To like Pee-Herman was an exquisite factor, a foolish and liberating factor.
I’m not talking as somebody who as a youngster watched Pee-wee’s Playhouse — somebody, you may think, like Greg, the boy who cherished to stitch on Curb Your Enthusiasm — however as an grownup homosexual man who’d manage his Saturday mornings round watching the most recent episode. In these days earlier than streaming, I used to be identified to overlook trains out of city as a result of it meant extra to me to remain house and watch Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) announce the arrival of Miss Yvonne (Lynne Marie Stewart), routinely described as “probably the most stunning lady in Puppet Land.”
Miss Yvonne, truly, seemed like a woman who’d gotten misplaced on her option to the promenade a number of many years earlier and eventually turned up, her taffeta barely the more serious for put on however her head stuffed with desires that she’d been topped. Her delusion was what made her stunning. She floated across the Playhouse like a fairy godmother — and, sure, I take advantage of “fairy” deliberately. Let’s throw warning to the winds.
Within the new HBO documentary Pee-wee as Himself, Reubens, who died in 2023 and revealed he was homosexual within the documentary, discusses how he’d rigorously stored his sexuality hidden for many years. To be out, he stated, would have ended his profession, not less than as a youngsters’s character. (That proved to be true when he was arrested at an adult-movie theater in 1991.) Nevertheless it was all the time apparent to anybody who was homosexual that Reubens was too: He had a sensibility just like that of director John Waters (Polyester, Hairspray): campy, blithely sunny and someway essentially harmless (however with out Waters’ gleeful enthusiasm for shock and trash).
And what about Reubens’ celebrated creation? Sure, Pee-wee was homosexual. Wasn’t he? Sure, in fact Pee-wee was homosexual.
I don’t imply that this hand-flapping man-child in a too-small grey go well with might ever be imagined having intercourse, or fascinated by it, not to mention courting Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne), Tito the pool boy and even Miss Yvonne. (Pee-wee did get married, in a single episode — to a fruit salad.) The character maybe was conceived in some deep, pre-sexual stage of Reubens’ unconscious mind — a toddler’s mind — the place gender and sexual orientation playfully swirled round one another, like vanilla and chocolate ice cream in a cone. And perhaps there’s significance within the character’s title: “Pee-wee,” indicating one thing or somebody very small or younger, and “Herman,” an ambiguous compound of female (“her”) and masculine (“man).” I’m not a psychologist, so my vocabulary right here is imprecise — perhaps a pupil of Melanie Klein might determine all of it out.
Then again, I do not assume that there was something sexually complicated or confused about Pee-wee, both. (If you would like actual confusion, watch Sam Rockwell’s huge scene on White Lotus.) As carried out by Reubens, Pee-wee was an entirely built-in character.
Which is why, having maybe barely muddled my argument, I reiterate that Pee-wee, not less than the one who lived within the Playhouse, was homosexual.
The present, which ran from 1986 to 1991, was rife, and knowingly so, with what we these days name homosexual or queer signifiers — you couldn’t miss them. Randy the puppet seemed like a rough-trade Howdy Doody. Pteri the Pterodactyl, anxious and neurotic with a preeningly theatrical voice, wasn’t far faraway from one in every of Samantha Stephens’ flustered aunts on Bewitched (one other present that may be mined endlessly for homosexual subtext). I consider I already talked about Tito the pool boy, (What youngsters’s present ever featured a pool boy?) And there was Jambi the genie (Paul Paragon), a turbaned, disembodied head radiating mild. It’s more durable to pinpoint why Jambi was homosexual, precisely — besides to say that if he’d had fingers, he’d be folding sweaters.
Pee-wee’s Playhouse was mainly a youngsters’s present that would have been written by Oscar Wilde, creator of The Significance of Being Earnest. (“Earnest,” by the best way, was a euphemism for “gay” in Victorian England.)
I feel if I’d seen Playhouse as a boy — in different phrases, when I used to be nonetheless a part of the viewers it was supposed for — I might need been drawn to the homosexual subtext with out understanding it. For a homosexual man, although, the winks had been an immediately comprehended type of cultural code, one thing like gaydar reconstituted as humor.
One of many pleasures of homosexual tradition was, and is, having the ability to choose up on a joke, a phrase or a line that is smart — that’s humorous — provided that you occur to be “that method.” I can’t let you know the unusual, scrumptious frisson I skilled once I first heard the phrase “pal of Dorothy,” which refers back to the homosexual obsession with The Wizard of Oz.
I bear in mind, as properly, an evening once I’d first moved to Manhattan and went to a cabaret present (homosexual signifier No. 1) of trunk songs (which is what you name numbers lower from musicals — homosexual signifier No. 2). The singer introduced down the home with the road: “As Benay Venuta used to say….” Who was this Benay Venuta? Ethel Merman’s understudy (homosexual signifier No. 3). That night time, for me, was the motherlode of signifiers. I am glad I’ve written all that out — I can use it in my memoir.
That is all only a roundabout method of claiming that Playhouse was, in a way, music to my ears — a canine whistle that snapped me to consideration. I can’t consider one other present that ever appealed to me fairly the identical method. (I would been much less loopy about Pee-wee’s Huge Journey, Reubens’ hit 1985 movie. Possibly as a result of I used to be afraid of Massive Marge.)
However Playhouse additionally had an sudden therapeutic impact, I feel — it does even now, judging from my feelings once I watch outdated clips.
Within the documentary, Reubens emphasizes how Playhouse was designed to make you’re feeling higher, extra accepting of your self, about being completely different. By the point the present premiered, as I’ve stated, I used to be grown up and knew I was completely different, and in exactly which method. At that time I didn’t want Pee-wee’s Playhouse for validation. I’d already begun seeing the therapists who would assist me as I navigated my method, not all the time steadily, out onto the open seas of maturity. (Cliché a lot, pal?) As a substitute, what Pee-wee’s Playhouse felt like was a retro fantasy of a contented childhood — a fantasy of what it might need felt wish to have been validated, as a boy, for being completely different.
Pee-wee, in any case, lived in a protected, blissful, colourful world the place everybody favored everybody else for who they had been, no extra, no much less. Pee–wee may trigger a raised eyebrow or two in Puppet Land. (Within the documentary, actress S. Epatha Merkerson observes that her character, Reba the Mail Girl, was the one one who did not fairly “get” Pee-wee.) However he wasn’t bullied or ridiculed or harassed.
Effectively, would not which have been good? I bear in mind any given day of my childhood as having two primary arcs: Within the morning I braced myself for no matter humiliations may come my method once I bought to highschool. Then, within the afternoon, I returned house, unable to speak to my dad and mom about any unpleasantness that may have occurred — and questioning (a thought that vastly troubled me) whether or not I used to be presumably a supply of embarrassment or disgrace to them, to my household. (The Andrew Scott-Paul Mescal movie, All of Us Strangers, contains a rare scene that dramatizes this predicament.)
There’s an Emily Dickinson stanza that sums all of it up:
I knew not however the subsequent
Can be my ultimate inch, —
This gave me that precarious gait
Some name expertise.
However sufficient of that. In Pee-wee’s world, nothing was precarious. (Fame was one other matter.) Reubens, in a way, imagined a contented childhood for me. I suppose it sounds treacly (in actual fact, it is treacly), however the Playhouse will be present in the identical neighborhood because the place Judy Garland sang about. You might say I am a Good friend of Pee-wee’s.
Pee-wee as Himself is streaming on Max.
