> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://malloryelliott.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Revenge of the Repressed - URL: https://malloryelliott.ghost.io/revenge-of-the-repressed/ - Published: 2025-05-26T23:04:22.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-23T19:47:25.000Z - Description: Paul Reubens and the queer romance of the "false self". - Author: Mallory Elliott - Tags: lgbtqia+, paul reubens, trans, pee wee herman, queerness, Newsletter, #Migrated-1787496673720, #Import 2026-08-23 14:51 *This piece is going to be a bit different because it’s my first one about an artist who isn’t a trans woman. I started writing it after watching the new HBO documentary* Pee-wee as Himself*, but it’s not exactly a review of that (excellent) film.* I have distinct memories of waking up on Saturday mornings as a preschool kid, age three or four, and watching *Pee-wee’s Playhouse* while picking the raisins out of a dry bowl of Raisin Bran. Although my parents were quite conservative, its wild art and weird vibes didn’t seem to trouble them, and they have fond memories of how much I loved the show. I think they rightly recognized that Pee-wee Herman was a contemporary version of their own beloved Howdy-Doody and Captain Kangaroo. They even bought me [a pull-string Pee-wee doll](https://i.etsystatic.com/42110000/r/il/aa7e5d/6357721628/il%5F794xN.6357721628%5Fj2y5.jpg?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io)—my dad actually got two, one for me to play with and a second to hide away as a future collectors’ item. Such was the power of the cult of Pee-wee in the 80s. I didn’t believe in him like I believed in Santa Claus, but he was almost as ubiquitous, a character who transcended any particular form of media or franchise. [Subscribe](#/portal/signup) Later, when I was 10, I first saw [*The Pee-wee Herman Show*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FPee-wee%5FHerman%5FShow?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io), which had originally aired in 1981 on HBO, playing as daytime afternoon filler on Comedy Central. I had no idea what to make of it, but I watched with unnerved fascination. It was clearly a theater production rather than a full-fledged TV show, and the jokes were much more adult. I was still too young to totally understand them, but I recognized a raunchy smirk on the face of everything—the MILF Miss Yvonne pulling tissues out of her cleavage to wipe away tears, the genie Jambi, a disembodied head, waxing lustful about acquiring a pair of hands. I was just beginning to learn about sex (mostly from whisperings on the school bus), and this version of Pee-wee seemed to have matured along with me, disturbing the sense of nostalgia I was already developing in my waning childhood. I was just as fascinated, when I was a teenager, seeing Tim Burton’s incredible *Pee-wee’s Big Adventure* for the first time. In *Playhouse*, Pee-wee’s cartoon world is self-contained, but in the film, realism and cartoonishness collide. I realized for the first time that this character was kind of unsettling—an uncanny manchild, impossible to code either as gay or straight, but seemingly remaining in the latency of pre-adolescence. In the adult context, a uniquely strange humor emerges from the tension between his creepiness and his cuteness, something that reaches deep into collective psychosexual recesses first mapped out by Freud. As singular as he is, Pee-wee is very much a product of his era of alternative comedy, the same that gave birth to *Saturday Night Live*, George Carlin, Andy Kaufman, and Steve Martin. By the late 70s, the psychedelic playfulness of 1960s counterculture had long since curdled into a hip sense of cynicism and a fondness for clever stupidity. Social critique was still sharp, but the hope that things could really change for the better, much less that art could have anything to do with it, was significantly diminished. Pee-wee Herman was a perfect character for this mood because he seemed totally unaffected by it, blithely unaware of his existence in a morally bankrupt culture, appealing both to nostalgia for a lost boomer innocence and a steely acceptance that such innocence had always been an illusion—in other words, a figure representing the irony and absurdity of denial. Reubens’ background wasn’t in comedy but in performance art, and one of the things that makes Pee-wee such an amazing comedy character is that, while he’s endearing and oddly sly, he isn’t actually laugh-out-loud funny. He’s not a satire on anything or a stereotype of anyone, and even his catchphrases like “I know you are, but what am I?” aren’t original. He seems to have come straight from the collective unconscious. He is funny only by default: we have to laugh in order to fill the uncomfortable void his strangeness forces us to confront. What is he doing here? Is he supposed to be funny? Well sure, it’s funny that a man in the 80s is acting like a kid from the 50s. Right? In *Adventure,* Pee-wee confronted America with its repression of own innate queerness, displaying it much louder than an openly gay character could—who remembers [Billy Crystal’s character from ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodie%5FDallas?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io)[*Soap*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodie%5FDallas?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io)? Such frank depiction of a homosexual personality was fairly big pop cultural deal at the time, but Pee-wee Herman [dancing to “Tequila”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDb00Mx7D7g&ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io) before a captive audience of biker dudes was and remains iconic. Of course, there’s nothing particularly gay about the scene, in the sense of implying any kind of sexual desire a man might have for another man, or any kind of overt gender nonconformity. But Pee-wee exhibits a freedom not afforded to conventional cishet men, calling attention to queer possibility without naming it outright. As a character for adults, Pee-wee is much more of a threat to a cisheteronormative order than as a character for children, because unlike explicitly queer characters, he doesn’t exist as a compartmentalized representative of some kind of “alternative lifestyle.” He’s the hero of the movie, inviting us into his world, allowing us to fill in his blanks. He offers us not fully formed queerness but a cutting that we could plant in ourselves, a small sample of forbidden enjoyment. All of this is wrapped up in a sense of mid-20th century kitsch that was intimately familiar to audiences of the time—nostalgic artifacts of pop culture that also reverberate with that same weird, unconscious enjoyment of every feeling not explicitly “allowed” by the culture. Pee-wee therefore had to be demoted, his manchild character re-tooled to serve, like many children’s TV hosts before him, as an intermediary between the world of children and the world of adults. In the Playhouse, everything disruptively queer about Pee-wee as a man becomes merely the harmless vestiges of boyhood. Fortunately, though his queerness was somewhat neutralized, his subversive mission continued. *Pee-wee’s Playhouse* inaugurated a slew of children’s entertainment, informed by [punk-adjacent aesthetics and ethics](https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2015/10/03/grungy-accelerationism/?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io) of the 70s and 80s counterculture, that subtly reassured 80s and 90s kids that the world was indeed just as grotesque and obscene as it seemed to be, that they shouldn’t listen to adults who tried to tell them otherwise, that they shouldn’t be afraid of themselves, and that there was freedom and perhaps even truth to be found in the embrace of absurdity. --- ![Young Paul Reubens. You're welcome.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/ca0e5278-06f3-4dcd-b926-e74d963a4350_412x500-jpeg.jpg) Young Paul Reubens with a friend. *Pee-wee as Himself* shows us how, long before his humiliating [1991 arrest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul%5FReubens?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io#1991%5Farrest), Paul Reubens decided that he would not be a public figure. In the 80s, he did not become a “celeb”; it was his character who attained fame. The most fascinating parts of the documentary for me were the videos from his early years in college and as a young man in Los Angeles. Here we see him as a savage young art school savant—experimenting with drag, making conceptual films, and cultivating a mildly effete hipster vibe. It was this Paul Reubens who became lost behind the character of Pee-wee, and his stifling feels a bit tragic. He played several other side characters in the years after his arrest, most notably the drug-dealing hairdresser Derek Foreal in 2001’s *Blow*, but his re-emergence was hobbled by [a second bullshit legal saga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul%5FReubens?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io#2002%E2%80%932004:%5FSubsequent%5Fcharges). We missed out on so much more from him, and the culprit is systemic homophobia. Reubens’ homosexuality was fairly obvious, and its ambiguous implication was a key part of Pee-wee’s whole vibe. Because homosexuality is repressed in the character’s consciousness, it can return in all sorts of strange, wacky ways. Pee-wee is a figure of immense frustration, prevented from maturation by—well, by *something*, that’s for sure. But Reubens’ genius is to make him *enjoy* this frustration. If Pee-wee is subversive, it is only because he is first able to subvert himself, alchemically transforming his inhibition into exhibition through a natural will to freedom that seeks an exit from repression wherever it can. Reaganite society tolerated all of this just fine, along with the various gender games of glam metal and synth pop. They even let this obvious queer watch their kids, but only on the condition that *his queerness remain implicit*. Gay men died in droves from AIDS, ignored by the government and blamed by the populace, while Pee-wee danced like a fiddling Nero for millennial preschoolers. But the moment his queernesss stopped being a joke, and in a particularly seedy-looking way (pornography!), everything Reubens’ ruse had been devised to avoid and subvert attacked him with full force. Even before these persecutions, it’s clear that staying in the closet took a certain toll on Reubens. Though he had plenty of friends, his life also seems to have been ruled by a reclusive instinct and workaholism. At one point, he expresses to the film’s director, Matt Wolf, a mostly sincere pride in his low capacity for trust, and the only window we really get into how this developed is the tragic story of losing his long-term boyfriend to AIDS in the early 80s—after which, he declares to us from the present, he swore off relationships completely. I was struck, watching the film, by the achievements of this uncompromisingly queer artist in an era of cultural repression, but also by the personal cost of these achievements, as well as their tenuousness. Reuben’s mania for control seems both a personality trait pushed to the level of a flaw, and the consequence of a reasonable paranoia about being openly gay in the 80s. --- ![The Pee-Wee Herman scandal](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/9c67eae7-00c9-4d53-9b7e-c79be81b1808_1500x903-jpeg.jpg) Creating a straight and/or cis alter ego is something that many queer people learn how to do, even if only people like Reubens take it to the level of high art. We do it because we have to survive in a society that clearly doesn’t like us as we are. Learning this skill is creatively enriching, but stressful, because it’s done under duress. Pee-wee protected Paul Reubens from the world and cut him off from the world at the same time. As a trans woman, I see in the relationship between the two a larger-than-life analogy for the relationship between my repressed feminine inclinations and the male persona I tried to project for the first 35 years of my life. Just like Pee-wee, rather than Paul, was the one who earned a star on the Walk of Fame, I see a name I’ve retired on awards I’ve won, poems I’ve published, and credits on albums from old bands. Of course, my pre-transition self was not a character—it was me, just the wrong gender. In some ways, that didn’t matter; in others, it made a huge difference. Living as a man and wanting to be a woman sometimes feels like working for someone else and not getting paid, or like looking at everything through frosted glass. I also felt safe behind that glass. With the partially false self up front, the real one never had to be exposed. I became a fan of the version of myself, who felt like someone else, that I projected into the world. He was beautiful to me, like my own son. To me, he was already a rock star, a famous writer, or whatever else I wanted to be at the time. When it became clear that I wanted to transition, I was afraid of giving him up—though not preferable, he had become more substantial than the person I felt I actually was. What I’m saying is I get it. I get the allure of the red bow tie and the grey suit and the funny voice. For me, it was a flannel shirt, baggy jeans (even when skinny were in), a slumped posture, and a flat, sardonic tone. But I get it. There’s a scene in which Reubens, in the present, tries to explain why he wanted the kissing scene in *Pee-wee’s Big Top* to go on for so long—basically, he just thought it would be really funny. But he also sees, in retrospect, why it didn’t work, and while he doesn’t exactly spell that out, instead simply attributing it to his mania for control blinding him to his own excesses, I think the scene fails because it’s not ironic enough—because there’s *a desire to be straight* (or at least for Pee-wee to be straight), and it’s getting in the way of what could be a hilarious parody of straight romantic narrative. I can think of many times in my male life when I said or did exaggeratedly sexist things simply because I felt I had to say and do them to pass as an actual man instead of a gender-confused person who only appeared to be a man. The world of women was too attractive—I had to loudly distance myself from it, lest I be tagged as a “fag.” This stuff was offensive to the women in my life on its face, which made me feel ashamed, of course, but later on (sometimes much later) I was also stuck by its inauthenticity—how forced it felt, how compulsive and overdriven the emotions behind it were. Just as Reubens found, as a manchild, a way to be a gay man without triggering cultural alarms, I figured out how to (sort of) expose my femininity as a man by embracing the trope of the “sensitive guy”—a geeky, emotionally preoccupied, artistic type, more about feelings and intuition than physicality or commandingness. I wanted people to see both the man I was trying to be and the woman I secretly would rather have been, but they rarely ever saw the latter. When Paul Reubens was caught in that porn theater in the summer of 1991, he was staying with his parents in Sarasota, Florida, where he’d retreated to mentally regroup. With *Playhouse* brought to an end, as well as the still-recent failure of his second film, he seemed to be on the cusp of a creative crisis. For a such a fanatically private celebrity, visiting a public porn theater seems like a wild indiscretion, even if, with his long hair and beard, he didn’t strongly resemble Pee-wee. This is maybe an evil thought, but perhaps, on some unconscious level, he was okay with potentially being recognized in that porn theater—not being arrested in a sting, of course, much less being accused of exposing himself, but simply being seen for who he actually was, after so much effort advancing the career of someone who wasn’t really him. All I know for sure is that such effort is absolutely exhausting, and I feel a great sympathy for Reubens. I see now how he taught me and a whole generation of kids how to hide their queerness from the world while still expressing it—how to hang onto yourself in a culture for whom your existence is, at best, an inconvenience, discouraged at every turn. He was not an activist—he didn’t stand up to be counted as a gay man in any of the battles for queer liberation in his lifetime. Nonetheless, through his art, he did a great service to the community from which he maintained such a careful distance. Although he comes off in the documentary as fairly narcissistic and highly controlling as a collaborator, I absolutely believe Reubens when he says, in his final statement, that everything he did was motivated by love. We should all be so lucky, at the end of our own lives, to be able to say so, and to know we believe it. [Subscribe](#/portal/signup)