Paul Reubens Comes Out as Gay Posthumously in Pee-wee Doc

Paul Reubens, the actor behind the iconic Pee-wee Herman character, has come out as gay — a year and a half after he died.

The New York Post reports that Reubens, who died of cancer at 70 in July 2023, sat with director Matt Wolf for 40 hours across a year to document the story of his life and career for the two-part HBO doc series "Pee-wee as Himself," which premiered Thursday at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Though Reubens never publicly confirmed he was gay, in the interviews, he talks about wanting "people to see who I really am."

He says before he became a household name as Pee-wee Herman, the manic boy-man who hosted a popular Saturday-morning kids' show for years, he was in a relationship with a man named Guy from the Echo Park neighborhood of L.A. It was Guy's strange way of speaking that first inspired Reubens to create Pee-wee.

According to Reubens, Guy would say stuff like, "Mmmm! Buttery!" in a Yoda accent. "You can see where that led me," he cracks.

Guy later died of AIDS "a couple hours" after Reubens last visited him.

Back when he was a Groundlings comic, Reubens was actually openly gay, but that changed as he began to find fame. Fearing his sexual orientation would be held against him and dim his chances of accomplishing anything, he did a 180.

“I was out of the closet, and then I went back in the closet,” he says matter-of-factly in the doc. “I wasn’t pursuing the Paul Reubens career, I was pursuing the Pee-wee Herman career.”

Even though he stayed mum while people gossiped, he confirms he had "many, many secret relationships."

“I was secretive about my sexuality even to my friends [out of] self-hatred or self-preservation,” he continues in the series. “I was conflicted about sexuality. But fame was way more complicated.”

Reubens also hid behind a "huge" weed habit.

Things took a turn for the worse when the Pee-wee character wore thin, leading to a flop movie sequel and a shocking 1991 arrest in a porn theater. "All of a sudden, I had a Charlie Manson mug shot," he recalls, referencing the notoriously grungy image of the fallen idol. "I lost control of my anonymity. It was devastating.”

Though he recovered from that scandal, he was plunged into another when a 2001 raid of his home led to child-porn charges. By then in a better place mentally, he successfully fought the worst of the charges by pointing out the vintage erotica in question was also held in college collections, winding up pleading guilty to obscenity.

He went on to a successful run on Broadway and many years of sold-out shows, plus memorable appearances on TV and in the 2016 movie threequel "Pee-wee's Big Holiday."

Though, as Variety reports, Reubens and the doc's director battled over who would control the film's content and thrust, and that Reubens did not want it to be about his legacy, that is exactly what it wound up being once he died in 2023.

Ultimately, Reubens states in the series, “Everything I did and wrote was based in love."

"Pee-wee as Himself" will stream on HBO later this year.