2. The Porn House

Misremembering Media

I want to think about Pee-wee’s Playhouse refracted through another scene: the very public, near career-ending scandal Paul Reubens went through after his 1991 arrest for masturbating inside a porn theater in Sarasota, Florida. While working on this research, I’ve asked many tail-end Gen Xers and Geriatric Millennials (those born from roughly 1978–85) who were childhood Pee-wee Herman fans what they remember about the Reubens sex scandal: what they gleaned from the news, or schoolyard, or what their parents told them.1 I encourage readers who were kids in North American in the late 1980s to reflect on what you remember before reading on.

Most people say that they thought Reubens had done something really bad involving children. For sexuality studies scholar Gayle Rubin, sex panic about adults with children was the most prolific “tactic for stirring up erotic hysteria” in the late twentieth century, often tied to homophobia.2 The 1980s saw a widespread moral panic in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom about child sexual abuse, accompanied by sensationalized media coverage of this issue and the construction of a new category of “sexual predator.” Historian Philip Jenkins argues that this moral panic was “fueled by antihomosexual sentiment” designed to reverse the social progress made by gay and lesbian movements by locating “child molester” on the same discursive continuum of perversion and deviance as consensual gay sex between adults.3 Anita Bryant’s antigay crusades in Florida during the 1970s set up the conditions for this slippage, as Bryant’s rhetoric relied on claims that gay men had predilections for child pornography and were often involved in organized pedophile rings. Reubens’s banal trip to the porn theater took place within a sex-panicked, antigay context and traded in his day job as a children’s entertainer to further stigmatize him.

Rumours circulated that Reubens was masturbating at a regular Cineplex movie theater or even a screening of a Disney film. As disinformation circulated through newspaper opinion columns, late-night talk show jokes, celebrity gossip news, around water coolers, and in schoolyards, some people came to believe that Reubens had molested a kid or exposed himself to a kid. In fact, he was accused of doing something quite ordinary for many men, especially queer men, something that should be legal because it isn’t hurting anyone.

There are a few reasons why the Reubens sex scandal was so misunderstood in its time and is so misremembered today. First, this scandal happened in the early 1990s, at the height of puritanical AIDS-phobia as it destroyed the public sex cultures that made queer life joyful. This porn theater was patrolled and raided regularly by the Sarasota County Sherriff, and so were similar theaters, bathhouses, and backrooms across the United States and Canada in the early 1990s.4 Often these systematic raids were justified by claims that these were spaces where HIV spread unchecked (sex that isn’t solo in porn theaters is typically low risk, involving mutual masturbation or blow jobs). Second, Reubens’s proximity to children as the actor who played Pee-wee Herman shaped the arrest story. This was, after all, the death knell of the 1980s panic over ritualized child sexual abuse. Audiences had a hard time distinguishing between Pee-wee and Reubens because Reubens was always in character, committed to the bit.

News framing traded in the incongruity between Reubens’s trip to the porn theater and Pee-wee’s squeaky-clean public image. An Associated Press wire story interviewed psychologists on how parents should talk to their kids about the scandal. It was reproduced widely in United States and Canadian newspapers and included the advice, “If a child asks why Herman exposed himself, the parent can answer that he does not know, but that it was wrong.”5 This advice assumes that parents want to avoid honesty with their children in a favor of a moralizing tone about sex, and conflates Reubens the actor with Herman the character (Herman did not expose himself—he is fictional).

The widespread refusal to distinguish between Reubens and Herman was critiqued by Joel Achenbach, staff writer for the Washington Post, writing under the headline “The Kiddie Star and the Ancient Taboo”:

The case is all the more sensational because Paul Reubens is better known as Pee-wee Herman, the TV man-child, entertainer of children, someone presumably sexless, a squeaky-voiced character who cannot be easily reconciled with the disheveled figure who admits that he patronized a porno parlor. . . . Indeed, the average person who has read or heard about it probably thinks the allegation against Pee-wee is something much worse—flashing perhaps. He was, after all, charged with “exposing himself” in public, which raises the image of a guy in a raincoat prowling outside a schoolyard. The moral of the story so far, to judge from office banter for the past couple of days, is that Pee-wee’s a pervert.6

I quote Achenbach at length because he summarizes the salacious tactics and slides in meaning news media used to construct this scandal: the use of the term “kiddie star” evokes the phrase “kiddie porn”; Paul Reubens is Pee-wee Herman, who is sexless and kind of a child; we still don’t know what Reubens did, but it’s probably worse than we think (flashing, prowling outside a schoolyard); Pee-wee (a fictional character who lives in a pretend house that’s actually a soundstage) is the “pervert” here.

Reading through newspaper archives from the summer of 1991 following Reubens’s arrest is heartbreaking. Shame, rejection, and a general tone of reproach seethe from the page. The glee conservative reporters took in bringing Reubens down is palpable. An Associated Press story published widely after the arrest includes a quote from Reubens’s Sarasota lawyer that reads as if he was pleading with the reporter: “He does a lot of things with kids over the world and his career will be over when that story runs.”7 The gay and lesbian and alternative press also covered the story, but from the opposite angle and with outrage: this was a puritanical witch hunt reflective of narrowing sexual values. Articles showcased protests against the arrest in liberal cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco and reframed the scandal as backlash: a scheme to shame queer people back into closets. Michael Bronski explained in Gay Community News, “If Pee-wee Herman was not such an intriguing creation exposing both the absurdity and the harm of traditional sexual and gender arrangements, no one would have cared very much.”8 Gary Panter, the Playhouse production designer and art director, took this one step further in his typical punk style, telling Rolling Stone: “I wish Paul’s arrest could be part of an epic moment in American life, when we finally face sexuality in adulthood and childhood . . . But that won’t happen. The country is still based on titillation and denial.”9

Misrememberings of the Reubens’s porn theater arrest three decades later also conflate Reubens and Pee-wee and confuse masturbating in a semi-public space that’s designed for masturbating with forcibly exposing oneself to children. A 2022 viral twitter thread by FEYA COMIX reads, “Not sure who needs to be reminded of this but: PeeWee Herman was not arrested masturbating at a public theatre. Not like you think. He was at an adult theatre (where masturbation is encouraged) and it was a sting operation targeting queers.”10 Again, Reubens is Pee-wee here, even as the author attempts to correct the record otherwise. Replies include “WAIT WAIT. I thought he was convicted of being a pedophile?”11 and “oh shit i didn’t know this, i was always led to believe it was in a general public cinema where kids could be.”12 Others narrate that their parents explained what happened with more complexity, or that they knew in their guts that he’d done nothing wrong: “My Peewee doll was taken away and VHS tapes destroyed as a kid with no explanation. I was pissed when I got older when I realized my parents overreaction.”13 “I fucking knew pewee herman was still cool, didnt know why i just felt it in my bones.”14 The thread is a long and mostly convivial reflection on queer childhood, media, and nostalgia tinged by reckoning with familial and cultural homophobia in retrospect.

The stories people told and still tell about Reubens’s arrest are sticky, part of why they need revisiting to understand how and why they stick. Their stickiness tells us something about sex negativity, homophobia, gentrification, and AIDS in the early 1990s, but also about how queer people relate to media from the past. I remember learning, sometime in my early twenties, that none of the rumors about Reubens’s arrest were true: he had done nothing wrong and shouldn’t have been arrested. The whole affair—the raid, the news coverage, the aftermath—was about wielding shame to stamp out queer culture by destroying a person who stood very publicly for the most wonderful things about queer people: how we play, delight in the absurd, and are willing to seem “immature” in our workplaces or to our families in pursuit of joy. In the disjuncture between what I thought I knew as a child and what I realized I actually knew as an adult, new knowledge about sex, public culture, and queer life emerges. I started this book at thirty-eight, Reubens’s age at the time of the arrest, convinced that I owe him another turn through the story.

A Biomythography of Reubens in Trouble

Here is what happened at the porn theater the night of July 26, 1991, embellished with some biomythographic detail. Biomythography is a term coined by poet and writer Audre Lorde to tell the story of her early years growing up Black and coming into her queerness in New York City in the 1940s and ’50s.15 It has been taken up more widely as a Black, trans, and queer genre for working with underdeveloped archives to narrate complex lives otherwise circumscribed in memory by epistemologies that can’t account for them. C. Riley Snorton uses this tactic to narrate the life and death of Phillip DeVine, the Black, disabled man who was murdered alongside white trans man Brandon Teena in Humboldt, Nebraska, in 1993. DeVine is eclipsed by the scope, scale, and whiteness of what Jack Halberstam calls “the Brandon archive,” which became the subject of Hollywood biopic Boys Don’t Cry (1999).16 Snorton explains that biomythography is an inventive practice and a genre invested in questions about what was but also what might/will have been. Through biomythography, “past and future give rise to a set of conditions and responses in the present.”17 These are practices of invention that respond to epistemic violence by using undisciplined genres to give a different sort of account. Biomythography does not strive toward reconciliation, but is supplementary, practicing repair in a broken world where repair is not possible.18 In other words, biomythography does not bring a subject into the fold of the systems and modes of thought that circumscribed them in the first place; rather, the genre builds something else altogether, on the side.

Biomythography is a portal toward understanding what happened to Reubens from a queer point of view and toward contextualizing how this scandal’s framing was and is part of a larger constellation of violent rhetoric around nonnormative sexualities and genders, and adult–child relationships, that reaches its pinnacle in state-defined antitrans projects today.

Reubens was in Sarasota, Florida, visiting his parents in the city where he grew up Jewish in the 1950s and ’60s. Reubens’s mom, Judy, and dad, Milton, owned a lamp store called The Lamplighter Shop. Before her children were born, Judy worked as an elementary-school teacher. Milton grew up Orthodox, was broad-chested, very tanned, smoked cigars, and according to Paul, “had a lot of chutzpah.”19 Milton served as a U.S. Air Force pilot during the Second World War, then volunteered to be one of the first five pilots in the newly formed Israeli Air Force in the late 1940s, because he believed so deeply in the state of Israel. Judy was a stay-at-home mom with a sharp sense of humor who took up birdwatching late in life, and trained her Doberman, Carlos, to carry her purse.20 Judy and Milton regularly took Paul and his two siblings to the theater and theme parks, including Disney World, two and a half hours northeast of Sarasota.

Like Pee-wee, Reubens grew up in an eccentric, futuristic house, so notable in its design that the detail is included in Judy’s obituary: “The family found an unconventional home on Sarasota Bay that had been built as a test house by the Navy. Japanese in style, it had a swimming pool in the center and overhead garage doors that opened the house to the outdoors.”21 When Paul was five, Milton built a stage for him in the basement, complete with a lighting rig, curtain, and dressing room. In his old age, Milton wore the same type of glasses frames that Paul wore in his mug shot.

I have a hard time reconciling the violence of Milton’s Zionist military background with building a basement cabaret for his fey son, but people are complicated. Judy and Milton seemed proud of adult Paul, carrying autographed headshots of Pee-wee around with them to show off and give away. The couple appeared as extras in his second feature film, Big Top Pee-wee (1988), and walked the red carpet at his premieres. Reubens has talked about how Sarasota marked his work in a few ways: first, growing up under segregation in South Florida shaped how Pee-wee’s Playhouse was built around central Black characters, such as the King of Cartoons (Glibert Lewis/William Marshall), Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne), and Reba the Mail Lady (S. Epatha Merkerson). Second, Sarasota was the winter home to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, which Reubens went to see a lot.

Paul Reubens visited his family often in Florida. The Sarasota he returned to in 1991 was a much different place than the one he grew up in, built of snowbirds, retirees, and mobile-home parks but with a compelling arts scene too. The South Trail Cinema, where he was arrested, is located next to one of these massive trailer parks. The one-story theater has a suburban vibe and was built in 1972 in the middle of an expansive parking lot. Today, the building is a woman-owned “LGBTQ+ friendly” chain pizzeria called Mellow Mushroom. We used to have porn theaters; now we have gluten-free crusts. According to Cinema Treasures, a website that documents shuttered movie theaters of all kinds across the United States, South Trail was a porn theater that specialized in serving Sarasota’s elderly population. Porn theaters show straight porn to audiences made up primarily of men, gay and straight, some there to watch alone, others cruising for casual hookups or doing sex work for pay. As literary critic and sci-fi author Samuel R. Delany outlines in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, these theaters are critical spaces of cross-class and cross-cultural contact: places of intimate encounter with other queer people who are different from you, whom you would never otherwise meet in your neighborhood or line of work.22 For Delany, this is why they matter as cultural and political spaces that undergird justice-oriented queer communities capable of thinking across different struggles outside the theater.

Porn theaters are their own kind of playhouses: plush, worn-out seating, cruising as a set of informal rules and routines for play, and surprising intimacies with others mediated by what’s on screen. Like the playhouse, porn theaters are also enclosed, interior spaces that offer respite from the harsh world outside. In either enclosure, visitors can be a version of themselves that’s derided outside and find other ways of being in relation. Both places are destinations for kinship and predictable release: going bonkers versus getting off.

Porn theaters and other infrastructures of casual, public sex were gradually dismantled throughout the 1990s under the guise of AIDS-related “public health” measures that were often actually about government support for gentrification and real-estate speculation that displaced queer, Black, and brown residents. In practice this amounted to creating local ordinances and statutes and police suddenly choosing to enforce laws that had long been on the books. The Sarasota police set up sting operations in this porn theater often, sending three or four cops dressed in T-shirts and cutoff jeans to pose as patrons.23 The cops would spend five to six hours in the theater (a questionably long period of time) and arrest a handful of men. The cops threatened to charge the ticket taker working the night of Reubens’s arrest with obstruction of justice if he warned any theatergoers that police were inside.24

Crackdowns on porn theatres matter because they are vital cultural spaces. Delany writes, “Were the porn theaters romantic? Not at all. But because of the people who used them, they were human and functional, fulfilling needs that most of our society does not yet know how to acknowledge. . . . Till 1985 public sex was largely a matter of public decency—that is to say, it was a question of who was or who wasn’t offended by what went on in public venues. Since ’85 for the first time, under a sham concern for AIDS, the acts themselves have been made illegal, even if done with condoms, in a venue where everyone present approves.”25 In Reubens’s case, this crackdown on porn theaters dovetailed with a 1990s celebrity culture fascinated by sex scandals and public shame.

I like to imagine the mood that led Reubens to take time out from Judy and Milton by visiting the local porn theater. Maybe you’ve been there: you love your parents and dutifully visit them in whatever backwards-feeling place you left behind, where they still live. You are happy to see them, but it’s also utterly exhausting and brings up a lot of stuff. At certain points you just want to be alone. Getting off, in a perfectly seedy, low-rise porn theater could be an excellent distraction. Reubens drove there in a Mazda—maybe he paid extra and rented a Miata convertible. He probably didn’t check what was playing at the theater in advance, because something is always playing at the porn theater: the porn just plays, and plays, and plays while the audience rotates in and out of the theater.

There are schedules though. A newly released video called Nurse Nancy (1991) was on at the time of the raid. A muscley man with a blond ponytail has been hospitalized for impotence. He is bedridden by his failure to get an erection. Various bottle-blond, hot nurses with big, teased hair are charged with caring for the impotent man and agree to “help him out” by having sex with him. This is a functional, albeit temporary cure for the man’s impotence and a plot device that calls into question the phenomenon of his impotence in the first place. It’s a typical, boring, straight porn video from the early 1990s, and Reubens, like most of us, had probably seen many others like it before.

Reubens wouldn’t have been recognized by the undercover cop, Detective Watters, because the theater was dark. Besides, Reubens had grown his hair long, about four inches past his shoulders, and had a goatee. He wore oversized, thick, tinted grandpa glasses and a white T-shirt. I know this from the mug shot, which circulated widely in the mainstream news media as the sex scandal blew up. The photograph is notable for the incongruity it presents between Reubens and Pee-wee: while Pee-wee was asexual to the nth degree, this image of Reubens looks down-to-fuck in the best way. As the Wall Street Journal described it, “Pee-wee had lapsed into Paul, a long-haired, goateed lowlife in a T-shirt” and a “sleazoid homeboy,” evoking early ’90s anti-Black rhetoric to further mark his transgression, a reminder that sexuality and gender norms are always formed in relation to racialized violence.26

Arrest Report (July 26, 1991, Friday night)

Probable Cause Affidavit of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department

Det. Watters, an undercover officer, begins to observe the defendant in the porn theater, masturbating “his exposed penis with his left hand” at 20:25. To see the defendant with such detail in the dark theater, Waters must have been seated nearby, perhaps pretending to be interested. Choices about proximity to others in a porn theater including where you sit, who is nearby, how close they are, and the lines of site this establishes can all flag intentions: the geometry of cruising.

The defendant stops masturbating and puts his penis away. Watters sits there for ten more minutes. At 20:35 the defendant, “did again expose his penis and masturbate again” at which point Watters approaches and identifies himself as a detective with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office.

Waters tells the defendant and that he is being placed under arrest for “exposure of sexual organs,” statute 800–03. The defendant is led out of the theater into the lobby and arrested.

—Adapted from Sarasota County Sheriff Department, “Arrest Report,” Sarasota Country Sheriff Department Probable Cause Affidavit, July 26, 1991, http://www.thesmokinggun.com/sites/default/files/assets/peewee16.jpg.

The cops found out Reubens played Pee-wee Herman on TV because he told them as much in a panic once the reality of spending Friday night in a cell set in. He offered to do a fundraiser for the Sheriff’s office if they let him off. “I don’t know why he did that,” Reubens’s lawyer told the press, implying that if the actor had just kept his mouth shut, he would have been released on bail, with a misdemeanor no one needed to know about.27 After Reubens’s disclosure, someone at the station alerted the media, the arrest report was leaked, and the story blew up in the Sunday morning papers.

Reubens’s bond was $219, but he was $22 short. He didn’t call Judy or Milton for the cash, maybe out of shame, maybe because they were old and he didn’t want to bother them. Instead, he asked a high school friend of his sister, a cop, to borrow the money. Corporal Joan Verizzo was later suspended one day without pay for lending Reubens twenty bucks.28 “I made a very small loan to Paul out of loyalty to someone I consider family.”29 Verizzo served the suspension after her maternity leave, which ended that August.

By Sunday, Reubens was on a plane to New Jersey, where he would ride out the worst of the scandal in hiding, on tobacco heiress and philanthropist Doris Duke’s estate. He stayed in a cottage that had just been vacated by Imelda Marcos, corrupt former first lady of the Philippines whose husband Ferdinand Marcos had recently died in exile in Hawai’i.30 Eventually Reubens returned to Hollywood, pleaded no contest to the charges, and returned to work, finding small guest roles and bit parts through the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s. Many people thought CBS canceled Pee-wee’s Playhouse because of the scandal, but the show’s end happened months earlier when Reubens chose not to renew his contract. He was exhausted and ready for a change.

At the end of the show’s final episode, Playhouse for Sale, Pee-wee utters a reassuring goodbye to viewers, seated atop his scooter, poised to ride off for the last time: “the playhouse will always be here, for everyone to play in, for ever, and ever, and ever. On that you have my WORD.”31 The whole playhouse screams together one last time at the secret word (WORD) and Pee-wee blasts through his garage door into the world out there. In response to Reubens’s arrest, CBS canceled Pee-wee’s Playhouse reruns, which meant a broken promise and a significant financial blow for Reubens, who was also the show’s producer. Cultural suppression works, in part, through the restriction of historical knowledge transfer. The playhouse was not there for a subsequent generation of kids who missed out on reruns because CBS cowed to homophobia.32

This biomythography of Reubens in trouble is here to refract my reading of the playhouse toward queer ends. The playhouse was a place of respite and wild self-expression that became unthinkable except in relation to Reubens’s perceived sexual deviance. Drawing a line through an intimate media scene that moves from the character Pee-wee and his public persona to Reubens on a trip home to visit his parents resists the grain of sex negativity through which this story has been previously framed. Here refraction refuses the violence of conflation, moving across the show, its fan cultures, news media, and memory to bend another story from a queer point of view. My own relationship to this story has shaped this inquiry: what it felt like for my favorite childhood television show to become the butt of schoolyard jokes while I was growing up feeling queer and trans without the shape of those concepts to hold me. How we remember and relate to media from the past through our guts matters. So too does context: the early 1990s AIDS-phobic, sex-panicked logics were the conditions of possibility for Reubens’s public destruction. These politics continue in the right-wing discourse of “child grooming” today, where children are the objects of shame and regulation, experiencing sexual and gendered violence, and claustrophobic anxiety as their every gesture is under impossible scrutiny. Part of what we grieve in looking back at Reubens’s arrest and public shaming is the playhouse itself, as a space of uninhibited expression, that offered an earlier generation of kids safety, mutual recognition, and care.