By Rachael Price
Nowadays, one does not usually understand the term “manchild” to be a compliment. Whereas it once denoted a young person who had to deal with adult challenges early in life, such as the autobiographical protagonist of Claude Brown’s landmark Civil Rights-era novel Manchild in the Promised Land, it now tends to invoke images of adult men who refuse to take on grown-up responsibilities, like the subject of Sabrina Carpenter’s massive pop hit called…You guessed it: “Manchild”! And yet, I can say honestly and without equivocation that the media figure who had the most profound and inspirational effect on my own coming of age was a true manchild.
This particular manchild seemed ageless, with the body of a man but the wardrobe of an overgrown boy. He seemingly lived in a house on his own (at least, not with any other humans), but his days were spent in childish pursuits such as playing pretend, watching cartoons, or preparing such cultured cuisine as fruit salad and ice-cream soup. Yes, that’s right—I’m talking about the one and only Pee Wee Herman.
Pee Wee was a true cultural phenomenon for us Xennials as children in the 1980s. Some loved him; some hated him. But one thing was clear: unless you were living completely off the grid, you could not avoid him. Paul Reubens, the man behind the manchild, came up with the character while performing with the famed Los Angeles-based improv comedy group the Groundlings in the late 1970s. In that first iteration, Pee Wee was a stand-up comedy performer who was not actually good at telling jokes and just relied on showing various toys and gadgets to the crowd. In 1979, Reubens appeared as a contestant on The Dating Game in character as Pee Wee, a move that not only garnered some publicity but also began an association between Reubens and Herman that was so intense that it was often hard to tell exactly where the character ended and Paul began; for the next decade, Reubens’s public appearances were almost all in character as Pee Wee, a move that only added to the quirky persona’s mystique.
After an unsuccessful SNL audition, Reubens expanded Pee Wee’s scope by making him the star of a late-night stage show at the Groundlings Theatre on Melrose Avenue. The appeal of The Pee Herman Show, as it was called, was hard to categorize; in fact, perhaps that is why it had such appeal. The audience now was able to see Pee Wee’s home, a playhouse that hearkened back to classic children’s television shows from the 1950s, but with a style (largely due to the work of artist/set designer Gary Panter) that showcased a punk-rock edge. Noted Reubens, “We mashed up punk, art, and comedy in a subversive way that had never been done before.” In an era when so much of entertainment, especially television entertainment, was siloed into distinct categories, the show defied categorization. Rather than being a television program inspired by the theatre, it was a live stage show inspired by television. It was a late-night show for adults inspired some of the most beloved stars of children’s TV. It was quirky and subversive, but a true moral message still shone through the story. Word spread quickly and it became a cult sensation. It soon grew too big for the Groundlings and was moved to the Roxy in West Hollywood. It was a version of the Roxy show that aired as a special on the then-fledgling HBO network in 1981, followed by a national tour.
The success of The Pee Wee Herman Show propelled Reubens to team up with a then 26-year-old Tim Burton to create the 1985 feature film Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. With a script authored by Reubens, along with future SNL star Phil Hartman and screenwriter Michael Varhol, the film version of Pee Wee’s story relates the character’s quest across the United States as he searches for his stolen bike. This Pee Wee was more family-friendly fare than the late-night stage show, and became an instant classic with both older and younger Gen Xers. Film critic Roger Ebert noted that “Pee Wee has created a whole fairy tale universe as consistent and fascinating as Alice in Wonderland, or the world of the hobbits or The Lord of the Rings. Pee Wee’s Big Adventure is one of those movies like The Wizard of Oz…that kids could look at in one state of mind, while the grown-ups enjoy it on a completely different level.” It had quickly become clear that a large part of the character’s appeal was his ability to create his own quirky, magical world where one could enjoy both the wonder of childhood and the autonomy of adulthood at the same time.
This winning formula soon led to Pee Wee’s own Saturday-morning show on CBS. Pee-Wee’s Playhouse was where I, and most of my microgeneration, really became familiar with Reubens’s work. The show first debuted days after my eighth birthday, and my brother and I were immediately hooked. It quickly became a staple of our Saturday-morning television consumption, right after Garfield and Friends. A huge part of its appeal, of course, was that it was so unlike any of those other kids’ shows. I grew up in a conservative Christian household and attended Catholic school, and so much of my education to that point had been focused on following the rules and obeying. But Pee Wee seemed to live in a world where the rules didn’t apply. He is somehow a kid and a grown-up at the same time. He can’t drive a car, but he can fly. He has a live-in genie who routinely grants wishes for him, but his wishes are often altruistic in nature. He’s nice to his friends (most of the time), but his behavior is all of his own volition; there is no one looking over him or enforcing any rules.
Now, as a middle-aged adult, I can see that this kind of tension was integral to the show’s success. In one way or another, all of its important parts were based on familiar characters and concepts from children’s television, but in the world of the playhouse they each had a different twist, something that didn’t quite fit with “the rules.” Pee Wee was the manchild protagonist. His friend Miss Yvonne (played by the brilliant and underrated Lynne Marie Stewart, who died earlier this year) is supposed to be “the most beautiful woman in Puppetland.” (Though the specifics of Puppetland are never discussed in the show, it appears to be the larger community in which the playhouse is located.) Yet her beauty is not of the same brand as it is in most children’s television, where numerous female characters are literal princesses and classic beauty still seems to be a precursor to main-character status. Instead, Miss Yvonne’s expression of beauty is so over the top as to be almost a parody, with her huge bouffant hair (a style considered kitschy at best, if not ridiculously outdated, in the 1980s), thick coats of makeup, and a frilly, fancy dress for even the most mundane of activities. By the time they start watching Saturday-morning cartoons, most American girls have already learned to compare themselves to others, but with Miss Yvonne I never felt like I couldn’t match up. Instead I thought, if she can be that goofy and weird and over the top and still be considered beautiful, then I can too.
Pee Wee and Miss Yvonne were far from the only characters to display this refreshing brand of iconoclasm. Friend Cowboy Curtis was a clear throwback to the cowboy heroes of midcentury television—but with several key differences. Unlike most of the TV cowboys of yesteryear, Cowboy Curtis was a black man (played by none other than the brilliant Laurence Fishbourne). His personal style also pushed back against popular notions of frontier masculinity, as he sported a Jheri Curl hairstyle, lots of pink and purple, and enough sparkles to shine as bright as any campfire. Children of our generation were amply familiar with the staid middle-aged white man as the friendly neighborhood mail carrier (such as, say, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood’s Mr. McFeely) but S. Epatha Merkerson’s Reba the Mail Lady enhanced our ideas of the postal service. Not only was she a woman of color, but she was able to always keep a level head and give Pee Wee practical advice while also indulging his frequent flights of fancy. Tito, the buff Latino lifeguard from the first season, and his replacement Ricardo, an athlete of similarly sculpted proportions, showcased ethnic diversity and also, to knowing adults in the audience, an unmistakable nod to a queer aesthetic. Friendly neighbor Mrs. Rene was a plus-size Jewish woman. There was no one who really fit the physical ideals of 1950s nostalgia that the show continually invoked, and yet Puppetland was just as wholesome and joyful a place, if not more so, than any relic of the past.
Looking back now, I realize not just how much I enjoyed this world, but how much it taught me. While the Playhouse was not billed as educational programming per se, it was through that show that I learned one of life’s most important lessons: that it’s okay to be yourself. In fact, not only is it okay to be yourself; it’s okay to be weird. The wackiness was not only funny—it was exhilarating. Freeing, even. Each episode had a new “secret word” that would be revealed at the beginning, and whenever any character uttered that word, Pee Wee invited the audience to join him and fellow characters and “scream real loud!” My brother and I would literally scream at the TV from our living room, and I’m sure that our parents must have wondered what was going on, but it was so thrilling to have that kind of permission. So much of children’s education is focused on learning rules and manners; it felt like we were always being told to sit down and be quiet. Pee Wee’s Playhouse taught us that it was okay to be loud and proud, even if just for thirty minutes a week.
As I learned in the recent HBO documentary Pee Wee as Himself, Paul Reubens was not able to be as loud and proud as his beloved on-screen counterpart. As many had long suspected, the film confirms that he was gay. “I hid behind an alter ego,” he says earnestly to the camera. “I was secretive about my sexuality to even my friends.” The pressure to remain in the closet took on an added layer of exigence as he became a star of children’s television in the Reagan era. Looking back, there is something both ironic and heartbreaking about this brand of sacrifice. Speaking of his early days as a queer performance artist, Reubens notes, “I was as out as you can be, and then I went back in the closet. My career would’ve absolutely suffered if I was openly gay, so I went to great lengths for many, many years to keep it a secret.” And yet, it was through the guise of this tightly controlled persona that he brought a message of freedom and confidence to so many young people.
He seemingly lost control, though, after his 1991 arrest for indecent exposure at an adult theater in his hometown of Sarasota, Florida. I was twelve years old—just old enough to really understand what the incident was about. And while I still loved Pee Wee’s Playhouse and tuned in every Saturday morning until it was abruptly yanked off the air, the backlash all around me suggested what I was already learning to be true at that confusing time in my life: there was such a thing as being too free. Rules were there for a reason. Conformity was essential for living a good life. Those who dared transgress these boundaries probably did so because they were “perverts” or “deviants,” to use terms I heard all the time back then from various authority figures in my life. As I floundered into adolescence, the loud and proud voice inside me became quieter and more self-conscious. Sexuality was barely on my radar then, but I was still terrified by the possibility that I, too, could one day lose control.
The documentary shows us that Reubens always maintained that all that he was guilty of that night was being in the theater, and it seems pretty clear in 2025 that he was the victim of what was basically a gay sting operation. The theater where he was arrested was a well-known gay hangout, and the idea of a being a gay man on children’s television didn’t sit well with many Americans at that time. This same prejudice came into play again in 2002, when the press reported that “child pornography” had been confiscated at Reuben’s home. The district attorney’s office spent a year combing through his vast collection of vintage homoerotic art and found no images depicting children. Reubens eventually pled guilty to a misdemeanor obscenity charge to avoid having to go to trial while caring for his dying father.
“This was a homophobic witch hunt,” says his publicist, Kelly Bush Novak. “You know, there’s a trope, obviously, that’s quite dangerous about pedophilia and the LGBTQ community. It goes on today.” While characterizations of gay men as inherently predatory were commonplace in the McCarthy era, one would think that such damaging stereotypes would have been fully eradicated by now. And yet even today, queer and trans people are often labeled “groomers” when they insist on being accepted in all social spheres in the same ways that straight and cis people are. Child sexual abuse is a horrific and real problem in our world, and only a sociopath would argue otherwise. Thus such accusations can often evoke a kind of straw-man problem, where those accused remain silent rather than speak up and risk drawing any attention to the idea that they could be involved in such a thing. Consequently, silencing alternative viewpoints on the grounds of “protecting children” has become a remarkably powerful strategy for maintaining the status quo.
This feeling of injustice permeates the last thirty minutes or so of the documentary. Wolf has said that Reubens basically ghosted him when it came to talking about the allegations on camera, and for a long time he feared that the film would never actually materialize. Then, in the most moving part of the entire story, we learn that Reubens made a voice recording for the documentary on the day before he died. As the audio plays, we hear a noticeably weak Paul Reubens explain how the difficult the accusations were for him until the very end, and how painful it was to be labeled a monster when all he wanted was to bring joy and laughter to his audience, children and adults alike. That part got me. I started to cry. I cried for Reubens, and I cried for myself. I cried for all the nonconformists who dared to spread their wings, only to have them clipped. I know that I am only one of thousands of people of my generation who owe a debt of gratitude to Pee Wee’s Playhouse for showing them that it was okay to be their authentic selves. It may be the most important lesson that one can learn in this life. And it all came in the form of a manchild.
About Rachael Price
Rachael Price teaches English at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia.
Her work has appeared in The Middle West Review, MidAmerica, The North Carolina Literary Review, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Transitions Abroad, and elsewhere.
She also sometimes blogs over at Tears of Eden, a website and support resource for survivors of spiritual abuse and religious trauma.
She spends a good portion of her free time thinking of ways to have less free time.
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