Paul Reubens Did Nothing Wrong

You read that right.

Of course Paul Reubens wasn’t perfect. After watching the new “Pee-Wee Herman as Himself” documentary and seeing him admit to treating people in ways he wasn’t always proud of, it might seem comical to claim that Paul did nothing wrong, but, well, that’s my claim and I’m sticking by it.

If you don’t plan on seeing it, or if you have already seen it and need a reminder, here’s the short and sweet of it: Paul didn’t have kiddie porn in his house. He didn’t walk into a movie theater, whip out his dick, and spray his juice everywhere.

So I’ll say it again: PAUL REUBENS DID NOTHING WRONG.

Of course, all cards on the table, I am about as strong and devoted a fan of Pee-Wee and Paul as one can possibly be. My bias is baked-in at this point, and not going anywhere.

I was born in 1980, which means I was five years old when “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” hit the big screen. I can still quite literally remember the night my parents told me the next day we were going “off the hill” to Victorville to see it, my five year old heart bounding with joy as I raced toward the shower to get ready for my own big cinematic adventure the next day. For weeks and months I had been going around using his catchphrases, and generally admiring him, so this was a seminal moment in my life, to say the least.

When “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” debuted about a year later, I would watch it every single Saturday morning until the show finally went off the air. The documentary only solidified in my mind that, thanks to his thoughtful approach, Paul was my generation’s Fred Rogers, which is even more fantastic to me because “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was the other place in my life that a strong but empathetic man would tell me every time he saw me that my feelings were okay, and that he liked me, no matter how “weird,” or “different” I was.

Being raised in a very hardcore evangelical Christian home, I am not sure I picked up on any LGTBQ-coded messaging in the show, and I know if my parents had they would have banned it. But it makes me so sad to think that Paul had to climb into the closet for me. Not just for me, for the millions and millions of his fans — young and old — who cherished and loved him. Those same evangelicals he was trying to pacify by keeping his true self hidden from us behind a checkered gray suit and red bow tie would be the ones who crucified him later, just another reason that I remain happily apostatical with the church.

“Pee-Wee as Himself” brilliantly lays out the deep, personal sacrifices Paul made to become an icon. He shouldn’t have had to put himself in the closet and he damn sure shouldn’t have been railroaded by a puritanical crusade to punish him for, again, doing nothing wrong. I believe him when he says he wasn’t even touching himself in the theater when he was arrested.

Why do I believe him?

Because ACAB, that’s why. And if cops would lie about anything, they’d lie about what they saw in a gay movie house in the early 90’s in order to have themselves a trophy arrest. Looking at it now, it seems comical that they’d imply this man, who was so closeted he became his alter-ego, would just whip his cock out and start stroking it in public, but so many people believe that bullshit to this day.

Almost nothing angers me about what I learned in the documentary than finding out part of his settlement of the absolutely bogus scandal over alleged kiddie porn was that Paul had to agree to register as a sex offender. He couldn’t have unsupervised visits with children, even kids of friends who loved and adored and trusted him. One of the most beloved children’s show hosts of all time, reduced to innuendo and rumor and lies because, once again, ACAB.

Paul’s lawyer said she has had to see actual child porn in her line of work, and nothing in his collection was anything of the sort. For the rest of his life, this man, this fucking hero to a generation, was labeled a pedophile by right-wing religious extremists. You can go ahead and add that to the litany off offenses they’ve committed that, in my mind, make them as viciously evil as any group of humans to ever exist.

It struck me as I watched the film that I must’ve known and connected with Paul on a deep level from an early age, without realizing how or why. But it’s clear to me that I’ve always been drawn to people who can throw themselves into characters they’ve created so well that the public starts to believe those personas are the real person. Andy Kaufman and his wrestling phase, for example, or well, Andy and his Tony Clifton character. On some level, it explains my being drawn to acting and comedy so early on…because I too wanted to be someone who could and would slip into those alter-egos whenever I wanted to.

It feels good to know I’m not the only one who felt that connection to Paul. It seems to be one of the things that binds his fans together. His willingness to explore the weird and silly, and to encourage us to do the same, was a gift of love to the world, and instead of being a lifetime hero for it, like Fred Rogers, he was crucified, vilified, and lied about for more than three decades.

The world needs to restore Paul Reubens’ reputation to what it was before the porn theater incident. It needs to reckon with its ability to tear down and destroy everything that is good when it feels like it doing so. The world needs to come back to Paul Reubens, and give him a big hug and thank him for the enormous contribution he made to making an entire generation of kids more creative, and more loving of themselves and their fellow human beings.

Paul Reubens did nothing wrong, and really did everything that mattered right. I’ll go to my own grave believing that. You’re entitled to call me a “naive and myopic fanboy” over it if you want to, and I’d only be able to respond as best I could.

I know you are, but what am I?