Paul Reubens and the enduring queer legacy of Pee-wee Herman

Pee-wee Herman's return to film in 2016 after a near 30-year absence with Netflix's Pee-wee's Big Holiday made queer fans strap on their platforms, cue up "Tequila," and dance in celebration of what they considered the iconic character's coming out.

In the film, Pee-wee (the late, great Paul Reubens), falls platonically in love with Joe Manganiello (playing himself) and embarks on a quest to leave his hometown, where he's been feeling trapped as of late — a feeling to which many a queer person can relate — to head to New! York! City! for Joe's birthday party. The pair end up riding off into the sunset on Manganiello's motorcyle.

While some saw this as Pee-wee's long-awaited queer love story, still others were quick to point out that Pee-wee Herman has always been knowingly, winkingly queer. Really, the character's queerness has been the subject of critical discourse since at least the earliest days of Pee-wee's Playhouse, Reuben's beloved and subversive-as-all-hell children's show that ran from 1986 to 1990.

Esteemed academic journal Camera Obscura stuffed its May 1988 issue with essays analyzing the bowtie-wearing "loner" and "rebel" — as Pee-wee describes himself in his 1985 film debut, Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

Reubens came up with the character in 1977 when he was a member of the LA-based improv troupe The Groundlings. An impish, effeminate, almost androgynous man-child out of some deranged Norman Rockwell rendering of '50s Americana, Pee-wee Herman was an instant hit with audiences and led to an acclaimed stage show, an HBO special, and star-making appearances on Late Night with David Letterman.

Conceived as a hilariously bad stand-up comedian, the character was so odd as to be endearing; asexual but also demonstrably queer — like some faded silent movie star with his pancake makeup, rouged cheeks, and blood red lips — with an endless array of innuendo that sailed over kids' heads and landed right in their parents' laps.

Pee-wee's Playhouse was a queer fantasia of drag queen genies, campy broads, Jheri-curled cowboys, Mail Ladies, shirtless lifeguards, kitsch, kitsch, and more kitsch. In today's warlike cultural landscape, Pee-wee and his Playhouse would be too subversively gay, too likely to "indoctrinate the children."

But in the more innocent, less tolerant Reagan Eighties, the show was a massive success, garnering 15 Emmys.

Pee-wee Herman was like Liberace, a flamboyant character so toothlessly gay — that is, so deeply queer-coded but "harmless" — that he passed as family entertainment. Whether Pee-wee himself was gay or straight was beside the point since the vibrant, cartoonish world he inhabited was anything but straight.

From a 2016 New York Times profile on Reubens:

While Pee-wee may have finally and fittingly straddled a hog with Joe Manganiello in Pee-wee's Big Holiday, the character reached the apex of his queer life with 1988's Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas Special.

When you have a lineup that includes genuine gay icons like Cher, Grace Jones (singing the definitive version of "Little Drummer Boy"), Little Richard, Joan Rivers, Whoopi Goldberg, k.d. lang, (then-Princess) Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Oprah, everyone's coming out of this a little bit gay.

And you're welcome.

Pee-wee's Playhouse was Reuben's inclusive vision of Norman Rockwell's America, born of someone who never felt as if he fit in anywhere.

"I felt like a total oddball almost every minute growing up," Reubens said in a 2004 interview with NPR's Fresh Air. "That sorta was the whole point of the show, or at least a big point of the show, was that it would be hard to stand out in the Playhouse. Everything stood out in the Playhouse, so you could feel right at home no matter who you are or what you were thinking or anything."

Judd Apatow, who produced Pee-Wee's Big Holiday told The Times he loved Pee-wee's Playhouse because it was "a group of strange people who are having a great time and being really nice to each other."

That's what Pee-wee Herman ultimately stood for. It's hopefully what Paul Reubens will be best remembered for. And, not for nothing, a group of strange people having a great time and being really nice to each other seems almost revolutionary right about now.

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