Introduction

Everyone Inside

Pee-wee’s Playhouse ran on CBS Saturday mornings from 1986 to 1990 and starred Paul Reubens, who created the Pee-wee character years earlier as a live sketch-comedy show for adults. Pee-wee Herman is a man who behaves like a boy in a home tricked out with animate toys and technologies. He plays hard and silly while building mutual, ethical relations of reciprocity and care with the people and puppets who live in and visit his playhouse. All of the action of the show takes place inside, away from scrutiny and rules. Pee-wee steps outside the house occasionally during the run of the show but is almost always shot from inside, through a window. There is no regular exterior set.

The show revolves around Pee-wee’s daily routine: he arrives to the playhouse in the morning and checks on his toy shelf of Frankenstein-like, mutant dolls and actions figures brought to life through stop-motion animation. He says hello to the animate devices and objects who make up the sizeable nonhuman component of the show’s cast: these include Chairy (a turquoise upholstered armchair with eyes and a mouth), Clocky (a wall clock), the Dinosaur family (a stop-motion-animated nuclear family of tiny dinosaurs who live in a mouse hole), Pterri (a talking pterodactyl who plays fetch like a dog), Floory (part of the floor who talks), and Randy (a marionette schoolyard delinquent who bullies the rest of the cast but is actually not so rotten at his core). Most of these characters are puppets who interact on even ground with the show’s human characters. These humans include Reba the mail lady (who delivers letters and parcels from Pee-wee’s pen pals around the world), Mrs. Steve/Mrs. Rene (a nosy house-wife neighbor who looks like Divine with less makeup), the King of Cartoons (who rolls up to play cartoons in a taxi chauffeured by Dixie, a soft-butch with a ponytail), Cowboy Curtis (a lasso-wielding cowboy), Tito (a thirst-trap lifeguard who patrols the swimming pool outside wearing a barely there swimsuit), Ms. Yvonne (an aged-out girl next door who looks like a 1950s prom queen), and Jambi (a campy genie in a box who grants Pee-wee one wish each day). These characters come and go in each episode, and their visits to the house drive the action: Cowboy Curtis shows up for dance lessons, or Ms. Yvonne comes over to play “House,” or Randy gets in trouble for smoking cigarettes.

Most striking in rewatching Pee-wee’s Playhouse from the present are the networked, computational devices that make up the final category of playhouse characters: Conky 2000, the tin-man robot who spits out each episode’s secret “word-of-the-day” from their typewriter face; Magic Screen, a touchscreen tablet that is also a portal to digital dimensions; Globey, a geographic information system–meets–artificial intelligence in the form of a globe with a humanoid face; and Picture Phone, a smiling photo booth for making video calls. Pee-wee engages with Conky, Magic Screen, Globey, and Picture Phone to explore new dimensions of play or reach the world outside: they do not surveil him, and he never shouts instructions or abuse their way for laughs. They decide upon play-oriented tasks together, and the machines ask Pee-wee for help as often as he asks them. Overall, they are key interlocutors for the generative play made possible by the playhouse. As media studies scholars offer vital critiques of “smart home” technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) for their toxic surveillance and their gendered and racial dynamics that seem inexorable, revisiting this popular, cult television show offers an alternative vision of what network relations embedded in domestic spaces might have become. Pee-wee Herman, beloved by children and an adult, queer audience, modeled alternative relations of care, reciprocity, and love for the “devices” in his playhouse.

In addition to returning to the scene of the playhouse and the relations between humans and networked technologies that took shape there, this book is most importantly a rumination on where memory and emotion meet sexuality in media history. To do this, the book veers off somewhere else: from the idyllic California playhouse in the mountains to a seedy, Florida porn theater where Reubens was arrested in 1991, the year Pee-wee’s Playhouse was supposed to begin reruns. Reubens was accused of watching straight porn with other men while jerking off in the theater: a vital but banal practice of mediated intimacy for many queer men and their sexual networks. The event was widely misunderstood by the child-sexual-abuse- and AIDS-panicked public, who conflated the actor with his character and that character’s proximity to children. A classic 1990s sex scandal ensued, part of a line of public shaming of celebrities caught stepping outside heterosexuality or monogamy, such as George Michael’s arrest for cruising in a Beverly Hills park bathroom, Hugh Grant’s arrest for hiring a sex worker for a blow job in his BMW, or Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s leaked sex tape. For adult queer Pee-wee fans, the sex-phobic mob had come for one of the good ones and had done so within the context of a growing gay and lesbian visibility politics tied to respectability and neoliberal policies like the right to serve in the military. I return to the scene of Reubens’s arrest to retell this story in a reparative way, to think about the residues and desiring attachments we bring to history, the way we read media of the past, and how we let them butt up against our present(s), or not.

One way queer folks hold on to Pee-wee and this history all these years later is by collecting merchandise, particularly the iconic Talking Pee-wee Doll. These eighteen-inch dolls were sold at toy stores during the run of the show, and at “Pee-wee Boutiques” inside JCPenny department stores. Pulling the string that emerged from the doll’s back caused it to say a series of catchphrases from the show in Pee-wee’s eccentric voice, including “I know you are, but what am I?” The dolls were marketed as bringing the feral, imaginative energy of Pee-wee’s Playhouse beyond the screen, into a child’s domestic world.

When Reubens was arrested, Toys-R-Us pulled any remaining dolls from shelves. This lack of supply met a surge in demand from adults who wanted the dolls precisely because Reubens emerged from the arrest as an antihero for queer folks. The dolls are still collector’s items today, signifying not just affinity with Pee-wee the character but also a practice of holding on to an object that ought to be junk. Most of these talking dolls are broken in the same way from age and use, their pull strings worn out to produce an unintelligible screech instead of Pee-wee’s familiar voice. And yet we keep them, displayed on shelves or tucked away lovingly in a closet. Holding on to a broken, worn-out technology is a way of being with the joy of Pee-wee, but also with the pain and shame of what happened to Reubens within the political constellation of early 1990s homo- and AIDS-phobia. These affective histories help to explain renewed anti-queer and anti-trans hate in the present, specifically how shared objects of popular culture get taken up as strategies of solidarity against state-backed annihilation of queer and trans flourishing. Keeping these dolls over decades holds on to the past violence they index, a reminder that the contemporary stories Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committees tell about progress aren’t true. In other words, real and symbolic violence against certain genders and sexualities is an ongoing condition of racial capitalism’s reproduction and not an aberration from history that we’ve moved past with the help of liberalism.1 The doll keeps the score.

Thinking across these scenes—the playhouse, the porn house, and the talking doll—is speculative, a refractive offering. Refraction refers to light (or sound, water, or waves) passing from one media to another that varies in density. Light changes course as it passes through these transparent, or semi-transparent substances. Refraction happens because media bend light at different angles according to their specific density and opacity. Optic lenses in cameras, glasses, and eyes magnify, invert, and otherwise represent objects by refracting the light that bounces off them. In other words, refraction is fundamentally relational, allowing for perception and magnification by directing light across media with different properties, densities, and opacities. I’m using refraction as a metaphor here to put forward a way of thinking with a bend across mediated scenes. Queer refraction asks what happens if we shift our objects and attention, and care less about the “rigor” that accompanies concepts like causality, or even “prehistory” and “archaeology,” terms given to contemporary media histories. A story told across these varied Pee-wee scenes and time periods bends our attention toward new angles on the past and other things we might think through with our light.

To remember and revisit the playhouse from the present is to look with a bend at what went on between the humans and technologies who played there, understood in and through what the show and the violence of Reubens’s sex scandal meant and means to queer folks who were kids then and are fans still today. Looking back at Pee-wee is a confrontation with what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls the “growing sideways” of queer childhood, a process that can be at once sentimental and traumatic but also ghostly, because the queer child is always in excess of the fantasies and fears ascribed to them by adults in the present or in retrospect.2 This book is an exercise in revisiting a mediated scene that seems settled in order to make amends without trying to repair (or get over) a past that is equal parts joy and wound.

Scandal, Grooming, and Parents’ Rights

Pee-wee Herman transgressed both heterosexuality and gender norms as they were understood in the 1980s. He was a classic sissy, affected in his speech and dress, and uncomfortable with typically masculine forms of play. Instead of sports, Pee-wee likes to learn new dances, stage limbo competitions, do crafts, redecorate, make food, or play House. He expresses his feelings readily and communicates honestly with others. Pee-wee is most alienated from Randy, the archetypically masculine schoolyard bully who looks and acts like the older brother from Home Alone (1990), red-haired and built like a refrigerator. The show often trades in assumptions about Pee-wee’s sexuality with bits about sexual object choice: he helps Cowboy Curtis practice dating by roleplaying his feminine date but refuses a kiss at the end; he flirts with a hunky visiting repairman played by Jimmy Smits; he plays Dad in a game of house opposite Rhonda but is grossed out at the idea of kissing her, too; he marries a fruit salad and happily puckers up.

Reubens first developed the Pee-wee character for adults while performing with Los Angeles’s Groundlings sketch comedy troupe. Pee-wee’s first TV appearance in 1979 was as one of three eligible bachelors who could be selected by a contestant on the Dating Game. Early Pee-wee was still kind of a boy and kind of a man, and on this episode plays the disconcerting sexy baby for laughs; when asked his best pickup line, he tells the contestant, “Hey baby, you know I might not be old enough to drink, but you look like you’re old enough to drink.” He is not chosen for a date.

All of this play with sexuality and gender depends on Pee-wee’s status as neither adult or child: he is always both at once, which lends the character a certain kind of plasticity that stretches both categories. Pee-wee’s queerness is defanged by his boyishness, but the adult audience watching Reubens play this role is in on the joke. Pee-wee is primarily a queer and not a trans text, because the character remains resolutely cisgender through all this play: a boy whose gender aligns with sex assigned at birth despite his skepticism about many of the things “boys” are supposed to like and do. At the same time, his adult boyishness offers potential points of identification for transmasculine viewers, and trans studies has fundamentally informed my reading of Pee-wee’s movements across gendered categories as much as queer studies has.

There are also lines to be drawn between the backlash against Reubens and Herman by “concerned parents” and the ideas about childhood informing contemporary attacks on trans children. I am not suggesting that queer children have become good objects in the eyes of the state, displacing pathologizing, racialized discourse onto trans children. As historian Jules Gill-Peterson argues, this common ahistorical claim erases the long history of trans childhood across the twentieth century.3 Often, queer sexuality and gender transgression are bound up in the intimate ways children’s lives are policed. What happened to Pee-wee is a complex constellation of stigmatized sexuality, gender transgression, and children’s media that is a useful antecedent to think with about contemporary “parents’ rights” discourse, which is most spectacularly about the desire to eliminate trans children so that they do not become trans adults.

Revisiting Pee-wee’s Playhouse means thinking from the mid-2020s about the politics of sexuality and gender in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and realizing that less has changed than liberal ideas about social progress might have us believe. Through the time I spent writing this book, public expressions of transphobia and homophobia became the leading sentiment used to unite the right under the rubric of parents’ rights. In Vancouver, Canada, parents show up at my university department to complain about the “trans agenda” our courses “promote.” “Grooming” has gone from a term used to describe sexual abuse against minors, most often perpetrated by cis heterosexual men against their own family members, to shorthand for any nonfamilial relationship between queer or trans people that involves an old and young person, especially teachers and students. Parents’ rights movements frequently claim that public elementary school teachers show students “child pornography” to turn them queer or trans. This rhetoric affects trans and queer kids and their life chances profoundly, damaging intergenerational connections and their potentialities. Books representing gender and family diversity have been censored from public and school libraries, public school teachers in many states can’t say “gay” or call trans students by their affirmed names and pronouns, trans kids are banned from bathrooms and sports teams and risk state investigations of their families for supporting them with affirmative health care, when it is even available in the first place. I’ve spent many hours laughing to Pee-wee DVDs as I worked on this book, but just as much time has been spent at protests, reading the news, and combing through the archives feeling bad.

Reading through news archives to understand how Reubens’s arrest was scandalized has felt hard, as difficult as some of my other work that is more clearly about traumatic histories like the AIDS crisis. Through the archives, I’m getting another view of the homophobic and AIDS-phobic early 1990s in which I grew up, but this time through the controversy surrounding a television show I loved. When Reubens was arrested, my classmates started calling him “perverted,” one of our favorite bad words. Boys in my class would pretend to flash other kids in the schoolyard “like Pee-wee Herman.” Eight-year-olds pretending to pull out their dicks to shock and surprise other children says a lot more about the state of masculinity than it does about queer kids trying to make sense of what it meant for one of our idols to fall so irreparably into disrepute.

I turned eight in 1991, just reaching the age where adults and other children started correcting my masculinity, wielding shame like a ton of bricks. I was in love with a girl in my class named Alexis. I also loved Pee-wee Herman, and some of my friends did too. The adults who were supposed to be protecting me from cruelty weren’t. There’s nothing unique about this story—I imagine many readers can relate in visceral ways. Most queer and trans kids growing up in the 1980s and ’90s had it worse than me: they got beat up, kicked out of their houses, sent to conversion programs, or didn’t survive the deep depressions many of us confronted. I lived in Toronto, a big Canadian city, experienced the privileges of whiteness and a middle-class life, and my parents’ love outweighed their fear and foisting of girl’s clothes and toys on me. Still, reading through this Reubens archive was a confrontation with the commonsense ways that queer sexualities and gender transgressive behaviors are violently managed through carceral means. The casual slippage between adult, presumed-gay man and pedophile simply rolled off the tongues of journalists and the general public. Their vitriol grew through articulation to Pee-wee the character, who was neither boy or man, did masculinity wrong, had no discernable interest in heterosexuality and way too much influence on children. This was not an extreme or right-wing take; rather, the story had legs, in part, because rejecting men like Reubens aligned with liberal moves to galvanize support for an emerging gay and lesbian respectability founded in white, middle-class family values and private domestic life.

This was 1991, but little has changed. The other reason this archive is so deeply sad to confront in the 2020s is that the world is in many ways worse, not better, for queer and trans kids. Stigmatizing media discourses about children and teenagers’ genders and sexualities have doubled down and become the main recruitment strategy for right-wing political parties and white feminist movements, who each argue that children who question their genders or sexualities have been “seduced” by “woke” adults. The moral panic about Drag Queen Story Hours at public libraries across the United States and Canada has perhaps the strongest echoes of Reubens’s public shaming. Drag Queens dressed in fantastic clothes, make-up, and wigs animate the space of the staid public library to enact what Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess (the alter ego of Harris Kornstein) call “drag pedagogy,” a mode of living queerly against the straightening scripts of public education. Drag Queen Story Hour, like Pee-wee’s Playhouse, “artfully invites children into building communities that are more hospitable to queer knowledge and experience.”4 Ultimately these practices are threatening because they pull children off rationalized pathways to economic success through allegiance to white, cis-heteropatriarchal norms.

I don’t want to flatten the differences between 1991 and today, but I do think that a queer approach to thinking historically is based in a firm commitment that we only ever know the past from our current place and moment. This knowing is personal, embodied, and also structurally informed. And it often hurts. Finally, the past is never resolved and can continue to introduce ways of thinking that are surprising, if we let them be.

Pee-wee’s Downtown Scene

The first season of Pee-wee’s Playhouse was shot in a “filthy,” un-airconditioned loft repurposed as a soundstage in SoHo, Manhattan, located one floor above a working textile factory the crew describes as a “sweat shop.”5 When the show became a hit, production moved to Los Angeles, along with the writers and production designers. In 1986, SoHo was in transition from an arts district, driven by artist-led conversions of postindustrial lofts into cheap live-work spaces in the 1960s, to a site of developer-backed real estate speculation that turned the neighborhood into a high-end retail district and displaced those same artists to other neighborhoods.6 In the era of Pee-wee, the SoHo loft landscape was no longer gritty and experimental, but it was still the gallery district and there were vestiges of that earlier moment. Playhouse set designer Wayne White was a downtown New York artist working side gigs as a puppeteer when he joined the show. White describes his vision for entering the Playhouse as defying the laws of time and dimensionality to joyfully encounter another world, like teleporting into a rich Kodachrome scene depicted on a Viewmaster slide or jumping into the sidewalk drawings in the Disney film Mary Poppins (1964).7

White estimates that about 80 percent of the art department had no experience working in television—they were friends or other artists invited to the gig. Writer George McGrath relates that several of the show’s writers were gay and that this made them “eager to flip expectations,” drawing on a “gay-ish” sense of humor to write jokes that were “sort of in the gay world.”8 Together, the writers, designers, puppeteers, and actors worked to imagine what the playhouse would look like, sculpt the cast of puppets and give them voices, and generate a structure for each episode, all while deeply embedded in New York’s downtown scene in 1986. White says, “It was downtown New York funky, and I think those conditions and that context lent a lot of the soul to that first season, because we were all just a bunch of downtown New York artists, working in a loft, making a fake ‘kiddie’ show.”9

Part of that context was HIV/AIDS, which by 1986 was already decimating the downtown New York artist scene. State refusal to acknowledge and fund HIV/AIDS research and treatment, or to care for those who were sick and dying, meant that networks of mutual aid sprung up in the most impacted communities. So did direct-action activism aimed at demanding accountability for the racism and homophobia behind widespread social abandonment of queer, trans, Black, and brown communities most affected by HIV/AIDS. The AIDS crisis was an engine driving new regimes of sex-negative, antigay, and antidrug discourse. The same year Pee-wee’s Playhouse began, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick upheld the criminalization of oral and anal sex by some states as constitutionally just.

Over the course of its run, as the 1980s chugged onward, Pee-wee’s Playhouse became a thirty-minute place of respite from stigma and the violence of being left to die that many adult queer fans of the show were navigating outside the playhouse (about one-third of the show’s weekly audience was adults). The confluence between the playhouse’s beginnings in downtown Manhattan’s and then Los Angeles’s queer lifeworlds in the early years of the North American AIDS crisis is not part of the documented history of the show. In thinking these scenes together, I am speculating, imagining what it might have felt like to create something so full of queer life at a time when so many queer people were sick and dying and the world responded with cruelty and carelessness.

Looking Back Together

Looking back at Pee-wee from the present isn’t a task I’ve taken on by myself. When I tell people I’m writing a book about Pee-wee Herman, they offer stories about what the show meant to them as kids that are much heavier than memories of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (or for Canadian readers, Mr. Dressup). My neighbor Karen Lum is a butch dyke, plumber, and longtime East Vancouver drummer around my age. When small things break in our building—door handles, a rhododendron that collapsed in a snowstorm—Karen fixes them. She is a self-aware parody of a Judy-on-Duty, in the best way. Karen and her partner Katie were over for a drink at my place one night when she saw my Pee-wee doll sitting on my desk, a talisman I wrote with. Karen had her own Pee-wee doll when she was a kid. We got to talking about the book, and I told her I was interested in how queer people who were kids when Pee-wee’s Playhouse first aired remember the show today and, more specifically, how their understanding of Reubens’s arrest has shifted over time, as they went from being children to adults.

This seemed to land for Karen as a question she understood in a deep and even embodied way: her face fell a bit as I spelled it out. Karen’s Pee-wee story was loving the show as a kid but feeling a little bit ashamed for liking it. Affinity for Pee-wee betrayed something about her difference in her family that she didn’t want revealed just yet. Enjoyment of Pee-wee is an encounter with difference that is also affective in retrospect—a mediated experience of returning to scenes of low-key alienation from the heteronormative family. This alienation might be ongoing to different degrees depending on the specific flavor of rejection from family of origin one is still dealing with.

Other recollections shared with me have been sweet. My friend Robin Simpson, an educator, curator, and all-around gentle soul told me about his father’s renovation of his family’s unfinished basement into a rec room in the late 1980s. Dad asked Robin what color to paint the walls and Robin said to paint it “like Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” Robin’s father interpreted this request as beige, which, to be fair, is a color that appears on some playhouse walls, though always as the background to a loud wallpaper pattern. The painting gesture meant something to Robin, even in its failure, and says something about basements as their own kind of off-space where clandestine things can happen. Talking with Robin, I got to recount Reubens’s own story, told in several media interviews, of his dad building a basement cabaret stage for him when he was small.

Reubens’s untimely death from cancer at age seventy hit me by surprise in the summer of 2023, while this book manuscript was out for review. I was visiting my parents in Ontario when the story broke. Miles from any queer community to grieve with, I scrolled through my phone compulsively, reading tributes to Reubens and texting with heartbroken friends and colleagues. A litany of grown-up queer kids and weirdos took to Twitter and Instagram to commiserate about how lucky we were to have been guests in Reubens’s coded house of possibility. Despite the differences between us—of race, class, geography, and more—Pee-wee’s Playhouse had held us for thirty minutes each week, and now it was holding us together again. Reubens’s work had offered a glimpse of safety and the promise of something like belonging and love. Most moving to me were the comments by other queer comedians about how Reubens’s work had shaped their own. Scott Thompson from Kids in the Hall, Dynasty Handbag of Los Angeles’s iconic Weirdo Night, and many others shared personal stories about a friend and mentor who gave them enthusiastic permission to make delightfully weird, gay art, and always remembered to call them on their birthdays.

Talking with my friends and social network about how they remember Pee-wee Herman is a “bad” research method. There’s nothing here resembling evidence or a series of steps that could be taught in my department’s methodology seminar. I want this queer media theory of Pee-wee to help others grapple with hard questions about what we value or take to matter when we do media history. There is still much to be learned and felt by sticking with Pee-wee.

This book about Pee-wee Herman, the phenomenon, is set in the context of a speculative looking back through the lens of media and kinship. Media include the television show and news coverage of Reubens’s arrest. Media also structure the various spaces that form the context for this story, including the playhouse as a home to computational, networked characters who are actually puppets, and the porn theater as a threatened, sacred space for intimacy and connection through porn watching and public sex. The kinship I’m talking about is how “we,”—by which I mean queer and queer-adjacent folks who have found connection with Pee-wee, past or present—hold on to all these things in our memories, or in the case of talking Pee-wee dolls, our homes. The ways we do this, and the reasons why, are entries to thinking about queerness as a future-oriented but also retrospective constellation shaped in and through media, within political conditions often designed to extinguish our flourishing.