instructing kids to mail him dollar bills. (Nice joke, actually.) About Pee-wee Sales predicted (wrongly), “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over. He signed his own death warrant. Where else is he gonna work? Television will never give him another chance."

There’s a whip-cracking tradition in this country of ruining public figures with sex scandals—unless they are rich and white and straight and can find a way, as has Donald Trump, to turn charges of rape and sexual assault into boosts to his public approval. Until the rape charge against William Kennedy Smith, Kennedy cocksmanship lent glamor to the clan. They were guys being hormonal. When videotapes of Rob Lowe screwing female minors surfaced, he was teased, yet in no time Lowe was on an Academy Awards show, singing a duet with Snow White that could fairly have dinged his career.

Driving the reaction to Reubens is his connection to children. No one has suggested he touched children. They don’t need to. The image is of him masturbating—a thing everyone knows children do. Everyone knows children are sexual without the help of adults, and also people go to great lengths not to know this.

In the reality of Pee-wee’s world, children were never in that vanilla zone. The name “Pee-wee” is so close to the word “wee-wee.” There he cavorts, a noodle in slicked hair and lipstick, okay as long as he stays limp. The kid-hosts that reassure parents are eunuchs—Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo, also the Muppets, who are made of cloth and who cringe away from females, their one female character is a lecherous, clueless pig.

Reubens doesn’t look like a eunuch in the mug shots released to the press by the Sarasota vice squad, his hair grown biker long, his chin shaded by a goatee. The Pee-wee character who talked to kids wasn’t a eunuch, either. He was a peculiarly sexed guy—libido poking out in campy flounces, risqué asides, and hip wisecracks. He's a committed deviant, welcoming of other oddball types who visit Planet Playhouse.

Pee-wee impersonates the child that adults find precocious and that other kids push away. He’s happiest in fantasy, where objects talk and he controls them. It’s no wonder kids adore his freakishness. All kids grope around in the mysterious meanings of adult language and measure themselves, trembling, against the size of adult body parts.

Pee-wee has always been a wanker figure, getting off on solitary, imaginative pleasure. The charges brought against Reubens have only made this association obvious. The narrator of London Fields, the novel by Martin Amis, points out that masturbation is almost never described in fiction. We’re supposed to be feel lonely alone—not enjoy our apartness.

Last week [in 1991] in a statement quoted in Newsday, Joan Rivers said that Reubens’s situation was “terribly, terribly sad,” adding that if he was convicted she was “sure” he was “going to go for help.” What kind of help? In seeking out more remote porno theaters? Bill Cosby—[he’s on the right side here, no one is consistent, or maybe he’s foreseeing his own sex trials]—faulted CBS and Disney/MGM Studios for caving into hysteria and dispensing with due process.

Cyndi Lauper summed up the Pee-wee arrest as “a petty, victimless occurrence.” In homage to Reubens, Dave Herman, host of WNEW’s The Rock & Roll Morning Show, played Pee-wee’s theme song, “Tequila,” and encouraged parents to let their kids play with Pee-wee dolls. Herman, in a phone conversation, said his show had prompted 30 fax messages supporting Reubens and none attacking him. He reported a caller’s evocative detail about Reubens. Before his arrest, he’d declined a CBS offer to do a sixth season of the Playhouse, saying he’d like “to kill off the character.” He was an actor. He wanted to play other roles. Well, maybe it was the time to let go.

Postscript. Reubens was released from county jail the night he was arrested after posting $219 bond. According to Celeste Finn, writing in a post on Facebook, “The official police report described the silhouette of the man they later identified as Paul Reubens using his left hand to commit ‘the crime’. Reubens is right handed. If it had gone to trial, an expert witness from Masters and Johnson was prepared to testify that, in their exhaustive research on human sexuality, they had never recorded a subject who used their non dominant hand to masturbate.

“The case didn’t go to trial because Reubens was also shown on the theater’s security footage in the lobby, with a time stamp at the time ‘the crime’ was taking place in the theater, according to the detective’s report. Also, Reubens was advised to avoid the publicity of a trial.”

At the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards Reubens made his first public appearance after the arrest. Taking the stage in costume as Pee-wee, he asked the audience, "Heard any good jokes lately?" and received a standing ovation. Reubens responded with, "Ha, that's so funny I forgot to laugh!"

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A Gift

It was 2005, and I was drifting along Broadway. A giant building was going up outside my apartment, and the noise was driving me onto the streets. I floated into a gourmet market, hoping to find samples, when I heard my name, and a tall man leaned over to kiss my cheek.

It had been a while since I’d crossed paths with Mark Svenvold. He had dark hair, and he was handsome. He’d been the poet-in-residence at Fordham University, when I’d taught there a few years earlier, and he’d included me in a show he produced. Because of Mark, I created a performance piece with Ashley Paul, a beautiful, young jazz saxophonist Mark had heard playing in the subway.

Ashley Paul

I was happy to see Mark. I would have been happy to see anyone who could part the fog. I didn’t find samples in the store, and I didn’t care. Mark paid for his groceries, and we sat in a little park on 106^th Street. He gave me a cookie.

He’d published a book since we’d last met. It was about people who chased tornados and hurricanes—and were looking for something in the hunt. I thought the subject was intriguing. I hadn’t read the book.

I asked how it was going. He said he was disappointed in the way it had been handled—although his publisher was prestigious and the book had received praising reviews. All the writers I knew felt swindled or abandoned by their publishers. Not me. I’m always afraid something I’ve written is going to be canceled before it can appear, so when I see something in material form, I feel I can’t ask for more.

Mark was matter-of-fact. He was proud of his accomplishment and thought it should have gained more recognition. He was past feeling aggrieved, and I asked how he’d moved on. He said the feelings didn’t do him any good. I said I understood that. I wanted to know, practically, how he worked it.

He said, “I pray and meditate.” A plump pigeon pecked near us with a lopsided walk. His feathers were brown. I know this because I jotted down the color in some notes.

I didn’t remember Mark having a religious bent, but then I recalled a conversation from the time he was writing his book. The weather chasers were after transcendence. They were engaged in a kind of religious quest, and Mark had been interested in this. What I knew about his life looked marvelous to me. He was married to a talented woman, who taught at a university. They had a young child. They were younger than me. Publishers sought out their work. He was generous. Like many successful people, he wasn’t self-absorbed.

I said, “What do you pray about, and who do you pray to?” He had to slump down a little to meet my eyes. He said he sent his thoughts out to the universe. Maybe that wasn’t his exact phrase. He concentrated on shifting from his momentary feelings of grievance to performing a service for someone else. The performance of this service or even the thought of it produced emotions it was easier for him to exist in.

Thinking of this conversation now, it reminds me of something Lewis Hyde wrote about in The Gift, where he says the gift of the lyre that Hermes invents and gives to his brother Apollo prompts him to go on to invent a second musical instrument, the pipes.

Mark said the practice was difficult and he’d spent a long time feeling bad about his book. I felt calmer sitting beside him. His fingers were long. He could easily have palmed a basketball. I wondered if he knew right then he was performing a service for me.

I can easily imagine how he’d met Ashley Paul. I can see him hearing her tenor sax at Columbus Circle and telling her she’s blowing him away. I’m trying to remember rehearsing with her back in 2003. Some people, you can see they have spent their lives knowing they are artist. That was Ashley.

With me, it’s been a series of tiny steps—maybe the way Mark described learning to meditate. Ashley and I wanted to create the feeling of an old beatnik café, where a poet would be saying lines while a musician played softly underneath. They each took solos, and sometimes there were beats of silence. What I remember is something like a taste or a smudge of happiness. There’s an apartment. There are shiny instruments in cases. I’m dazzled, and I can’t believe this is my life.

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Check out Richard’s stack Every Twenty Minutes, the current post, “No Off Switch” is about becoming a cyborg with no regrets. To read Richard, click here: richardtoon1.substack.com/p/no-off-switch

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