As I was watching HBO's new two-part documentary, Pee-wee as Himself, I couldn't help but feel like I was watching history repeat itself.
The two-part documentary series, directed by Matt Wolf, was filmed over the years leading up to Paul Reubens's death from cancer in 2023 at the age of 70. It features footage pieced together from 40 hours of interviews with the legendary actor, comedian, and children's entertainer.
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While the first episode covers Reubens's rise as an artist and how he came up with the character known as Pee-wee Herman, the second episode starts to chart his fall from grace, which included a 1991 arrest for "indecent exposure" at an adult movie theater and a 2001 police investigation for possession of child sexual abuse material.
Reubens's 1991 arrest for "indecent exposure" in an adult movie theater in Hollywood, FL became a major news story that immediately changed his career from one of the most beloved children's entertainers in the world to a pariah. As a result, Reubens also lost his anonymity, as photographs of the performer (not dressed as his Pee-wee persona) were published in various publications alongside headlines labeling him as a sexual deviant.
Reruns of Pee-wee Herman's show were taken off the air. One clip in the documentary showed comedian Sam Kinison calling for Reubens to be "executed" for his activities "because he was involved with children." Children's entertainer Soupy Sales also appeared in the documentary arguing, "We do not like our children hanging out or having anything to do with perverts."
It's hard to imagine it in 2025, when porn is accessible from every phone. But when Reubens was arrested, porn was less widely available, and it was a common culture for men to masturbate during screenings of many adult theaters. In most places, these acts were technically illegal, but law enforcement generally looked the other way.
Beyond his act as Pee-wee Herman, Reubens had been known as a collector of many kitsch, camp, and vintage items. In 2001, police came to his house to investigate his art collection on a tip that he owned child sexual abuse materials. During said investigation, police found vintage homoerotic art and examined hundreds of thousands of photos, magazines, and films of archival gay erotica — some of which Reubens had reportedly not even opened yet.
In the end, no pornographic materials containing underage people were discovered. "I could find the exact collections in some of the biggest universities in the country in their LGBT archives," attorney Blair Berk says in the documentary. "I had defended folks in child pornography cases, and this was just not child pornography. This was a homophobic witch hunt. You know, there's a trope that's quite dangerous about pedophilia and the LGBTQ community. It goes on today."
The district attorney investigating the case decided that no charges should be filed. However, Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, who had political aspirations, decided he would file one count of misdemeanor child pornography.
"Delgadillo was the newly elected city attorney," Berk says in Pee-wee as Himself. "He was very ambitious and had announced that he was particularly focused on child abuse issues. It was increasingly clear to us that this was a political case. Had Paul been a regular citizen, none of this attention would have been given to him."
Ultimately, to avoid a public trial, Reubens pleaded guilty to an obscenity charge. He was forced to go to mandatory counseling, couldn't have unsupervised contact with children, and he had to register as a sex offender for three years.
Reubens's friend, Allison Berry, who worked on several Pee-wee projects and raised her daughter around Reubens for her entire life, said she had to sign a letter saying it was okay for Reubens to be alone with her children.
And yet, the damage was done, and Reubens never fully recovered from the scandal.
We're now seeing the echoes of that "witch hunt" in the modern treatment of drag queens, trans people, and authors of books (with queer themes) that were written for children and young adults. Right-wing pundits and politicians are once again claiming that they don't want "perverts" in kids' media — though, by their definition, anyone who is gay is labeled a "pervert," and any storyline deemed "gay" is interpreted as "obscene."
Police aren't just raiding vintage erotica collections; they're raiding school libraries. They're not just banning erotic magazines that show naked young men; they're banning children's books, comics, and any other published works that talk about being gay or trans in any positive or neutral way. One book was classified as sexually explicit material solely because the author's last name was Gay.
Memoirs about queer celebrities figuring out their sexualities are being called pornography. Young adult novels with two boys exploring their love are called pornography. Parents who take children to drag shows, even if they are in a library with a drag queen dressed like Mother Goose reading nursery rhymes, are said to be exposing their children to sex.
This new, modern-day witch hunt is only becoming more popular. Now, it's not just city and state legislatures passing these laws; President Trump is promoting similar ideas on the national level.
In the documentary The Librarians, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival alongside Pee-wee as Himself, school librarians from states like Texas and Florida talk about how they've lost their jobs, faced verbal hate, and were threatened with physical violence for letting children check out books like All Boys Aren't Blue and And Tango Makes Three.
Those librarians weren't giving children erotic materials. They were allowing young people to read books about a penguin with two dads.
'And Tango Makes Three' by Justin Richardson.YouTube/Simon Kids
This is the sad and scary progression of the kind of witch hunt Reubens was the victim of. It is now even easier for that rhetoric to start, and much more likely for it to ruin a person's life.
Toward the end of this two-part HBO documentary, Reubens opened up about what it felt like to be accused of such a heinous crime while doing nothing abnormal. "The moment someone labeled me as, I'm just gonna say it, a 'pedophile,' I knew it was going to change everything moving forward and backwards," he explained. "I wanted to talk about and have some understanding of what its like to be labeled a pariah, to have people scared of you or unsure of you or untrusting. Or to look at what your intentions are through some kind of filter that's not true."
Reubens added, "I wanted people to understand that occasionally, where there is smoke, there isn't always fire. I wanted people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love and my desire to entertain and bring glee and creativity to young people and to everyone."
In a world where lawmakers have smoke machines that can cloud one's vision and interpretation of queer media, many other lives and careers are bound to be ruined due to false accusations intended to censor talent and works by people in the LGBTQ+ community.
Pee-wee as Himself is now streaming on HBO Max.
