Pee-wee Herman Heads Respond to Paul Reubens ‘Coming Out of the Casket’

Paul Reubens has gone public with his sexuality over a year and a half after he passed away. Pee-wee’s Playhouse is finally done with closets.

To anyone who had been following Reubens’ career since his hit stage show became a TV sensation in the mid-1980s, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Pee-wee Herman Show creator’s personal life was about as non-traditional as his stage persona. In the two-part biographical docu-series Pee-wee as Himself, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night and will make its streaming premiere on Max sometime later in 2025, Reubens cleared the air about his private life, which had been the subject of speculation for decades, during the nearly 40 hours of interviews that he shot with director Matt Wolf before his death in 2023.

Among the many revelations from Pee-wee as Himself was Reubens’ admission that he had been living the secret life of a gay man in show business throughout his career, fearing that coming out would have cost him his many TV shows and movies. As Reubens’ fans explained, this news is less of a shocking revelation than it is a perfect posthumous bit:

While most Pee-wee Herman fans found the news to be anything but breaking, Pee-wee as Himself goes into detail about why exactly Reubens couldn’t go public with his worst-kept secret while he was still with us. In fact, as Reubens explained during the docu-series, he was open about his sexuality for a time — before he recognized the very real threat that industry-wide homophobia posed to his job security. “I was as out as you could be, and then I went back in the closet,” Reubens explained. “My career would have absolutely suffered if I was openly gay, so I went to great lengths for many, many years to keep it a secret.”

In the series, Reubens recalls the always-stressful experience of coming out as gay to his parents, but he was delighted to find them to be hilariously supportive. In Pee-wee as Himself, Reubens remembers a letter that his father wrote to him when he came out of the closet, which contained the message, “Son, if you’re homosexual, I want you to know that I hope you can be the greatest homosexual you can be.”

Wolf spoke to USA Today about his docu-series subject’s bombshell, telling the publication, “Paul told me that he had decided he was ready to come out. … Since he had been extremely private throughout his life, talking about his sexuality was probably the most sensitive thing we had to navigate together.”

“I’m gay and I’ve made several films about queer history, so I empathize with the experiences of artists and entertainers like Paul from different generations,” Wolf explained. “I wanted to let Paul discuss his experience as a gay person and as a closeted person on his own terms, and he did so beautifully.”

While Reubens’ fans may react facetiously to his decision to finally let them into his private life, his posthumous reveal is worth celebrating, as he’s finally able to put his worries about facing homophobia and exclusion to rest along with the rest of his earthly worries.

But, as one fan put it about Reubens’ post-funeral self-outing in a Reddit thread regarding the reveal, “I know you are but what am I?”