Cannonball with Wesley Morris The Closet in Pee-wee’s Playhouse
Jul 10, 2025
56:30
In the new HBO documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,” Paul Reubens, the creator of the iconic character Pee-wee Herman, comes out as gay. Reubens, who spent most of his career in the closet, had already come out years before but then returned to the closet during his time as the popular Saturday morning children’s show host.
On today’s episode of “Cannonball,” Wesley Morris talks with the writer Mark Harris about Reubens’s relationship to being closeted, and they discuss what it means for artists to publicly come out.
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