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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
We are living through, like, what I think is a very similar moment to the nineteen eighties in terms of the attacks that we're seeing on trans and queer kids.
John Stadler:It was during year one of COVID that I purchased my own Pee Wee Doll and really started to become quite nostalgic for my childhood.
Cait McKinney:Hi, John.
John Stadler:Hey, Kate. How's it going?
Cait McKinney:I'm doing well. Thank you for doing this.
John Stadler:Of course.
Cait McKinney:Looking forward to it.
John Stadler:Absolutely.
Cait McKinney:Let's start by introducing ourselves. So my name is Kate McKinney. I wrote the book, I Know You Are, But What Am I? On Pee wee Herman. I think by the time this podcast comes out, I'll be an associate professor.
John Stadler:Oh, congratulations.
Cait McKinney:Thank you. In the school of communication at, Simon Fraser University. And I work on queer media history, which is kinda how I met you, John.
John Stadler:Yeah. Absolutely. I am John Stadler. I am a an assistant professor of film studies at North Carolina State University, and my research is centered on queer media with a strong focus on pornography, although I'm moving into other realms as well. I'm so excited to be diving into the Pee wee Herman universe with you today.
John Stadler:So, yeah, thank you for including me. I know we've often seen each other at conferences, so it's really lovely to get a chance to kind of talk about your work.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. When when Maggie Sattler at University of Minnesota Press asked who I would wanna do this with, you were the first person who came to mind for a couple of reasons. Like, first, I've always admired your work and your work in the field of queer porn studies. And this book is not a porn studies book per se, but there's a whole chapter about Paul Reuben's arrest for indecent exposure in a, adult cinema, and that's part of part of what we're talking about today. And also when I was presenting on this work at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, you came to the paper and I kinda realized in talking to you after that you were a big Pee wee fan.
Cait McKinney:So it felt like a good match.
John Stadler:Yeah. I was obsessed with the show as a kid. So my my siblings, my my brothers in particular, Saturday morning, we would all race downstairs to watch the cartoons, and my brothers always were watching, you know, like, X Men and Transformers and all these other shows that I I sort of was just this begrudging, viewer of. It was like, my brothers got to pick that. But whenever Pee wee Herman came on, that was that was my show.
John Stadler:And they they often didn't sit to watch it. So my my brothers would leave, and I got to watch Pee wee Herman by myself. And it's only, you know, much later, you know, coming out, in my twenties that I realized what a sort of formative role this show played in in my sort of very early proto queer childhood. Right?
Cait McKinney:Yeah. So, Pee Wee, was your, like, early gay Saturday morning screen time?
John Stadler:It really was. I can't even think of another show that comes close to to being as formative for me. Right? And as just like, it was my safe space to watch this show. Just watching some man boy misbehave and be wacky and have fun felt so comforting to me.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. It was the same for me, and I think so much of what the show did as a, like, queer text was make this kind of world
John Stadler:Yeah.
Cait McKinney:That we could be in. The whole show takes place in the space of Pee wee's playhouse. So it's, like, very contained, and the playhouse is this, like, live action set full of humans and also puppets that's, like, just absolutely wildly styled and quite spectacular and very expensive to produce in a way that you don't see on children's television anymore. Right? Like, shows today, like, Paw Patrol, for example.
Cait McKinney:They're, like, deliberately extremely inexpensive to produce, but this was, like, a high budget kind of world, that we could just, like, spend thirty minutes in every week. And there was something really special about that, I think.
John Stadler:Yeah. It was delightful. A delightful sort of escapist world to explore different possibilities in.
Cait McKinney:I thought, John, I could kick us off by reading the first, page and a half of the book.
John Stadler:I would love that.
Cait McKinney:Though I ought to be done with a television show I loved in the first grade, I can't seem to let go of Pee wee's Playhouse. The show was a portal for a lot of queer kids of my generation who grew up in the nineteen eighties. We could spend Saturday mornings with a hyperactive weirdo in a tight fitting suit who looked and acted a bit gay, transgressed gender norms, but had found friends, safety, and a home of his own to play in like no one mean was watching. Week after week, Pee wee Herman, played by Paul Reumens, arrived in the playhouse, said good morning to his toys and technologies, and played along with viewers at home, children and adults alike. From 1986 to 1990, the thirty minute live action program became one of the most popular children's television programs in history, winning 15 Emmy Awards and inspiring films, merchandise, and a new schoolyard comeback for any insult.
Cait McKinney:Pee wee's catchphrase, I know you are, but what am I, said in a silly nasal voice was used to shut down bullies everywhere. The show landed within an unfolding AIDS crisis that was reshaping sexual politics in The United States and Canada, including through violent homophobic backlash. Against this cultural backdrop, Pee Wee was wacky, wild, and unapologetically himself and he gave audiences permission to be that way too and this mattered in the late 1980s when queer people's intimacies and very ways of being and emoting in public were under attack. Pee wee's Playhouse ended in flames alongside the first public sex scandal I can remember. Just before the show was to start syndication, Paul Reubens was arrested in a suburban porn theater for exposure of sexual organs, a phrase that Pee wee's Playhouse could have turned into a whole bit about a horny piano if the show wasn't for kids and hadn't already wrapped months before the arrest.
Cait McKinney:This kind of porn theater sting operation was common in 1991, a calculated, stigmatizing response to HIV AIDS aimed at rooting out public sex cultures through raids on bathhouses, theaters, and bars with back rooms, often under the guise of what we call public health. From the state's perspective, the practice had the added bonus of raising real estate values through gentrification as unseemly businesses closed under pressure from police harassment of patrons and owners. News media fashioned Reubens, the children's entertainer, as a risk taking pervert. He became the butt of late night TV jokes, and his career suffered in the months and years that followed. Queer people, kids and adults alike, stuck with PeeWee through it all.
Cait McKinney:Kids staved fans despite parents who threw out their PeeWee dolls and bootlegged VHS tapes, while adults defended Reubens against the false associations with pedophilia that attached to the story. The show's ongoing cult status decades later speaks to the main contention of this book. We aren't done with Pee wee's Playhouse because there's much to learn from sticking with it. I look back at Pee wee as an expansive mediated scene that moves from television screens to the domestic technologies inside the playhouse to the porn theater as an otherwise space under attack. Thinking across these scenes in the ways we remember and misremember Pee wee offers lines of flight for queer understandings of media, ways of moving between the real and the fictive, complicating ideas about adults, children, and technology, and knowing history through speculation and against causality.
John Stadler:Thank you so much for for reading that for us, Kate. It's such a beautiful and compelling introduction to your book. I love the way especially, I think it's so important that you contextualize this moment, because for people who didn't grow up at this period, if you were a young queer person, the way in which you understand queerness or or homosexuality or any kind of sexual or gender deviance is through through the AIDS, epidemic. Right? Like, the my first association with queerness was with death, and I felt it especially pronounced I I grew up in Indiana where at the same time that Pee wee Herman was coming out, Ryan White was dying of of AIDS.
John Stadler:And so we saw it on our news all the time that that local local child dying, of AIDS, I believe it was through a a blood transfusion. But it all got sort of wrapped up in this pathologizing of of queerness, as queerness as illness, queerness as disease. So reminding us that PewDiePie, occupied a space that was informed by this is, I think, so important. I just wanted to in addition to discussing how lovely it is that you've historicized this, I I wondered if I could just ask you what brought you to this project? Because it's it's so timely, of course, you know, and and tragically because Paul Rubens died last year.
John Stadler:But I don't imagine you were writing this with any sense of knowledge that that would that would happen. And so I I would just love to know a little bit about what brought you back to Pee wee, you know, in '20 I don't know when you started this, 2022, '20 '20 '3, whenever you were writing it.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. I mean, I finished the book about a month before he died, and I'm sure his friends and family knew that he was ill, but fans didn't. Right? So it was a surprise to me, and I ended up having to, revise the book. So I went from kind of this author, like, nervous that the person who their book was about would, like, read it and hate it, hopefully love it, to somebody who was as a fan kind of, like, mourning this person's, passing along with, like, all kinds of other queer fans who are really, like, devastated by Reuben's death in the summer of twenty twenty three.
Cait McKinney:And, I think a lot of us went back to sort of revisit the show and what it had meant to us in that moment. I have always wanted to write something about Pee wee's Playhouse. I think it was the, like, freedom and space opened up by going up for tenure and feeling like I had the room to write about an object that maybe some people wouldn't take as seriously in the field of academia. And I also, like, wanted to work on writing scholarly work that was more true to me and who I am and where my voice and my presence was more there in the writing. And it felt like a perfect sort of object to do that with because my relationship to it is, like, so personal because of what it meant to me as a kid.
Cait McKinney:So I kinda I decided I wanted to write about the show, and initially, I wanted to write about the playhouse itself as this magical interior space that is radically separated from the world out there. So Pee wee in the show almost never leaves the playhouse. There's no regular exterior set. You are contained within the space. And I was thinking about that, like in the sort of deep depths of COVID lockdown Yeah.
Cait McKinney:And what what it means to be inside. Right? And that's how the work started.
John Stadler:Yeah. I would that's amazing. I was I was thinking too about how the pandemic informed my own relation to Pee wee. I know we'll talk about this later, but it was during, I think, year one of COVID that I purchased my own, and I'll show this, although the podcasters can't see it, my own Pee wee doll, and really started to become quite nostalgic for my childhood. And and there were a number of reasons why that is.
John Stadler:My, my dad got sick, and I helped my my parents move out of our childhood home. So I was quite literally going through my bedroom at the time and clearing out things that I probably should have cleared out years ago. But, yeah, it it I feel like COVID produced the possibility for, for a kind of deep contemplativeness that I hadn't really given myself space for before. Right? There was just nothing to do.
John Stadler:Right? So I was really kind of, reworking my thoughts on on childhood and and such. So it's really interesting to to see these parallels, especially with spatiality and the show's own, inward and sort of in enclosed quality, especially when you think about it against the films, which are so much about going out into the world for the most part. Right? They they do often have moments of, like, interiority, but it's usually about Pee Wee exiting a house or exiting a space.
Cait McKinney:Against his will too. Yeah. Like, he doesn't he doesn't wanna leave. He gets forced out into the world in those films,
John Stadler:Right. Which I find so interesting. I'm I'm just really curious. I I wish Rubens were still here for us to ask him or to to contemplate why why this this very, stark division between space from the the TV show to the to the films.
Cait McKinney:I mean, I imagine some of that distinction is about budget. Right? Like, you have a huge budget to make a film, and and you do have a smaller budget to make episodic children's television. Although Pee wee's budget was huge, like, CBS was spending, like, $300,000 an episode on that show in the later season, which was unheard absolutely unheard of at that time. Right?
John Stadler:Yeah. That's true.
Cait McKinney:I think part of it's budget, but I think it's also, like, it's the character. He is a creature of habit, of routine, and of his space. And so a really compelling plot point for the films is to use that budget in that, you know, hour and a half to see what happens when you take Pee wee out of this world in which he makes sense into this, like, outer world in which he doesn't make sense and sort of mayhem, ensues. And I think we learn a lot as characters who have no schematic for understanding Pee Wee come into encounter with him.
John Stadler:Was that a conscious decision in the book, to focus primarily on the show?
Cait McKinney:Yeah. It was it was absolutely a conscious decision because I wanted to like, what for me is really interesting about the show is it had this first of all, it's on network television, so it had really wide viewership. It was on CBS. And second, it had, like, no other children's television programs, a real mixed audience of adults and children. So about a third of regular viewers on Saturday mornings were adults.
Cait McKinney:And I was really interested in it as this, like, episodic network shared text and what it meant for both adults, most of whom were queer queer adjacent in some way to share this text with, like, just regular six, seven, eight, nine year olds of all life experiences. I I wanted to, like, be with that experience of of the show for sure. And I think also, like, that's primarily how Pee wee is known. Like, the the films were a bit more cult y. People who are Pee wee fans are very familiar with the films and love them and I love them, but I think it's the show that really had this wider appeal, and it was what people went to after the porn theater sex scandal.
Cait McKinney:The show was, like, the target for people's anger and and homophobia in the aftermath of that.
John Stadler:I was wondering if I could follow-up with another thing that you said in this introduction, which is PeeWee offers lines of flight for queer understandings of media, ways of moving between the real and the fictive, complicating ideas about adults, children, and technology, and knowing history through speculation and against causality. I'm really latching on to the notion of speculation and against causality and another word that you used earlier about misremembering.
Cait McKinney:Mhmm.
John Stadler:And so one of the things that I love about the book and that I hope you can speak a little more about is the way that you turn to friends, family, colleagues, and just do this really lovely, almost like a kind of oral history of people's, memories of the show, but also of their misremembering? You know? And I and I'm wondering what you think the value or the place of misremembering is for fans of the show, because I think you're aware I have my own misrememberings of this show, that I told you about briefly, which which include, like, misremembering the ending of the show where Pee wee jets off on his scooter out of the house, or out of the playhouse rather. And I misremembered that as him riding his bicycle through the sky and flying. And so, you know, it's I don't know what that says about me or about my relationship to the show, but I I am really struck by the methodology that you deploy in the book.
John Stadler:I feel it's it's so innovative, and I wonder too just because it's this cute, adorable little book that has, you know, little chapters. You know, it's not the typical monograph style. I'm just wondering, you know, I guess it's a two part question. I'm wondering about misremembering, and the place of that, but also just about the format of these books within academia. Hopefully, that's not too boring of a question.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. I mean, no. No. That's a great question, John. I think first with the the question about misremembering.
Cait McKinney:A lot of the approach I take in the book, like, at some point in the book, I call it, like, bad research methods and, like, leaning into, like, bad and square quotes research methods that
John Stadler:Right.
Cait McKinney:I would never be allowed to teach, like, graduate students of my program, for example.
John Stadler:Yeah.
Cait McKinney:But, like, as I was working on the book and people would ask me what I'm working on and I would tell them, so many, like, queer folks who are friends of mine would respond with this reaction of, like, interest, but also something like grief or sadness, which was interesting to me because it's, like, such a joyful and funny show. And I kinda realized the profoundness of what was taken away from people of our generation. I I'm born in 1983. John's born around, the same time, so we're both sort of in our early very early forties right now.
John Stadler:Very early.
Cait McKinney:We're we're we just turned we're barely. We're basically we're basically about 39.
John Stadler:Basically.
Cait McKinney:We're in. But, like, what was taken away? Right? And and so I started asking people, like, well, what do you remember about that time when when Reubens was arrested? And for lots of reasons, the primary one being, like, homophobia, for most of us, like, no one was talking to us about what happened to Reubens, which is, like, he was arrested for doing, like, a really normal banal thing that lots of men do.
Cait McKinney:He was in a porn theater, which exists for people to watch porn in. And if they want to to masturbate in, it's not harming anyone. There's a
John Stadler:Right.
Cait McKinney:Social contract in that space, and that's something that as queer adults, we all understand now. Right? But at the time, no one explained that to us, and it was part of this moment of homo and AIDS phobia of just, like, shaming and erasing Paul Reubens from existence. And so I became really interested in what people understood when they were kids at the time that it happened and when they realized that that information was wrong, which for me was in at some point in my twenties, I was like, oh, that was really messed up and homophobic. Right?
Cait McKinney:What what happened to this television character that I love? But I think, like, am I interested in the in the misremembering is I think that there's a lot of learning to be had in leaning into that misremembering because it tells us something about the function of homophobia around cultural texts and how cultural suppression works. And we need to think about that right now because we are living through like what I think is a very similar moment to to the nineteen eighties in terms of the attacks that we're seeing in on trans and queer kids and the ways that those attacks, like, are strategically trying to cut them off from relationships with queer and trans cultural texts or trans and queer adults. So that was my interest in the misremembering is, like and I think that we have to understand the show Pee wee's Playhouse only through its entanglement with what happened to Reuben's. Like, we can't know the show otherwise.
Cait McKinney:It was just so significant. And then, I mean, the format of these forerunners books that Minnesota does, which are acquired by, Leah Pennywork, who's an incredible editor, they're, like, 25,000 ish words, so they're quite short. They're, like, really long essays, more than books, so they are, like, bound like a book. So I can be, like, it's a book, y'all.
John Stadler:It is a book.
Cait McKinney:It is a book. But it's, like, it's kinda perfect for this format because it's, like, long enough to be serious, but it's accessible. You can read it in a few sittings, and I I wanted to give people a kind of, like, accessible experience of diving into this the story of what happened and some ways of revisiting and rethinking about the playhouse as a space.
John Stadler:Yeah. Accessibility here, I think, is so key to the book and to the series. It it really is something you can sit down and read in a couple of sittings, and it's it's quite just enjoyable. Right? It doesn't read with the same oh, I don't wanna be too despairing of academia, but it doesn't feel so stuffy.
John Stadler:Right? It it feels a lot more inviting. The other thing that you said that I really appreciated about this book was the salience that it brings to our current moment, regrettably in indeed. And we don't have to belabor the point, but the way in which the trans community right now is experiencing such strong phobia, transphobia, and its own kind of sex panic, we even see this happening at the Olympics quite literally right now, is quite stark. One of the things I really appreciate about the book is that it lends insight and a window onto an earlier sex panic.
John Stadler:And it's it's so fascinating too the way the book, the way that Pee wee is queered. Right? Because I think a lot of people, when they hear queer, immediately assume a kind of sexual queerness. And certainly, there there is, to a degree, that at play in the various shows and and films. But I think what the book really illustrates for me is just how queer the gender is of Pee wee Herman and just how nonnormative and against the grain he was.
John Stadler:You know? And that's, I think, on some level, what I found so compelling as a kid, if I if I had to put words to it, was this is basically a a sissy. This is like a fae boy who is not subscribing to the normative standard of what it means to be masculine or to be male, and he is allowed to be that way. No one is stopping him, policing him, telling him he has to be a different way. And and there are other kinds of challenges, like, and we can talk about this if we have time, the way that Pee wee is constantly being paired with girls and women who have attraction to him that he, one way or another, you know, gets out of that scenario where he's sort of paired up to have the kind of heteronormative pairing.
John Stadler:And in one way or another, he usually evades it. But for me, what was so striking about the book was really thinking about gender and the way that gender is being thwarted or played with.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. I mean, you have raised the important point that sex panics are cyclical. They're not a thing from the history that we have moved past. They come and go, and the reason that they come and go is because they're doing cultural work in relation to a particular political movement and how it desires for the world to change. So we're seeing sex panics right now in in relationship to right wing movements, a kind of anti internationalism, anti immigration, white supremacy, and the entanglement of all of these things.
Cait McKinney:Right? Like, trans folks are a convenient object in order to justify the move towards, like, fascism and normalization. But at the time of Pee wee, what the show was responding to with the sissy character was Reaganism and this, like, autonomous rugged vision of white masculinity that was similarly tied to, like, white flight, the destruction and abandonment of cities and the black and brown folks who call them home. And so there's, like, something similar going on here, right, with, like, this policing of gender as a way of, like, producing a kind of violent and fascist world. And, yeah, he was, like, the perfect sissy.
Cait McKinney:Like, what a lovable sissy he was. I like to think that there's more room in the world for people who are understood to be boys or think of themselves as boys as to be sissies. Now but I don't know that that's actually true. I think we're in another moment of a real kind of narrowing of what it means to do gender. That is sort of another sad thing that this book brought me to is drawing those connections between the 1980s and the present.
John Stadler:Yeah. Well, and and you've, you know, named it yet again. I know I talked to you about this earlier, but I was feeling such a strong sense of both nostalgia, but also melancholy when I was preparing for this. And and it was bound up with joy too. It was, you know, remembering the joy that this character used to bring to me, but also feeling this real loss about the, you know, the way that the show was sort of evaporated from my consciousness never to be found again.
John Stadler:And then going back to it in my also my late teens and early twenties, not necessarily to the show, but just going back to the scandal, right, that precipitated the end of the syndication of it. So, yeah, it's a real mixed emotional quality or feeling to to return to this. I wanna maybe, if it's okay with you, touch on just the three chapters that you have here where you you talk about the playhouse, the porn house, and and the doll. If you are up for it, I was wondering if just to get the ball rolling, we could think about what some of your favorite scenes are from the actual TV show and the playhouse. You know, one of the lovely things about the first chapter is the proliferation of objects, most of which are animate, that occupied the the space of the playhouse.
John Stadler:And I love the way that you bring them into conversation to what we today would think of as the smart house since so many of these objects can speak and seemingly think and engage with Pee wee. Do any scenes or objects within the playhouse really jump out to you or or still speak to you today and and and why?
Cait McKinney:Yeah. I'm I mean, I'm really drawn into any scene in the show that involves these four characters who I write about at length in the first chapter of the book as the sort of computational characters in the Playhouse. So Pee wee lived in a world called puppet land, and his sort of friends in the playhouse are a mix of human characters and actors who visit the playhouse and then the puppets who live inside of it. And there's there's many of these puppets, but the four who I'm especially interested in were kind of like proto I think of those proto smart home technologies or like networked, objects. So the first one is, Conky two thousand who's like, this kind of DIY robot looking character.
Cait McKinney:At the beginning of every episode of the show, Conky gets unplugged. He's been charging overnight. He boots up, and he has this dialogue with Pee Wee where he spits out what's called the word of the day on a piece of, like, receipt paper. Pee Wee reads the word of the day. It's always like a commonly used word that you're gonna inevitably say in a sentence a few times throughout the rest of the episode.
Cait McKinney:Anytime the word is said, by anyone in the Playhouse, everybody else has to scream really loud, and the viewers at home are supposed to scream as well. So Conky is this sort of rope interactive robot whose, work in producing the secret word produces these, like, interruptions of chaos throughout each episode of the show.
John Stadler:I almost feel like we should have one. I I mean, can we possibly have a podcast about Pee Wee Herman and not have a word of the day?
Cait McKinney:We it's just a bummer when only two people are screaming.
John Stadler:It's true. Yeah. It would probably be a little obnoxious for the listeners.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. I did do a secret word at the, like, in person book launch I had, which Do you? A lot of people at that. Yeah. The secret word was gay.
Cait McKinney:Ah.
John Stadler:I love it.
Cait McKinney:And that was fun because you had this, like, chorus of, you know, 75 people or whatever screaming every time.
John Stadler:Yeah.
Cait McKinney:Shrinking.
John Stadler:Yeah. That's lovely.
Cait McKinney:But, yeah, I I mean, Conky, I love, like, the sort of mutual chaos that he, produces. And and there's three other, technologies that are similarly, like, early network computers that I write about. So they're magic screen, which is like a tablet, kind of like an iPad with, like, arms and legs and a and a persona. Mhmm. There's PicturePhone, which is like a photo booth that allows Pee wee to have video conference calls with other people, and then there's Globey, who's this, like, humanoid globe, with a face and a voice who does kind of geographic, like, Google Mappy sort of stuff Mhmm.
Cait McKinney:For Pee wee. And I think revisiting the Playhouse is important because it's this queer vision from the past of what a networked smart home might have become, like, could have become, but didn't, and also, like, couldn't because it wasn't profitable, or rational. And also Pee wee is not treating these characters as his servants or as, like, objects. He's in mutual relationships of reciprocity and care with them. So they determine activities in the playhouse together.
Cait McKinney:So it's a really different vision than what we have today of people yelling at Alexa or Siri or whatever the other ones are called to buy stuff or or do stuff for them. It's this, like, other way of thinking about how we want to be in relationship with, technologies that I think we can use to critique the present that we actually have, and imagine digital worlds otherwise.
John Stadler:What do you think the relation is between the Rube Goldberg machines that I I think of as maybe more in the films, but you could correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe they appear in the TV show as well. And these more networks, maybe more digital, characters from the TV show. Do you have any thoughts on that? Because I I I seem to recall, at least with the first film, maybe even the opening sequence is, Pee wee waking up and and getting breakfast made for him by a Rube Goldberg machine, which seemed to be so common in so many different films and shows of the nineteen eighties.
John Stadler:And I'm just wondering if there's some kind of statement or allegory going on across the the networked characters from the show and the Rube Goldberg machines from the from the films.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. The the Rube Goldberg machine is, what opens Pee wee's Big Adventure, which is the, Tim Burton directed, first Pee wee film from 1985.
John Stadler:And that came out, like, a year before the show. Right?
Cait McKinney:Yeah. It was before the show started. So he had had, like, a Broadway show, like, a live show and then the film, and then he got the television contract. But the it's like this absurd and extremely analog, perpetual motion machine that makes Pee wee's breakfast. So it juices oranges, perpetual motion machine that makes Pee wee's breakfast.
Cait McKinney:So it juices oranges, it mixes pancake batter, flips pancakes, feeds his dog, all while Pee wee is, like, sort of free to do other stuff while this machine is running. The machine, like, doesn't work very well. It's like all these juices everywhere, many pancakes are stuck to the ceiling, but, like, that's not the point of the technology. Like, the point is the kind of joy of it. It's, like, meant to do a task, but it's also, like, wildly irrational because it would be easy for easier for him to just do the task himself.
Cait McKinney:And I think at the heart of your question, like, what is a technology like this Rube Goldberg machine have to do with these computational characters in the playhouse is, like, he's not drawing a line between those things. Like, there is, at every stage in this character's life, just this desire to be in relationship with gadgets and technologies and contraptions and animate objects that exist and function on terms that aren't about, like, fulfilling a task or aren't about efficiency.
John Stadler:Yeah.
Cait McKinney:It's like this kind of, like, joy and play.
John Stadler:Yeah. No. That's lovely. Yeah. That that's very helpful.
John Stadler:Maybe if you're down for it, I I would love to think a little more about the second chapter, the porn house. Although I don't wanna I don't wanna stop us if we have more to say about the playhouse because I think it's it's lovely writing and lovely work that you have there.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. Let's talk about the let's talk about the porn house. I would love to.
John Stadler:Yeah. Let's talk about the porn house. You know, I I'm so struck by is so much of the the drama and the the crisis and the the conflict around the arrest, probably hinges to some degree on on the fact that Paul Reubens was often just conflated with his character and was so devoted to the character of Pee wee that I think you wrote about this. He would make sure that no one ever, for instance, photographed him in character, when not being filmed and and while smoking a cigarette. Right?
John Stadler:Because he didn't want anyone to view Pee wee as Paul Reubens. And precisely, I think, what animates the the sex panic here is that people do do that. They do conflate Paul Reubens, the adult, the human, with Pee wee Herman, the character. And I'm thinking too about the way in which a porn house is really a playhouse for adults. Right?
John Stadler:And the and the sense that porn, as an object, is is one of the realms that adults have to experience play and pleasure, but we don't treat it the same way, obviously, that we treat play that that a child would have. And so I'm really struck by the through line here of play. Right? Paul Reubens is quite literally playing. He is having a good time, but this is a good time that is offensive to some, right, or is impossible to square with the persona that he has developed for Pee wee.
John Stadler:And so, yeah, I'm not sure where we wanna take this, but I'm really struck by the space of the porn theater as also being quite similar to the playhouse as this isolated space that is not, you know, it's I I don't know. I would question what we mean by public indecency. What what constitutes the public with within the space of the porn theater?
Cait McKinney:Yeah. So Reubens never appeared as Paul Reubens in public or in news media interviews during the time that the show was on. Right? So if he was he he did an interview, like, with Rolling Stone, whatever, he showed up to the interview as Pee wee Herman and gave the interview as Pee wee Herman. So the public did not understand Pee wee Herman and Paul Reubens as separate people even though, of course, they were.
Cait McKinney:So when when Reubens was arrested, and this was wild to me going back to, like, news archives and seeing this, but the press, like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times covered this story in ways that conflated Reubens with Pee wee Herman. So for example, there was a Associated Press wire story that was published in, you know, most papers of record in The United States and Canada where the journalist interviewed child psychologists about how to talk to your children about Paul Reuben's arrest. But the article instructs parents to tell children, like, that Pee wee had done something bad, that, you know, Pee wee Pee wee regrets doing this, that it was wrong, but people make mistakes, which is, like, wild to me that the advice to parents wasn't like, tell your kids that this is an adult man actor and that his sexuality exists. Right? Like, to to tell kids about this in a developmentally appropriate way, but that, like, clearly makes it makes it clear that there is, like, a television character who is this boy man child who they love and then an actor who plays him.
Cait McKinney:Right? Like, how much is that gonna mess up your kids if you're not, like, making that clear? So the the, like, deep seeded sort of homophobia of wanting to understand Reubens as Pee wee Herman in order to mark him being in this porn theater as this, like, transgression instead of this, like, actually quite banal and boring thing. Like, yeah, he watches porn at a at a porn theater. Like, who cares?
Cait McKinney:Right? It was, like, so so deep seated. But, yeah, like, the I mean, porn theaters are really interesting spaces in the sense that, like, any movie theater, you kind of disappear into them. Right? They're, like, dark.
Cait McKinney:The seats are soft. You can't see who's around you. It's this exit from the world outside, and it's summer right now while we're recording this. So you can imagine, like, going back out into the parking lot and the air conditioning is this even climactic shock from inside to outside. It really marks this theater as this space apart and space away.
Cait McKinney:I think about what it must have been like for someone like Reubens to have been living in public as this character for so many years. Right? And how, you know, exhausting that must have been become at times. So his arrest in the summer of nineteen ninety one, he had actually already decided to end the show about a year earlier because he was just burnt out and exhausted from playing the character. And he had, like, grown his hair out long because they were not gonna be shooting again and I think was just, like, kind of trying to live more as himself in this town where he grew up that he was back visiting.
Cait McKinney:To me, like, that the fact that Reubens was kind of experiencing this freedom from the character and then was arrested and and shamed publicly for masturbating in the theater, like, as the character is one of the most tragic parts of how the story was framed.
John Stadler:Yeah. And I I think it's important as as you're alluding to note the changing understanding of the space of the porn theater. So hardcore porn was had only been showing in in theaters in a in a very public, way since the early nineteen seventies. So we're, you know, about twenty years into that, but the AIDS epidemic is is already informing the way that people understand this space, which in the seventies, you know, you would see celebrities in the in the magazines and in the news going to porn theaters. You would you would hear about, like, Jack Nicholson takes date to porn theater.
John Stadler:And so it was quite well known that, you know, celebrities and and famous people were going to to these theaters, and it it was not career ending for them. But by the early nineteen eighties, porn theaters were being shuttered. They were they were seen as vectors for for disease. You know, sorry. Samuel Delaney has this delightful book, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, where he writes all about the Disneyfication of Times Square, the closing of all the porn theaters, as well as the this really interesting concept that he develops of of contact in the way that porn theaters become a space for interclass primarily, but, interrace contact of people who would not normally engage with one another.
John Stadler:And he makes the argument that that that there's a kind of social good that comes out of bringing together people who would not normally exist in the same social spheres. So one of the things that that I appreciate about about your book is that you were helping to push against the grain of the more normative, or standard argument about what the porn theater is, which is always, you know, predetermined as deleterious, and pathologizing. And and here, I think you're right to call it just rather mundane. This is a rather mundane activity. You know?
John Stadler:I can think of far more, explicit events that occur within porn theaters, and masturbating does not, come even close to them. So it is helpful to remind ourselves at the same time that, you know, porn was moving, into video at this point. So I I think some people have written about, well, why wasn't he just you know, if you have to watch porn, why don't you just watch it at home? And I think that that's an interesting question because it it again brings up this concept of space that that has kind of been hovering around this whole conversation and this notion of what private space is and where sex can exist within space, Even if it's self serving sex, even if it's masturbation, where what space is is that allowed to be in? And I think it's important to note too, I'm going to forget the Supreme Court case, but at the time, any kind of same sex sexual activity is going to be quite literally illegal within these spaces.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. It was Bowers versus Hardwick.
John Stadler:Yeah. So there's a lot historically to think about in this moment, but one of the things that the the book hopefully reminds us is that the conversation that was being had with children, with people of our age, these elder millennials, was, kind of quite quite messed up, quite conflating of the character with the person. Or in the case for me, was just a non was a non conversation. It was Pee wee Herman and Pee wee's Playhouse were in my life for five or so years, and then suddenly it was gone. You know, and I never got an explanation of what Paul Reubens had done until, you know, my my late teen years.
John Stadler:And then it was it was, as the book notes, often quite erroneous in the way that it was presented. It was that, you know, spoken as though Pee wee Herman had done this thing and oftentimes presenting it as an affront to children as though somehow his masturbation in a theater had been put to the end of trying to, corrupt children. Right? The this notion that him masturbating in the theater was somehow related to, I guess, what we would today call the the kind of groomer language or the the groomer panic.
Cait McKinney:Yep.
John Stadler:And I'm I'm just curious what you think of or what you found in your research with with people recalling this event and how it is bound up with those those fears about being about adults grooming young children.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. I mean, people, were circulating rumors that he was caught masturbating in a regular cineplex or at a Disney film. How I understood it as a kid was that he had done something sexually inappropriate with children. That was how people in my, like, schoolyard understood it. My parents never explained it to me.
Cait McKinney:These, like, rumors circulated, like, precisely as you pointed out as part of what we would today call groomer discourse. Right? So this is about homophobia, and it's about AIDS phobia and this what you talked about earlier in our conversation about, like, queer people being sort of fundamentally associated with death and dying and the negative in the public imagination at this time. Right? So this construction of perversion.
Cait McKinney:And all of that is to, like, make an argument to parents that you ought to keep your kids away from gay people, which is, like, a fear that is even more heightened when you have a kid like myself or I would guess you, John, too, who's, like, at that age, like, you can tell there's something queer about that kid. So it's like that. Those are the kids like you and I are the ones who are, I think, are suffering the most from the sort of straightening impulses and the, like, cultural violence that comes out of this kind of story and the the backlash that it engenders.
John Stadler:Well, I hope you are down for a conversation about dolls now because the the third and final chapter here is this delightful chapter about the pee wee dolls, which became collector's items. In part, I think we could argue because of the cancellation of the syndication, right, that all the toys were pulled off the shelves of Toys R Us and other toy stores. And before we fully jump into it, I do have an anecdote, which is that as a six or seven year old, I was begging my parents for a pee wee doll for Christmas one year, and I got one. I got one not from my parents, but for my aunts and uncle. Aw.
John Stadler:But here's an example of how bratty I was, which maybe it was informed by pee wee's sometimes brattiness. I did not get a speaking doll. I guess they were also producing non speaking dolls in the mid to late eighties.
Cait McKinney:Because a lot of parents do not want a loud toy electronic toy that talks at their house, which is very fair.
John Stadler:Very understandable, but I was so ungrateful. I, like, received this delightful gift from my relatives, and I just, like, immediately was like, where's the pull string? It doesn't fall. What what why would you give me this? So, and I only remember that because my my aunt told me that I was ungrateful, and I was so embarrassed as an adult to be like, oh my god, Antlyn.
John Stadler:I'm so sorry. But, you know, since then, I have, remedied this oversight on my relatives, and I have purchased, you know, one of the original dolls that that should speak. But as your chapter, astutely points out, almost none of the dolls today, whether they originally spoke or not, speak today. Right? But and that's because they they have all, for the most part, broken.
John Stadler:And you do this really amazing reading questioning that brokenness. And and so I I'm wondering what brought you, first of all, to want to acquire one of the dolls because it's it's my understanding maybe we bought ours at approximately the same time, early twenty twenties. Yeah. And then how you came to learn about, like, the history of their of their very brokenness.
Cait McKinney:So my partner, Hazel, has a non talking pee wee doll that I've lived with along with her for ten years or so. And when I started writing this book, I wanted a talking one. So I ordered one on eBay around the same time as you, John, and I thought I knew that they were all broken, but I hadn't kinda thought about what that means. And I thought I would buy the doll and maybe take it apart and repair it and write something about that process. And there's all these, like, people online who have fans who have tutorials about how to repair your broken talking pee wee doll.
Cait McKinney:And the doll came, and I spent a lot of time with it and sort of researching the history of these dolls and how they were disappeared from toy store shelves, but also became really desired collector items amongst adults at the time that Paul Reubens was arrested. So people, like, really adults really wanted these dolls and wanted to keep them and hold on to them. And they're all broken in the same way because okay. The dolls have a tiny, like, phonograph or record player inside them made of plastic. And what makes a record spin at an even rotation when you play it is a device called a governor.
Cait McKinney:It just, like, makes the speed consistent. So the governors in all of these talking peewee dolls were basically, like, defective. They were built in such a way that they, like, untensioned and stopped working pretty quickly. So, like, everyone's peewee doll is broken, and all the ads on eBay reselling these dolls are, like, you know, people have got grabbed them at estate sales or picked them from thrift stores or whatever and are reselling them to fans. They're like, the doll is broken.
Cait McKinney:The voice sounds unintelligible. The doll screams. It's like his voice is a nightmare. All these descriptions of this broken, shrill, I think, like, quite actually queer voice. So they're all broken in the same way, but people hold on to them still.
Cait McKinney:And I was interested in the book about, like, thinking about what it means to hold on to this, like, broken, worn out object and to keep it and to care for it. And the doll bearing these signs of, like, wear and of not being treated well, as a sort of analogy for what happened to to Reubens as well. Right? And the desire that queer fans have to, like, keep the doll and hold on to the broken doll is a way of sort of holding on to the memory of what happened to Reubens and what happened to Pee wee, in the wake of the sex scandal when this show that was so important to so many people kind of disappeared from the public imagination.
John Stadler:It's really beautiful, the the chapter and the way that you you tie it together to the the controversy around his arrest. My own doll, actually, also, the paint is coming off on
Cait McKinney:the top.
John Stadler:Yeah. So he's actually a little bit bald, which for the listeners, you won't know this, but I'm a bald man. So
Cait McKinney:Oh, you match.
John Stadler:Having a bald pee wee makes me love him even more. Like, oh, he's just like me.
Cait McKinney:Where where do you keep him normally, John?
John Stadler:In my office.
Cait McKinney:At work?
John Stadler:Yeah. On campus. I keep him in my office. He actually, you can't see it, but there's, I have a shelf above my desk, and he just sits there watching me the whole time.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. That's where I keep mine too. He sits in my office just looking down. It's a nice, like, object that students often ask about.
John Stadler:Yeah. Very few of my students seem to know who Pee Wee Herman is, so I was I was actually struck by the fact that some of yours did at least a little bit. I imagine maybe some of my older grad students might have some vague recollections to him. But,
Cait McKinney:It's not that they necessarily, like, know who he is. They're just like, what's that weird doll?
John Stadler:Yeah. What's that what's that weird doll? And
Cait McKinney:then I get to explain it, which is a pleasure.
John Stadler:Absolutely. I don't know. Are there things that we haven't touched on? I feel like this has been really informative and and delightful to run through some of the the highlights of the book.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. I mean, I feel like we've covered a lot, and it's been, like, a real pleasure to get to talk to you about the book and, like, to situate Kiwi's Playhouse and queerness and our relationships to it past and present to get to do that with you.
John Stadler:I've enjoyed it so much. I I do have a final question, though.
Cait McKinney:Okay.
John Stadler:Where do you think, like, the scholarship on Pee wee Herman goes from here? Because Because I think you've laid down a really amazing foundation to think about Pee wee. And one of the things that the book did that I was so appreciative of was to point to the, you know, somewhat limited amount of scholarship that has been done on him. You know, I'm seeming to recall that there is some scholarship that occurred in the in the nineteen eighties, but in the same way that Paul Reubens kind of went away or disappeared from the the popular cultural memory. Seems like scholarship on him also kind of
Cait McKinney:Mhmm. Disappeared for
John Stadler:a while, which is why this book is so exciting to have have out here in the world. Are there things that you wish, like, you could have turned your attention to or unwritten topics that that you think would follow-up from this?
Cait McKinney:I mean, I would love to see, like, more people do work on Pee wee's Playhouse and Pee wee Herman. I think there's, like, a ton there, and I think it gets not taken up because of the silence that happens in response to the AIDS crisis. It's not just cultural. It happens in academia too. Right?
Cait McKinney:So I think this is a great text for folks to return to, but I hope that more than anything, what this book does is it gives other scholars, especially younger folks, like, permission to sit with and think really seriously about things that they love that might seem silly
John Stadler:Yeah.
Cait McKinney:Or not serious and to take them really seriously, but to also, like, in their writing and their analysis to save space for their own delightful and loving connections to those texts. Like, I I would like this to open up carve out more permission for people to get to do that because I think that's what keeps queer media studies weird.
John Stadler:Absolutely. And we need it to stay weird.
Cait McKinney:Yes. Even though, weird as a word is maybe being stolen by
John Stadler:Oh, yeah.
Cait McKinney:The Democrats right now.
John Stadler:Yeah. It's a new insult, I guess.
Cait McKinney:No. But I'm I'm gonna keep using it. So whatever they can't they can't have it.
John Stadler:They I mean, they can do what they want with it, but I'm gonna keep it weird over here.
Cait McKinney:Yeah. Me too.
John Stadler:Kate, thank you so much. This has been a been a delight.
Cait McKinney:Thank you, John. It was a pleasure.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book I Know You Are, But What Am I? On PeeWee Herman by Kate McKinney is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.