Getty/HBO
As Pride Month 2025 gets underway, it’s difficult to know how to feel. With news stories about members of the U.S. government passing anti-trans laws or bolstering anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment popping up on a near-daily basis, the obvious response is for queer people and their allies to be louder and prouder than ever. But that’s easier said than done, especially when incidents like actor Jonathan Joss’ death as the result of an alleged hate crime are a stark reminder that the mere act of existing can still be enough to get queer people killed.
The question of how to live as a queer person, whether your life is constantly under a microscope or not, lies at the heart of “Pee-wee as Himself.” Director Matt Wolf’s two-part documentary about the life and times of the late and, it should go without saying, great Paul Reubens has been garnering universal praise since making its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, so it was only to be expected that Warner Bros. Discovery would roll it out on streaming just in time for Pride Month. WBD CEO David Zaslav and his regime may not know how to name a streaming service, but they sure as heck know how to manipulate a marginalized community for their benefit. (Don’t think we forgot about that “Our Flag Means Death” stunt renewal you pulled for Pride 2022.)
Of course, just because its streaming rollout was a calculated strategy doesn’t make “Pee-wee as Himself” any less impactful and important than it is. That’s why it’s gratifying to see the film is ranking among HBO Max’s top 10 most-streamed TV shows as of June 4, 2025, as reported by FlixPatrol. (Again, it’s really a two-part documentary feature and not a series, but we’ll take the win all the same.)
Pee-wee as Himself is essential viewing for Pride 2025
HBO
How do you make an intimate, insightful documentary about an artist who deliberately went out of their way to keep their personal life out of the limelight? Reubens famously spent more time appearing in-character on talk shows, attending movie premieres, and even co-starring in other films (like “Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie,” as Wolf’s documentary recounts) as his beloved man-child alter ego, Pee-wee Herman, rather than himself. In a must-read piece he wrote for Vulture, Wolf revealed in greater depth just how challenging it was to make the film — much less get his subject to talk about his sexuality and love life on-camera — due to Reubens’ self-confessed need to maintain strict control of his narrative at all times.
So, rather than resisting the tide, Wolf deftly went with the flow and made Reubens’ hesitancy to talk about himself the focus of the film almost as much as the actual events of his life. “Pee-wee as Himself” also makes its painfully obvious where Reubens’ evasiveness came from: As a gay man who, by his own admission, was as out and proud as one could be, he elected to go “back into the closet” and intentionally avoid having romantic relationships of any kind in order to keep the public’s eyes fixed squarely on his career (and, for a long time, his Pee-wee persona with it). And the two occasions he lost control of his narrative? He was arrested on either patently absurd or utterly false grounds not-so-secretly fueled by homophobia and suffered greatly for it.
I won’t spoil the conclusion to Wolf and Reubens’ power-struggle over who is really in charge of shaping “Pee-wee as Himself” (though, fair warning, there’s a strong chance you’ll find yourself shedding a tear by the time the credits start rolling). I’ll simply say Wolf succeeds in painting a beautiful, richly complicated portrait of a one-of-a-kind soul here and, in doing so, allows Reubens to impart one last gift to the community of weirdos and outsiders who cherished him so much in life.
As for the fact that Reubens didn’t live to see the movie himself? Well, as Pee-wee once put it, “I don’t have to see it, Dottie. I lived it.”