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notes on the culture
Long a place of hiding and shame, it’s now being reconsidered in queer culture — and beyond.
May 12, 2025Updated 4:31 p.m. ET
EARLY IN THE biographical documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the actor Paul Reubens makes a statement about his sexual identity that even in 2025 feels jarring to hear. As he discusses his years as a budding performance artist, he reveals for the first time that, soon after leaving California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s, he began a romantic relationship with an attractive artist named Guy. They moved in together and started to build a life; Reubens introduced Guy to his parents. And then he came to feel that he was losing his identity. The relationship ended and, soon after, Reubens, who would later come to be better known as Pee-wee Herman, made a decision that would shape the rest of his life — a professional choice with a great personal cost: “I was as out as you could be,” he says. “And then I went back in the closet.”
Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason Martin
The moment feels painfully confessional — all the more so because it isn’t clear whether Reubens, who died at 70 in 2023 after living with cancer for six years, knew he wouldn’t be alive to experience the public reaction to it. The revelation isn’t that he was gay. In the first minutes of the film, which will air on HBO on May 23, he teases that fact with droll self-amusement. (“I was extremely sensitive and romantic. … I like to decorate,” he says. “Whatever that suggests to you watching, go ahead — make those connections!”) The shock is that, out of what he acknowledges was “self-hatred” and “self-preservation,” as well as ambition and the practical impossibility of surviving as an out Saturday-morning children’s star in the 1980s, he hid his true self even from many close associates and friends. It turns out that Reubens, a figure of irrepressible joy as Pee-wee, felt that he was harboring a dark secret — and decades later, he found himself trying to explain not homosexuality but a lifetime of concealment.
I first heard that Reubens was gay when I started covering television as a reporter in the early 1990s. As he notes, it wasn’t exactly a shock. Pee-wee, who could code-switch from guilelessness to arch bitchery in a millisecond and possessed a John Waters-level aptitude for camp, had a huge gay following, and those fans were alert to every hint that was dropped in the 1985 movie “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” (1986-90), the beloved cult TV hit that followed. I found out Reubens was gay only because a gay colleague told me, and he found out only because a gay colleague told him and so on; that was how it usually worked. For upward of half a century starting in the 1950s, those morsels of information constituted a kind of currency, routinely passed in gay media circles, sometimes as scandalous gossip but more often as a kind of on-the-spot clarification of the record, often in brutally blunt terms. When the name of a putatively queer celebrity was brought up, the gay journalist who told me about Reubens would, as a casual interjection, remark, “huge queen” or “major homo.” It allowed him to both claim kinship with and implicitly rebuke someone who was unwilling to self-identify.
Sharing information about celebrities with one’s gay friends may have been a way of asserting insider knowledge, but it was also a contribution to a kind of ever-evolving group project, a map of homosexuality that you could help make a little larger and clearer, one name at a time, in an era when most gay public figures would not or could not stand up and be counted. One effect of all that dish was to turn the idea of the closet into something more complex than an in-or-out binary. It was widely understood that there was a third category, “those who know know,” that nodded to the existence of a gray area in which one could be out in certain circles while remaining reasonably certain that the information wouldn’t penetrate to the wider world. That was the zone in which, for a long time, Reubens lived — a closet, but a large one, with free access to a safe perimeter that surrounded it.
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