This page, a working draft of an essay in galleys, is NOT to be rifled for quotations or attribution. The essay will appear with IJCS.

If one more person comes in here to take a peek, I am going to charge admission.

Pat/Patricia Gaddison as played by Robert Reed, née John Robert Reitz[1]

 

The sacred image, the liturgical icon, princi­pally represents Christ. It cannot represent the invisible and incomprehensible God, but the in­carnation of the Son of God has ushered in a new 'economy of images': 'Previously God, who has neither a Body nor a face, absolutely could not be represented by an image. But now that he has made himself visible in the flesh and has lived with men, I can make an image of what I have seen of God . . . and contemplate the glory of the Lord, his face unveiled.'

Catechism of the Catholic Church[2]

 

I knew people fooled around with each other [in the theater], but I thought it was OK to be by myself.

Paul Reubens[3]

 

Watching Journalists, Watching Cameras, Watching Sheriffs, Watching Pee-wee Herman Watch
The Extraordinary Case of the Saturday Morning Children's Show Celebrity Who Masturbated <> 
William Anthony Nericcio, SDSU <> 

Scene 1 | Scenario For a Scandal/Scandal of a Scenario

You are alone in a theater watching a movie, keeping your eyes on the silver screen as photon facsimiles of assorted attractive, unclad or scantily clad peo­ple touch each other with abandon. You note something else as well: appre­ciable less time is being spent on plot development than on sexual intercourse. In the midst of this festival of cinematic erotic intrigue, you note that others around you in the movie palace--mostly men, mostly men utterly obscured save for an occasional intrusive flash of light from the screen--have begun to touch themselves. Slowly but surely, uncannily but assuredly, you too feel yourself similarly moved and you watch amazed as your hand descends be­low your waist, you watch bewildered as you begin to touch yourself. No true sinning going on here, one imagines--the species homo sapiens being, after all (and especially when it comes to the movies), more lemming-like than it is apt to admit. The movie speaks to you and those around you in ways you cannot imagine. But why be critical? Why worry about anything at all when such pleasure is right to hand?

<>As you touch yourself watching others touch each other on the pulsing screen before you, enjoying great pleasure in the process, imagine now, unbe­knownst to you, that three others (uniformed, professional, watchful) are watching you.

In a peculiar way, you are providing their entertainment. These three, reasonably trained in the arts and sciences of civilian inquisition, are armed and potentially dangerous. Ironically, the three armed men watching you touch yourself as you watch others touch each other, also want to touch you.

And that is not all: they want to bind you, and then, against your will, photograph you, renaming you also with a caption of stark numbers that will proxy for your unseen name.

As this watching, touching conspiracy comes to pass within the dark, sweaty confines of this theater (and not just any theater but one dedicated to a decidedly pornographic dramaturgy), there is, waiting for you in the lobby another unseen witness: a video camera.  Albeit inorganic, this sentinel is no less diligent than the undercover officers now surveilling you as you watch and touch and touch and watch. This camera, this electronic eye, also, is waiting to watch you--it will watch you and record what it has seen for others, who will watch you also.

You, too, reading these words--I know you are watching also. But look around you.  Who is now watching you?

Scene 2 | An Eye on Sacred Pee-wee at the Video Altar

Was the preceding scenario a working gloss for a David Lynch/Atom Egoyan collaborative film? Some odd screenplay inspired by the works Gore Vidal, Jeremy Bentham, Michel Foucault and Madonna Ciccone? An erotic Hollywood thriller coming soon to a theater near you? Not quite.

The preceding is an only mildly exaggerated summary of events that took place now nearly a decade ago, the evening of 26, July 1991 when movie star/television celebrity Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman) was arrested outside a Sarasota, Florida pornographic movie house called The South Trail Cinema in alleged violation of Florida statute "800.03, Exposure of Sexual Organs"--an all-encompassing civic ordinance which, via the logic of synec­doche, is routinely invoked by 'peace officers' for all manner and species of public sex acts, including acts of public masturbation. No cinema paradiso for Reubens, these widely broadcast events have permanently marked his career, costing him millions of dollars and introducing the masses to a postmodern rhetoric of scandal that has been since perfected via the televised coverage of the Menendez Brothers parricide, the OJ Simpson trials, the death of Princess Diana, the Jon Benet Ramsey murder, the unending deathwatch following John Kennedy Jr. Icarus-like plunge into the Atlantic ocean, the Clinton Impeachment/Lewinsky blow-job affair and, no doubt, the impending show-trial of ousted Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein. <> 

But there is even more going on as well, however. Returning to the events of that fateful night and to a critical sifting-through of this scandal's coverage, af­fords us the possibility of profitable intellectual philandering, offering those of us drawn to the allures of cultural study with another opportunity to examine that knotty, always already interesting nexus of gender, sexuality and the "American" body politic. This is made all the more tasty owing to the complex duo of Paul Reubens and his singular alter ego Pee-wee Herman. The alter ego is, of course, the stuff of psychoanalytic/hermeneutic wet-dreams; one does not have to be a student or aficionado of doppelgŠngers to understand that anytime someone presents themselves as someone other than who they might otherwise appear to be, there will be room for a general consideration of Identity and Disguise, existentialism and camouflage--domains with long-standing traditions of discussion in the Humanities, but domains, also, made much more salient, not to mention politically pertinent, by technological ad­vances in video surveillance and image dissemination/dissimulation.[4] <> 

Pee-wee Herman's case is even more intriguing as his particular mode of per­formance, the particulars by which he becomes his alter ego, brings us to the general terrain of transvestites, persons who dress as exemplars of that which they are not. Pee-wee, in fact, provides us with the opportunity to rethink the se­mantic/political contours of gender and transvestism. Certainly transvestism introduces here the thematics of costuming and camouflage, but it may also be seen alternatively and simultaneously as a cultural practice that disturbs the visuo/political order of things. Reflecting back on the events surrounding the coverage, that is to say, the creation, of the Pee-wee Herman controversy, we find ourselves re­hearsing a scenario wherein the semantic domain of transvestism expands, re­vealing itself as synonymous with strategic inversion, diastrophism, dis­placement and ruptureÑin short, transvestism as revolutionary praxis and fun to boot! <> 

The general premise though, and this returns us to the specifics of Paul Reubens's case, is that the transvestite is that threat to the status-quo that the status-quo must regulateÑand not only so that one will not be outdressed. Transvestites must be guarded and policed, surveyed and iso­lated, if not eradicated entirely--and not just now in the age of high priest prude Attorney General John Ashcroft but in the past as well.

 

So it is of no little importance to the essay twitching here in your hands that we see Paul Reubens dressing up as Pee-wee Herman as an act of transvestism--doing so puts us in a better position to understand the avalanche of media coverage which attended to his arrest and was attendant upon the scandal which en­sued.

 

Why Òtwitching.Ó?

 

Because the essay you are reading may be thought of as a transvestite in its own rightÑespecially if one understands rhetorical genres as the conceptual blood kin of sexual genders. Originally and essentially a piece of performance art for a gather­ing of scholars at a Lesbian and Gay Male Film Conference at UC Davis (see anecdote below), my writing appears here in the stolid garb of the scholarly essay for the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. One example of this genre/gender cross-dress­ing analogy will suffice: a quotation that appears below quoting Roland Barthes on the topic of toys (illustrated with an appropriated photograph of Barbie) was, during the original "performance" of this piece at the conference, a literal, traveling epigraph.

 

<>Figure 1. Barthes Meets Barbie (photo by Guillermo Nericcio García, memogr@phics designcasa)

 

Barthes's statement on toys and adults was printed on a small piece of paper grafted to a plastic see-thru package enclosing two blonde airline stewardess dolls which at­tendees passed about the auditorium as I delivered my lecture. So please do not let these rigorously marshaled footnotes and works cited fool you. You are not reading an essay, but a glammed up simu­lacrum of a performance.

 

For the moment however, let us leave the frock of transvestism to one side and turn to a related set of circumstances, conditions that ensured Reubens's sex act made the front pages of newspapers, newsmagazines and tawdry tabloids here and abroad. Let us now turn, then, to the notion of celebrity. Paul Reubens was and is an American celebrity: both a motion picture star and a children's television fixture--many adults, too, were fans of his Pee-wee's Playhouse series on CBS. In short, he was, as any face which graces the boob tube, a public icon.

 

My use of italics for the word "icon" here, is a none-too-subtle hint for us to look back at the second epi­graph above. I found this conspicuous gloss on Christ and iconography in a volume of official Roman Catholic catechism, in a section where the Holy Roman Church lays down the law regarding the worship of images (Martin Luther had a ball kvetching about just this kind of stuff earlier this millennia).

 

Said Catholic catechism relies upon and quotes from the findings of one St. John Damascene, an 8th century theologian and the last of the Greek fathers of the Church. Given our interest in television celebrities, it is noteworthy that Saint Damascene's "first important writings were three apologies defending the veneration of sacred images against the iconoclastic edicts of Byzantine emperor Leo III the Isaurian."[5] Were he alive today, he no doubt would be on CNNÕs Larry King Show touting the cinematic excesses of Mel GibsonÕs The Passion.

 

Let us not with hubris imagine that we have somehow progressed to the point that these ancient Catholic edicts, themselves underwritten by references to centuries-old theological findings, are somehow no longer pertinent to you and I as we glibly surf the new millennia. The increasing seculariza­tion of the globe, the displacement of the Sacred by web browsers, Nintendo, high-definition TV and the movies, may have left us with less of 'God' proper, but we are all the same still immersed with many, many, many more sacred im­ages.

 

After all, what is television as a cultural practice but the "veneration of sacred images." And what more sacred, pristine image is there left these days other than the sacrosanct icon of the Children's television celebrity.[6] Imagine here the following hypothetical scandals: Mr. Rogers caught with his pants down outside a Las Vegas cathouse; or Captain Kangaroo, the late Bob Keesham, entering the Betty Ford clinic for the second time to beat a habit of crack cocaine; or, in potentially the worst possible scenario, the spectacle of Big Bird caught on camera defecating on a public sidewalk.

 

The Catholic catechism's reference to a new "economy of images" brought on by the incarnation of God as man, is a hermeneutically sophisticated signal of a paradigm shift in visual exegesis; and while it allows for the literal pictorial representation of God on earth for the faithful it also and simultaneouly au­thorizes parodic and bowdlerized versions of the same that can, in fact, and do, pass for the real thing. No less sacred than God or god or the gods, take your pick, and no less removed, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, from the sultry sensuality and materiality of genitals, copulation and sexual inter­course, the body of Children's television stars cannot be seen to function as organic, sexualized entities. The spectacle of an ostensibly de-sexualized body, determined fit by the networks for the weekly consumption of children, get­ting caught touching itself in a Florida porn house, brings into high relief all the laws, sanctions, taboos, and policing institutions Western culture has amassed for the domestication of what Freud rightly and, in my view, conser­vatively termed our polymorphous perversity. And this is exactly the con­tentious nexus that Paul Reubens introduced when he, out of costume and, perhaps, out of character, gave himself over to the delights of Onan--forget­ting the lesson that Onan, too, learned the hard way. When our culture indus­try hosts a crucifixion, we best attend to the particulars lest we find ourselves invited to star in its next production.

 

Scene 3 | While the Emperor has No Clothes, The Transvestite Has Someone Else's

 

Since I will be using the term transvestite and speaking of Paul Reuben's dressing as Pee-wee Herman as an act of transvestism, I need to tell a short story about the first time I delivered this paper at the Looking Out/Looking Over: A Conference on Lesbian and Gay Male Film Conference at the University of California, Davis in 1993.[7] As these events are not at all extraneous to the ety­mological intrigues of transvestism, I beg the indulgence of my readers.

 

At UC Davis, it was the day before my presentation and Professor Earl Jackson Jr. had just finished introducing the audience to the allegorical and theoretical intricacies of a non-heterosexual specular dynamics, a homoerotic, gay male "gaze" if you will--and he had illustrated his point with selected fuck-scenes from his treasure trove of gay male porn. In his prepared com­ments, he alluded to a breakdown of sorts that occurs in feminist film theory whenever it chances to touch upon the concept/practice/or phenomena of the transvestite. Given my own prepared notes on Pee-wee Herman dealt with a generalization of the concept of the transvestite, I "plunged" forward[8] and queried the good doctor as to whether Pee-wee Herman's curious form of transvestism was worth looking into?

 

"No!," Jackson bellowed;

"Wrong!," he added, and none too gently.

 

Holding forth with the passion of a wounded rhinoceros, pontificating with the vindictive dedication of the self-righteous academic, Jackson declared to one and all assembled the inanity of my premise. Jackson's view was clear: Paul Reubens dressing as Pee-wee Herman was not an example of transvestic costuming, as no gender alteration was in­volved. I had not been shouted at in a public gathering with such passionate severity since Sister Cecilia wailed at me in fifth grade at Blessed Sacrament Elementary School in Laredo, Texas.

 

I must say that I was both startled and pleased by Jackson's heated rejoinder: startled at the vehemence of Jackson's rebuke and pleased, that in our ostensi­bly chaotic, indeterminate, post-post moment in the intellectual history of the West, it was still possible to be absolutely "wrong."

 

My suggestion regarding Paul Reubens costuming as a form of transvestism was not "valorized," nor "informing," nor "suggestive," nor "symptomatic," nor "tangential."

 

It was wrong. I was wrong.

 

How did Sir Jackson Jr. justify his decisive negative verdict? His ostensible command of the English language. For Jackson Jr., English was a proper lan­guage, with rules and usages regarding the deployment of the term transvestite which heterosexually-tainted ("-determined," "-marked," "-pol­luted"--) types like yours truly are apt to misconstrue.[9]

 

That afternoon, after Jackson's presentation and before my own talk the fol­lowing afternoon, I decided to plot my response carefully. Having been hum­bled before my peers, I quietly skulked out of the hall and scouted about for a library and the Oxford English Dictionary, the 1989 updated edition. In the OED I found the etymological derivation for the word "transvestite," which had, of course, little to do with English and more to do with Latin, which I, as one raised part-time in the mother tongue of Spanish, was pleased to see. "Transvestire": the "trans" part means to change, alter, or move. "Vestire" is akin to the Spanish reflexive verb "vestirse" and alludes  to the action of dressing oneself. Aside from etymology, the OED disclosed that a transvestite is one with a need to dress in garments appropriate to members of an opposite sex.[10] Language purists and Earl Jackson Jr. please note, there is nothing, etymologi­cally speaking, which speaks to any particular gendering, or sexing or cultur­ing of this clothing transfer. Jackson's whole rationale for bellowing me down on the niceties of the word "transvestite" was his misinformed view that to speak of Pee-wee Herman as a transvestite was a piece of utter nonsense be­cause he was not a man dressing as a woman but a man dressing as a boy--Herman's choice, and not by the by, I read to be an intriguing manifestation of a novel transvestite logic.

 

Now there is a gender specific term which also speaks to the phenomena of one gender dressing as another and it is the word eonism which some of my readers will be familiar with either owing to scholarly research or evening habits. Eonism refers to the adoption of a male subject of female clothing and mannerisms; the word was fathered by the Chevalier Charles d'Eon (b.1728, d.1810) a French diplomat known more for wearing female garments and ef­fecting feminine manners than for international détente.[11] I know that some may counter that it is a colloquial truism that "transvestites" are men who dress as women; but when have cultural critics ever taken the colloquial as the place to build an speculative edifice. Should the notion of the transvestite be limited to discussions of men in drag, or might it be of use as a critically en­abling term to metonymically reference those instances where a subject elects to confuse gender identity to an end, or for an end, as it were.

 

Figure 3   

 

It seems a waste to limit the scope of transvestism to critical meditations and mediations of examples such as the Dunkin Donuts ad in Figure 3 where cor­porate culture oddly mixes classical notions of the chimaera with a denuded, valorized visioning of a cross-dressing male.

 

Figure 4

source: http://web.actwin.com/toaph/peewee/peewee.html

 

Let us move from the abstract to the specific enigma that is Pee-wee Herman: Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman) is a man dressed as a boy; or, to be more specific, Paul Reubens is a male actor impersonating the character of a boy dressing as a man; or, even more specifically, the character of a boy dressed how parents, or other like adults, might dress a boy they wanted to look like a man. Reubens does not change clothes to embody the character of another gender, but to affect the personage of another age, another mindset, a man dressed as a child might who wanted to look like a man. This, then, I read as a radical form of transvestism which sentinels of cultural standards found hard to countersign. Those familiar with Mexican television know the pleasures of watching a man dressing and performing as a boy is not limited to the rarified television-rich atmosphere of the United States.

 

FIGURE 5

source:  http://www.chespirito.com/elchavo.htm

 

Mexican television's El chavo del ocho/The Boy from the Eighth Floor is another example. Here an actor known as "Chespirito," born into this world as Roberto G—mez Bola–os, now past seventy, plays a pun-loving, mischievous, im­poverished child, the bane of the low-income, high-rise neighborhood within which he dwells and the show is set.

 

What a curious theatrical desire, both peculiar and provocative: a man dresses and acts as a boy. For a boy? For boys? and what of girls? The Mexican actor who plays el chavo del ocho is seventy, Paul Reubens was still playing Pee-wee in his late thirties and now, past 51, is considering re-enacting his singular role. What of Bob Denver, aka the dopey indeterminately adoles­cent Gilligan, is he, too, part of this phenomena?

 

I am not alone in my suspicion regarding global, critical deployments of the transvestite concept, as I have been guided in my efforts by the works of the late Cuban exile, Severo Sarduy.[12] In "Copy/Simulacrum," Sarduy develops his theory of transvestism, building upon the work of Roger Callois in a study of camouflage. Sarduy does not read transvestites as men who want to look like women, but as individuals who assume the exaggerated guise of the other gender so as to disappear: "nothing insures that the chemi­cal--or surgical--conversion of men into women does not have as its hidden goal a kind of disappearance, invisibility, effacement"(94). In "Toward a Hypertelic Art," Sarduy expands this view: "Camouflage: not to seem the ag­gressor. Not to have to defend oneself. To counteract the enemy's scrutinizing eye by resorting to an apotropaic death: theater of invisibility"(95). In the end, Sarduy fashions a "law of true disguise" so as to better render the nexus of desires and acts at the heart of transvestism. Not as an act with a goal, nothing so economically practical, but as an example of performance without end: per­formance in the interest of performance.

 

In a Western context so thoroughly saturated with a psychoanalytically in­formed and existentially motivated view of Identity and the self, shape-shift­ing entities like the transvestite, or, like the actor who assumes an alter/ego of a child masquerading as a man, are sure to call into question the very founda­tions of the state, of the social body that believes the reflection it fashions for itself in the mirror of mass culture. In his succinct, probing introduction to the memoir of Herculine Barbin, Michel Foucault ironically queries "Do we truly need a true sex? With a persistence the borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative."[13] Three pages later Foucault remarks, "At the bottom of sex, is truth." It goes without saying that the categories of Self and Truth share turf when one examines the ideology of the West. Gender, too, is in there also and all this comes to a head, sort of speak, with the sad, titillating case of Paul Reubens.

 

Scene Four | Saturday Morning Rogues, Innocent Family Situation Comedies and a Singular Transsexual

 

Let us begin again--"begin the begin." And let us talk about the difficulty of talking to each other without talking at each other. Can we even speak of each other, of the "other?" My designated academic specialty is as a theorist of Chicano/a and Latin American culture. Chicano/a and Latino artifacts line my office, analyses of the same decorate my vitae. So this, then, is my turf. But if you were going to graduate school as I was in the mid-1980s, you could not overlook, unless purposely or genetically thoughtless, the determinant and indeterminate findings that were beginning to accrue and now prosper under the rubric of gender studies.

 

I have recently been engaged in the critical examination of Latinos and Latinas in United States mass culture, and Warner Brothers ubiquitous rodent, Speedy Gonzales, has been very much on my mind of late.[14] It was, in fact, my inter­est in Speedy Gonzales that led a would-be specialist on Latin American litera­ture and culture to the rather alien terrain of Saturday morning children's television celebrities, to Pee-wee, and, as we will see to father/other figures on the Brady Bunch television series.  What yokes Speedy and Pee-wee together is their audience--by and large these are moving picture entertainments for children and young adults; but what makes them blood brothers of sorts is that they are both highly sexed and sexualized. In these entertainments and in the controversies surrounding their real-life pupperteer/creators, we are presented with modern-day parables wherein revelations regarding diverse ideological constructs abound.[15] Speedy Gonzales entertainments ask viewers to navigate the ever-bumpy terrain of ethnic stereotypes, Latino masculinity, 'swarthy' machismo, as well as the processes which naturalize heterosexual rakishness as the signature of Latino desire. All are readily apparent in the images here for your perusal.

<>Figure 6  Drunk Mexicans
from Tabasco Road
directed by Robert McKimson, 1957

Fig 7 Mexicans in Trash

from Cannery Woe

directed by Robert McKimson, 1960

Figure 8 Chick Inspector

Libidinally Charged Mexicans from Cannery Woe, directed by Robert McKimson, 1960

 

I grew up, as most of you did, with Speedy Gonzales. It is only recently that I have begun to assess the magnitude of the marks this particular piece of ani­mated vermin has tattooed across the body of my psyche, the psyches of all who have witnessed his clever antics.

As we dally here momentarily with the Warner Brothers's redoubtable rodent we are not so far afield with our more general concern with transvestism and an oddly and highly sexualized children's television star. For a whole generation of American television viewers, Warner Brother Cartoons defined Saturday Morning television, moving amidst CBS, NBC, and ABC Television in the from the 60s to the 90s. And discussions of Speedy are not extraneous to concerns with archetypal sexuality: Speedy typifies the Latino "macho" who, as Sarduy has ably suggested in his reading of JosŽ Donoso's, El lugar sin l’mites /The Place that has no Limits, is "incapable of confronting his own desire, of assum­ing the image of himself imposed by that desire, the macho--a transvestite in reverse--becomes an inquisitor, an executioner" ("Writing/Transvestism," 34, emphasis added). The step between costume and language, subjectivity and mother tongue is here a rather short one: a "space of conversions, of transfor­mations and disguises: the space of language"(35). Sarduy's words here allow us to suture together our concern with celebrity and innocence, transvestism and resistance to the phenomena of transvestism by mass culture.

 

We have another television icon to consult before we return to watching Pee-wee Herman watch, to watching others watching others watching Pee-wee Herman watch. It begins innocently enough with the image in front of you--a somewhat familiar shot of nine, black-bordered cells; each cell, in turn show­casing two divorced, remarried parents, one cheery domestic servant and six children.

 

Figure 9  

 

Readers chained in Plato's cave since the Seventies, won't have a clue that the image is culled from the opening credit sequence of an ABC television series, The Brady Bunch.[16] These images, in particular the bottom center image of beneficently smiling Patriarch/Daddy Mike Brady, are to be held in the fore­ground of your consciousness, held in reserve as it were, so as to prepare you for the next set of images to follow.  Without giving away too much, I will only add that if you ever watched The Brady Bunch, that quasi-mythological grand narrative of a post-divorce, reconstituted American nuclear family, that epitome of cold war age suburbia, you may be in for a bit of a surprise.

 

In front of you now is a black and white still image from a made-for-television movie-length special episode of another 1970s television series entitled Medical Center--this particular episode tellingly entitled, The Fourth Sex. In this momentous piece of late twentieth century tele-cinema, we are con­fronted with the tragic dilemma of one Dr. Patrick Gaddison.  Pat's doctor and friend, "Joe" (played with the thespian range of a rotting log by seventies "hunk" Chad Everett), has just informed "Pat" that a "four-hour procedure" on the operating table awaits him.

 

The operation?

 

"Pat" wants to become "Patricia." No mere transvestite, Dr. Pat[ricia] yearns to change more than just his clothes. In the scene, here reproduced, Pat ap­poaches the soon to be spectre of his male self in the mirror.  There he pauses to deliver a simple, poignant line with conviction: "Goodbye, Patrick James Gaddison."

 

Figure 10

Patrick Gaddison confronts his mirror, confronts a version of himself in a special two hour episode of the CBS series, Medical Center.

 

 

Pat and Patricia Gaddison is played to the hilt with melodramatic adroitness by Robert Reed. Yes that Robert Reed, the very same actor who developed the character of Mike Brady, the Kronus of gated California sprawl of The Brady Bunch. In The Fourth Sex however, this special award-winning TV movie (Robert Reed won the Emmy in 1976 for outstanding actor in a television drama), one encounters the paterfamilias of the Brady clan as never seen before.  Needless to say, Pat's alteration into Patricia comes as a bit of a shock to his wife Heather and their baseball-loving son, Steve.

 

Figure 11

 

"No visitors" glares the sign. Patricias "wife" Heather confronts that bar, hav­ing just removed her wedding ring and glancing at her nails as if anticipating some odd, uncanny encounter that will challenge her gender identifications, an rendezvous that is somehow anathema to the institution of marriage--for how can Heather be married to Patricia?

 

Ignoring the bar, the sign which for­bids entry to the "freak" within, she braces herself for her encounter with her "husband." The camera lingers on the actress's back as she slowly approaches the hospital room portal--a one-way door that forbids the solace of a return. It is at this highly charged encounter that Patricia, complaining of scores of unanticipated visitors, mouthes the words which appeared at the head of this essay: "If one more person comes in here to take a peek, I am going to charge admission."

 

Figure 12

 

 

at the time, Medical Center was riding a wave of public interest in the U.S. concerning those technological and procedural advances in the medical arts that allowed for men to "become" women; Pat/Patricia's crisis was a thinly-veiled take on the then-breaking and landmark RenŽe Richard's transsexual operation story.[17] And to their credit, Director Vincent Sherman's and writer Rita Lakin's The Fourth Sex, along with the not inconsiderable thespian contributions of Robert Reed, achieved a poignant performative success on television in the mid-seventies.[18]

 

1975: a year which witnessed the incarceration of Nixon Watergate figures H. R. Haldeman, John Mitchell and John Erlichman, the capture of heiress/bank robber/terrorist diva Patty Hearst and, finally, the death of fascist won­derkund Generalisimo Francisco Franco in Spain. It also marked a turning point in the development of the critic whose words you are now reading here.

 

Scene Five | An Autobiographical Intrusion

 

An affable, if a bit peculiar, husky, tele-addicted 13-year old teenager from Laredo, Texas with limited experience and even less insight, I remember laughing quite viciously at the spectacle of Pat/Patricia's conundrum--Pat's choice to go under the knife and emerge as Patricia left me in howling tears, doubled over at the, for me, ridiculousness of the situation--after all, this is 1975; The Brady Bunch ended its series run in 1974: too much, too soon; Mike Brady in a dress, castrated, invaginated, me 13.  It was all I could do not to urinate in my pants as I rolled convulsing on the shag carpet of my very American living room.

 

Speedy Gonzales, too, was a source of no little delight. Here, after all, was an animated, facsimile version of a world somewhat akin to the Mexican American domain of South Texas--the "Mexicans" in Speedy's world were familiar, or, at least the accented English was familiar, the familiar being all that is usually necessary to deliver paroxysms of laughter from your average human subject. I was no different. I laughed at Speedy, at the trash, at the thieving ratoncitos, and at Pat--most loudly at Patricia nŽ Patrick James Gaddison.

 

And today, some thirty years later, I am perplexed with a nagging cu­riosity. I want to isolate the source of my glee; I want to touch the source of my wholesale delight and somehow document the mechanics of that laughter. I have not the vocabulary to address the source of my merriment. This return is not to enforce upon my past guilt for acts I would now not think to perpe­trate.  This essay is not a mere exercise in recuperative nostalgia; It is to try to recon­struct the culturally disseminated rewards that rendered sexualized acts of transition laughable. Transexualism is not identical to Transvestism, but there is in the medical procedure an echo of the dynamics of the costumed act.

 

All of which reminds me of an anecdote a friend of mine from Laredo, Sandra Juarez, told me.[19] A couple of years back, Sandra, then 22, made friends with an eccentric woman in the bordertown of Laredo where she and I were born and raised. For this telling, we'll call her Diana. Sandra and this twenty-nine year old woman named Diana became friends, close friends, over a series of weeks. One night, Diana drew close to Sandra and confessed that she was a hermaphrodite as she/he attempted to grope and snag a kiss. Sandra was taken aback, more from the novelty of kissing her "female" friend than by Diana's hermaphrodite status--for Sandra had no idea what a hermaphrodite was. She had never heard of, nor had imagined the possibility. As these things sometimes go, even for those of us with only one set of geni­tals, no romance ensued from Diana's advance and Sandra asked to go home. End of anecdote.

 

What matters about this minor tale is not the sordid allure of scandal or ro­mance, the Herculine Barbin-like potential for taboo libidinal intrigue.[20] What matters is the encounter with that for which there is no prior model. Nothing in Laredo, her education or her experience had prepared Sandra for this situa­tion. Her perplexity, and honesty about her perplexity I might add, under­writes much of what has here passed and what will herein follow: transvestites, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, as culturally intriguing, 'anomalies' which carry the mark of difference within and, sometimes, with­out--differences which bring into high relief the conforming strategies of the status quo.

 

Perhaps it is my dual imprinting between rakish, macho Speedy and the re­vised body politics of Mike Brady reborn as a woman named Patricia, yes perhaps it is this twin set of boundaries which led me to seriously think through journalistic accounts of the "scandal" of Paul Reuben's walking into a Sarisota Florida porn movie house and allegedly masturbating, or "masterbat­ing" (sic) as the voyeuristic Florida security forces wrote it in their arrest re­port.

 

And so it concludes with this: everyone wants to be moved by what they see.

 

An alternative take? Everyone will be touched by what they see.

 

Scene Six | Watching Journalists Watch Pee-wee Watch

 

Our locale and Modus operandi shifts somewhat: where transvestism and Saturday Morning celebrity have been our subjects, surveillance now comes to the fore and dominates, as we move to a tale of dueling glances and of actions taken as a result of what was seen. So let us move 1

<>
 days after the feast day of image-worshipping Saint John Damascene, and to the journalistic aftermath of the events of the evening of 26, July 1991, and let us see what our colleagues in the yellow press had to say about the events of that evening.

 

July 31, 1991 | It is five days after the capture and Joel Achenbach's story in The Washington Post opens quickly and succinctly: "Paul Reubens is living out every man's and every boy's worst nightmare. He is alleged to have been seen touching him­self."[21] Achenbach's words strike the voyeuristic keynote that will typify media cov­erage of Reubens's sex act. Interestingly, Achenbach's piece finds him dis­mayed by the work of his journalist colleagues, lamenting how "the simple equation of fame plus alleged sex crime equals news[,] requir[ing] ... the entire clammy story be exposed to the world." Refreshingly acute, Achenbach's sar­casm cuts to the quick: "there were no witnesses to the event other than one of the undercover officers assigned to stake out the theater--masturbation is ap­parently such a grave public threat in Sarasota that the Sheriff's Office as­signed not one but three detectives to infiltrate the place and watch for flapping elbows (emphasis added, B1; B9). In addition to clear editorializing, Achenbach's round-up gives us the straight facts, noting Reubens was de­tained for acts "in violation of Florida statute 800.03, Exposure of Sexual Organs"--a personal behavioral choice that exacts a price municipal price: it costs Mr. Reubens "$219.00" to post bond. Achenbach's piece is quite good and includes a highly entertaining if brief, thumbnail sketch of the history of attempts to eradicate masturbation from Samuel Pepys to Sigmund Freud, concluding quite evocatively, and even, perhaps, autobiographically that masturbation "is universally practiced, and it is universally considered vile"(emphasis added). In his final thoughts, Achenbach muses upon "people cast[ing] a jaundiced eyed at any adult who makes a living around children."(B9). The Associated Press, perhaps fearing the repercussions of said jaundice, were hot to the wire the very same day as Achenbach's Washington Post piece with an unattributed sidebar to the burgeoning Pee-wee story: "How to Explain Pee-wee Herman's Arrest to Children." The highlight of this brief journalistic vignette is a quote from a Professor Jeffrey Derevensky of McGill University who passes along these bon mots for parents to pass on to their young children concerning the recent exploits of their "TV pal." Derevensky: You are to say Pee-wee Herman "was doing things that were inappropriate. He went to a place that Pee-wee Herman shouldn't have gone to and he did something wrong." Other social scientist pundits are called upon in this AP wire guide to explain adult sexual predilections to pre-school children. Elissa Benedek, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical Center, offering helpfully that "parents should distinguish between Reubens the actor and Herman the character even when a child is as young as 3 or 4." Benedek's own psychological condition comes into question, however, in her conclu­sions: "It is important to teach youngsters that what they see on television is make-believe, other than on the news"(B5, emphasis added). Needless to say Benedek's implied faith in Rather, Brokaw, Jennings et al. ought to have given her readers (including three and four year olds) pause.

 

August 1, 1991 | Daniel Cerone and Alan Citron's piece in The Los Angeles Times appears and at­temptes to measure the West Coast zeitgeist regarding Paul Reubens's movie-watching activities, citing this noteworthy pronouncement from the mouth of local KCBS tele-anchor Michael Tuck: " 'It's almost like Donald Duck flashing in a public park'."[22] Tuck, who identifies himself as a "disappointed Pee-wee Herman fan," here invokes the holy name of Disney via analogy, underscoring the severity of Reuben's act--in Southern California there are few more sacro­sanct categories than Disney. Tuck's lament signals the outrage which attaches to the spectacle of a sacred image fouling itself. Auto-erotism and career sui­cide are revealed as synonymous.

 

In the articles that continue to appear on a daily basis in newspapers and magazines across the U.S. (echoing, I might add, the semiotic wisdom of Saint John Damascene), Hollywood producers and industry pundits repeatedly al­lude to mention the mug shots of Reubens after his arrest which were run on television and the print media.

 

Figure 13

 

Ultimately, the appeal and pleasure of iconic juxtaposition ends up fueling much of the publicity. Sally Jessy Raphael producer Burt Dubrow's 'eloquent' observation is typical: "it really freaked us out when we saw the picture, be­cause it was so opposite from what we know of him"(F10). New York Post metropolitan editor, Hohn Cotter explaining his none-too-subtle tabloid's at­traction to the story which they ran page 1 is clear about the draw: "the mug shots were definitely the thing that grabbed us"(F10).

 

August 3, 1991 | In the days after the arrest, more and more stories began to appear regarding the slim celebrity's sexual scandal. Lost in all the mud was a small notice in The New York Times regarding an old friend of Reubens in the Sarasota Sheriff's Department who tried to lend Pee-wee a hand.[23] Corporal Joan Verizzo "will be suspended for a day without pay for helping to provide bail money for the actor Pee-wee Herman, a longtime friend." Here is a narrative rift with real intrigue--signaling a minute fracture in the order of the policing institution charged with Reuben's prosecution, the Sarasota Sheriff's Department. More on this suggestive schism below.

 

 

August 5, 1991 | The scandal continues to snowball, with the effects of Reubens alleged public sex act rippling throughout the entertainment industry and business commu­nity: David Kilburn's "Sayonara Pee-wee" in the August 5, 1991 edition of Advertising Age explores the immediate, Multinational economic implications of a masturbating Reubens. Kilburn's blurb notes that a Japanese corporation, Wako Securities, has suspended Reubens's commercials until the case could be heard. The ad firm responsible for the production of this publicity series has a nose for Western sex scandals it would seem, having also hired Rob Lowe for earlier ads which had to be pulled from the airwaves lest Wako's face be lost in the process(3).[24]

 

August 6, 1991 | The shit really hits the fan when the mother of all newspapers on the mother of all editorial pages weighs in with its own less-than-mother-like (unless one's mother was a sociopath), pithy judgement. So it is that on this day, The New York Times, in an unsigned editorial entitled "Sick Jokes," holds forth be­low stolid editorial pieces on worker rights and the politics of embryos: "There seems to be little doubt that Paul Reubens, the actor who created Pee-wee Herman, violated the special standard that society rightly imposes on person­alities of the world of children"(A16). This unelaborated "special standard" is of course the ideologically inculcated values whereby sites and methods of sexual pleasure are collectively legislated and regulated. Needless to say, The New York Times is responsible along with the broadcast networks for a fair share of this elided, yet essential, cultural legislation.

 

August 12, 1991 | Time Magazine finally weighs in with its comprehensive account of Reuben's epic sexual act. The graphic juxtaposition they include with their article speaks volumes--a terse iconic shorthand, and a nice counterpart to The New York Post editor's huzzahs cited above:

 

Figure 14 [25]

 

Writer Paul Gray's view of Pee-wee is as curious and extraordinary as the noted graphics. Finding that Reuben's "hyperkinetic nerdiness was irresistible to millions of children," Gray muses, ÒPee-wee Herman was a grownup version of little brother: win­some, goofy, capable of saying dumb things and beatifically happy with the panorama of the world . . . This man-boy with the tight suit, googly eyes and lipsticked mouth was not every parent's cup of tea: add a leer and the little guy could pass for the emcee of a Berlin nightclub circa 1935.Ó Here, Gray aptly unravels the semiotic complexity of Pee-wee's routine. As we will see below, the particular aesthetic vein Reubens mined as Pee-wee has its roots in a realm of sexual desires and practices perfectly suited to outrage guardians of our domestic cultural status quo. Gray's conclusion is equally acute: "Perhaps the real crime, the one for which Reubens has been so relent­lessly pilloried, was the successful pretense of childishness." I read Gray's finding here literally: adults really do derive no little satisfaction from the pil­lory of others for the exploration of sexual pleasures allowable in toddlers and infants (if then!). In short, much of the public spanking Pee-wee received may profitably be read as a mass cultural castigation for the particular flavor of "entertainment" his Saturday Morning television show, stage act and holiday specials embodied.

 

August 12, 1991 | The highlight of Charles Leerhsen Newsweek Magazine piece is the following loaded, not-so-rhetorical question: "Can an electronic babysitter violate our children's trust?"(54) The image of a babysitter masturbating at the local porn-house inflames the always already heady mix of celebrity and scandal sur­rounding Pee-wee Herman's situation. Leerhsen's essay adds a few tidbits re­garding the circumstances of Reubens's arrest: "The undercover detectives were said to be working on a drug case, and when their leads did not pan out, they decided to check the theater for sex offenders"(55). That the agents charged with maintaining Sarasota's public hygiene move so easily from nar­cotics stake-out to porn-house surveillance speaks less to their particular range as detectives, I suspect, and more to the boredom of under-educated law enforcement types out for a good time and a little work on the side. The denouement of this particular Newsweek story is memorable: a quote from a professor emeritus of children's shows, one-time celebrity Soupy Sales, who weighs in with this bit of sage advise for Mr. Reubens: "He can masturbate his brains out, but you don't do that in a porno theater when you're a role model"(55).

 

August 14, 1991  | A memorable Wall Street Journal op-ed piece ("Pee-wee Herman, Hero of the Hour") by Doy Aharoni appears. Aharonia, a rabbi, author and student at the UCLA School of Law, discloses a bit of cultural study minutia which actually solicits and licenses a return to the work of Severo Sarduy noted above in our discussion of transvestite dynamics. Aharoni's sympathetic piece notes that among the many project cancellations endured by Reubens (the remaining episodes of his CBS Saturday Morning television program, advertising and promotion contracts etc), "the Philadelphia Zoo has zapped [their] two minute Pee-wee flick, this one explaining metamorphosis and starring a butterfly and a caterpillar."[26] The irony of this cancellation in the context of our inquiry is not to be missed: ultimately, this study submits that Paul Reubens was pun­ished in the media for, among other things, embodying a flexible subjectivity--an existentially charmed entity or, even, organism that sanctioned flexible gender and sexual practice oscillations.  Reubens's invention of a character who wears the costume of a boy dressed as a man has been revealed here as a striking alternative form of transvestism--here, the transvestism in question being understood as one which operates not strictly with regard to gender (as opposed to Eonism) but also with regard to age: an actor camouflaged as a child camouflaged as a man. The irony of a zoo's decision to excise a two-minute short film on insect metamorphosis comes into high relief in a discussion of transvestism in­formed by Severo Sarduy theorization of the same: Reubens had completed a short informational film about the transformation of caterpillars into butter­flies--an animal kingdom transformation, as documented by Sarduy via Roger Callois, which provides an analogue to human costuming strategies. As Sarduy concludes in "Copy/Simulacrum": "the animal-transvestite does not seek a friendly appearance in order to attract (nor a disagreeable appearance in order to dissuade), but an embodiment of fixity in order to disappear"(94).[27] More generally, Sarduy uses these views in order to sustain his striking reve­lations concerning the relation between behavior and rhetoric, culture and narration: "Transvestism...may well be the best metaphor for writing .. . mak[ing] us see. . . not a woman who might be hiding a man beneath her appearance..., but the very fact of transvestism itself" ("Writing /Transvestism," 37).

 

 

August 19, 1991 | It is now over three weeks since the story broke and Fred Barnes et al. in The New Republic seem at first to strike a sympathetic stance of advocacy on the whole issue of Pee-wee's incarceration: "The question to be asked is not why Pee Wee (sic) Herman was allegedly masturbating in an X-rated movie house (arresting him for such is like arresting someone for drinking in a bar) but rather why the police were sweeping the aisles with flashlights in the first place. If there is any indecency to expose, it's the prurience of the police, and the cowardice of CBS."[28] A laudable view, but before we acclaim the courage of NR's editors, let us take a closer look at the odd opening sequence which precedes their defense: "Free Pee Wee (sic) ¦The appearance of children's tele­vision star Paul Reubens...on the cover of Tuesday's New York Post was, to some, a myth-shattering revelation. Reuben's mug shot after being arrested for indecent exposure in a Sarasota, Florida porno theater was a far cry from his rosy-cheeked, asexual on-camera persona"(emphasis added, 10). "Asexual"? Pee-wee Herman? I do not think the semantic contours of the term asexual ("adj 1: lacking sex or functional sexual organs. 2: produced without sexual ac­tion or differentiation") can be of any use to our survey. An unusual and un­tenable premise; consider the alternative: It is, in fact, the particular form of Pee-wee Herman's overlooked and highly sexualized popular subjectivity which will, in fact, underwrite the scandal which arises from his public sex act.

 

November 6, 1991 | Weeks after Reubens' brief imprisonment, Daniel Cerone was back writing in The Los Angeles Times documenting the judicial end of the Pee-wee sex drama: "Paul Reubens will plead no contest to a misdemeanor charge of indecent ex­posure...The deal was offered last week, it appears, after Reuben's lawyers showed the court a videotape from a surveillance camera in the adult movie theater that allegedly supported Reuben's claim of innocence"(emphasis added).[29]  Talk about a late-breaking ironic scenario. In the final weeks of a case that allegorically fuses together all sorts of late 20th century concerns with voyeurism, identity, sexuality, and subjectivity, the star witness for the defense is an unseen VHS surveillance camera in the garish lobby of a fateful Sarasota porn-house. The break "came October 7" relates Cerone, "when lawyers representing Reubens disclosed to the prosecution a videotape shot by a security camera in the lobby of the theater on the night of the arrest. According to Dresnick [Ron Dresnick, one of Reuben's attorneys], the time code on the videotape showed that Reubens was in the lobby when detective William Walters allegedly saw the actor masturbating" (emphasis added). The human detective/voyeur's testimony is at odds another star witness/voyeur, this one non-human, a camera. "Walters claimed in a deposition that he had constant watch over a man he alleges was Reubens for a 20-minute period in the theater. Halfway through that time frame, however, is when Reubens was videotaped in the lobby" by his friend, a camera.

 

I am at great pains to resist anthropomorphizing this Pee-wee friendly camera, to personalize it like Chairie, and Globie, and have it sassy-mouthed and irreverent, chiming in with its findings in the final hours, affording Pee-wee a last minute reprieve from hard time in Sing Sing.

 

Pee-wee's lawyer Dresnick's conclusions, are, in the light of the scenario previ­ous, kind of pedestrian, but their political economic implications are nonethe­less worth sampling. Recalling the Los Angeles Rodney King tape evidence controversy, Dresnick waxes semiotic: "It's a perfect example of the power of the videotape recorder, where police just don't have any idea who's watching them." This documentation of surveillance and the police in the context of sexuality sanctions an introduction of thoughts from the late-lamented, oft-cited French scribe Michel Foucault: "With these themes of surveillance, and especially in the schools, it seems that control over sexuality becomes inscribed in architec­ture. In the Military Schools, the very walls speak the struggle against homo­sexuality and masturbation."[30] The irony here? Reubens was incarcerated for lewd acts upon his person in a structure architecturally designed to provoke masturbation. Akin to a dark waking dream space, the site of the motion pic­ture theater seems designed by the likes of a Bentham for the pleasure of the seated voyeur. The antithesis of a panopticon prison, the movie house seems the perfect place to "flap [one's] elbow" with impunity. Who would imagine that a palace designed for the delights of the watcher would solicit the polic­ing gaze of Sarasota sheriffs. In our every day waking, walking public lives, policing agencies and public institutions have "no need for arms, physical vio­lence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising their surveillance over, and against, himself"(Foucault, 155).[31]

            

Figure 15

A modest shot of Sandra Scream, one of the actors whose onscreen exploits moved Mr. Reubens that fateful night in Florida.[32]

 

But a movie house is different--akin to the bedroom or toilet, a movie house seems that most remote island of privacy. Hence the irony of the public spectacle which comes to surround Paul ReubensÕs private screening of Nancy Nurse starring Sandra Scream, Turn up the Heat, and Tiger Shark in the South Trail Cinema.

 

Scene 7 | Spanking the Gender-Bending Prankster

 

This is an informed chat. A thinking through. I am sharing some recent find­ings, initial but well-worked through--more a deck of cards than a road map. So we have watched journalists watching, amused ourselves with the some­time apt, sometimes annoying perambulations from the worlds of newspa­pers. Now it is time to come clean. Cultural commentators, academic cultural workers, what can we add to the discussion that might take us outside this circuit of scandal, disappointment and banal outrage.[33]

 

When I shared this chat at UC Davis, I was in the initial moments of thinking through Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud and its well-crafted take on the one sex/two sex debates on sexual difference--a volume that is worth the price of admission if only for its selective art historical survey on the aesthetics and sexual politics of anatomy illustration. So now it is with mild trepidation that I move to a mild rebuke of some choice words drawn from Thomas Laqueur's book.

 

Trepidation not because of the esteem which has accrued upon Laqueur's project, but for from where it is drawn: his conclusion. Rhetorically speaking, conclusions are odd, anxious sites, the desire for closure running head long up against a critic's desire to analyze, to break things down--my own piece will cop-out with a Post-script in lieu of a conclusion, which introduces attendant complications of its own.

 

Here then, in his denouement, Laqueur writes "...the content of talk about sexual difference is unfettered by fact, and is as free as mind's play..."[34] We can intuit Laqueur's goal in these lines, crafting a thesis about the cultural con­struction of gender roles, not to mention gender costumes (two different beasties if you ask me); Laqueur wants to stress the openendedness of it all, how having acknowledged the constructedness of men and women, of bodies designated male and female, we can now critically walk past that limited bi­nary view and throw ourselves (rhetorically?) into the churning polymor­phous waters of life. Leaving aside my cynical suspicion that while lunching at the Plaza, Laqueur uses the men's room, I merely want to re-emphasize that we would do well to sidestep the issue of freedom with regard to the content of our talk. To talk is to be fettered, and to imagine otherwise a naive dream.

 

In this essay, I would like to translate Laqueur's critical architecture and try to imagine infants, kids, teenagers, adults, and the elderly as categories much akin to those associated with gender. Sex practices and taboos also figure in and intersect these age categories. While it is perfectly acceptable for an eight month old male infant to publicly hold and manipulate his genitalia, a thirty-nine year old male in a public theater will have a tougher go of it. Once a community brings these age-sensitive categories online, they are quietly and powerfully naturalized, and the stage is set for all manner of neuroses.  I am not being obtuse or abstract: one has only to mention the specter of the ped­erast to kindle the outrage of the masses. And part of the controversy sur­rounding the 'scandal' of Paul Reubens's sex act derives from the fact that he produced a program ostensibly designed for children; that he dressed, singu­larly, as a child, and that he pleasured himself sexually.

 

And I think it is time to allow Paul Reubens to weigh in on his own behalf. As I suggested above, I read the vehemence of the response against Pee-wee and his private sexual act in a public venue (the cancellation of multi-million dol­lar ad accounts, neighborhood Pee-wee impersonators out of a job, the net­work cancellation of his remaining shows) as a collective vote of sorts, on the part of a significant, determining minority. This vote, the equivalent of a slap in the face or boot in the ass, amounts to a public spanking of Pee-wee for his misbehavior: namely his nationally televised showcasing of gender-bending celebrities. We can account for the scandal, but not the glee of the media. What had Pee-wee done? What had his productions perpetrated on the American masses to deserve such a public caning.

 

To begin to answer these queries, let us screen a few frames culled from a Pee-wee's Playhouse X-mas Special (1987) directed by Paul Reubens with Wayne Orr and written by Reubens with John Paragon. In these images one confronts sta­tus-quo gender propriety subjected to ironic and subversive parody--campy, irreverent and, in my view, delicious. The vehemence of the mainstream me­dia's response may be read then as a rebuke for this boy/man/comic/trickster not playing by the stagnant, concrete rules of identity and sexual choice. Consider only this: in his singular special, Reuben's and his coterie of actors, artists and producers, attack for comic profit that most sacred of Christian and Capitalist holy days--Christmas. December 25: both the ostensible birthday of Jesus Christ and that consumber frenzy season most associated as a tonic for Capitalism--the Christmas buying season. One would have to search long and hard for more important totems in US mass culture. I don't imagine I will have to provide you with a slew of citations from sociologists and anthropologists on the topic of Christmas and holiday rituals in order to sway you to my view of things on this issue. That all of Christianity and all of the retail barons of Wall Street and the European Commonwealth celebrate equally the glorious rituals of worship and purchase that is Christmas hardly calls for concrete substantiation.

 

And it is with the particular genre of the child's Christmas television special that Pee-wee Herman elects to launch his campy satire. A domain best known for the likes of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and Charlie Brown, the Christmas season television line-up is a paean to the spirit of Christmas past, those pre-secular days of lore when Christ was born and gifts were exchanged and children rubbed their eager noses on windows scouting for reindeer and an overweight, if generous, strange man's largesse. As I argued in my "Autopsy of a Rat," even when the characters are downright cruel (viz. Dr. Seuss's Grinch and ol' man Dickens' Ebeneezer Scrooge), their malevolence is merely a pretense for their ultimate redemption in the final act.

 

 

Figure 16

Panoply of Camp Stars

 

Nothing so contrived is to be found within the confines of Pee-wee's Playhouse X-mas Special. The opening sequence of the program begins with a tracking shot of a line of elves throwing extravagantly decorated gifts down a snow-framed well, anything but an auspicious beginning. And we have not even mentioned yet the mischievous selections of casting director Diane Dimeo in pulling together her Multicultural, multi-sexual, polymorphously endowed company of players who visit Pee-wee for Yuletide cheer. This singular and provocative grouping merits a brief pictorial review; it is a veritable who's who of kitschy, camp, US celebrity including Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Whoopi Goldberg, Earvin "Magic" Johnson and kd lang. Note the juxtaposition of clean-cut X-mas symbolism (each star ringed by a holly wreath) with ironic camp lurking there on the fringes--Avalon, lang and Goldberg, the possibilities are endless.

 

 

 

The Christmas Special's boisterous opening song sequence, a Gene Kelly-style extravaganza that begins with the gift-down-the-well-throwing-elves anima­tion, ends with a stern and sober company of what appear to be Marine Corps Honor Guard singers solemnly and richly intoning a minor-chord heavy carol noting "It's Christmas in the Playhouse."

 

  

Figure 17

 Stern,  solemn Marines

 

 

This almost sacred, somewhat melancholic, interlude comes to what appears to be a closing pause when Pee-wee appears suddenly and the slow, dirge-like music suddenly bursts into a rock'n'rolling melange of Busby Berkley and Esther Williams with Pee-wee leading his Marines-cum-Rockettes through a rousing song and dance sequence whose choreography is pure MGM.

 

 

Fig 18

 Semper Fi meets Esther Williams

 

The flamboyant, knowing, camp aesthetics of this performance is all the more ironic in politico-sexual context of recent controversies surrounding gay men and 'don't ask, don't tell' policies in the United States armed forces.[35] Needless to say, the scene experiences a bit of a climax when one of the crooning sol­diers gooses a surprised and rather dismayed Mr. Herman.[36]

 

Figure 19

Marine playfully gooses Pee-wee

 

 

After Pee-wee et al.'s dazzling opener, the special gets down to work with peripatetic glee: one sub-plot follows the running gag of Pee-wee's greed (a greed made all the more acute by the gift-potential of Christmas); another, is a curious vignette which charts Pee-wee's attempt to speak Spanish (feliz navidad in Pee-wee's mouth becomes "felesshh nabbaabbah") with a Latino dupe, Ricardo--a vignette which ends with Ricardo approaching a festive pi–ata se­quence. The pi–ata skit, is, itself, merely a set-up for a succinct paean to Hollywood Latinas via Dolores Del Rio/Lupe Velez simulacra, "Charo"--"Now the only thing missing is Charo," Pee-wee exclaims.

 

Another compelling vignette, captures the late singer Dinah Shore, who had a sickeningly sweet morning show of her own at one point, singing the "Twelve Days of Christmas" to a cruel Pee-wee via videophone. Pee-wee, annoyed with Shore's interloping, replaces himself with a masked mannequin, to whom Shore, oblivious, addresses her song. This is a text rife with semiotic possibil­ity. Simulacra, automatons, the mask, television, the phone etc.

 

Figure 20

 Dinah & the Automaton

Dinah Shore sings "The Twelve Days of Christmas" to a mannequin.

 

Earlier in the gala, Pee-wee has been visited by New York City cabaret fixture Grace Jones who enters the chez Pee-wee via a sealed box, intended destina­tion: The White House. Just before the crate Ms. Jones appears from is opened, Pee-wee says, "I hope it's not another fruitcake." The unsolicited, unwanted fruitcake is a motif of the Christmas special, with guest after guest handing ungrateful Pee-wee Herman one of these peculiar holiday confections. An odd overlap of Christmas and Gay Male aesthetic here appears, the Yuletide fruit­cake ("fruitcake n. a rich cake containing nuts, dried or candied fruits, and spices.") also being a popular early 20th century English-language epithet for Gay males. This is not a hermeneutic stretch as any viewer of the show quickly gathers. The motif culminates in a topper of a vignette, late in the show.

 

Figure 20 Pee-wee & the Fruitcake

 

The walls of Pee-wee's Playhouse part between reproductions of the da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Little Boy Blue, revealing a backroom with a wall of fruitcakes being assemble by two beefy construction worker types (Village People-style hunks). Pee-wee's succinct exchange with the sweaty shirtless laborer speaks reams: "Here's two more fruitcakes Roland."

 

But let us return to Grace Jones and her oddly appealing, disco-fied version of "The Little Drummer Boy" with which she treats Pee-wee. Jones's version of the X-mas classic is like no other I have ever seen, the solemn tale of Christ's herald reborn as a modified striptease gyration

 

Figure 21 Grace Jones Strips

 

 

In the image, here reproduced, you see the shadow of the gloves she has just flamboyantly hurled off camera.). When Jones intones, "I saved my best for him" we know we are not in Santa's workshop anymore.

 

It is the purpose of this essay to suggest that sequences like this lead main­stream media pundits to discount and abuse the entertainments issued by Reubens and his camp; the quote which follows, pulled from the Newsweek piece cited above is typical: "His show was 'a gallery of weirdos,' says John Hannah, a Los Angeles writer who knew Reubens. 'A kind of surrealist bath­house.'"(55) Given the impact of surrealism and by surrealists on the art and politics of the twentieth century, Hannah's remarks may be re-appropriated and championed as an astute anology.  In the Newsweek piece cited above (August 12, 1991), it merely served to underscore Reuben's allegiance to the domain of gay male aesthetics.

 

Scene 8 | Turn off the Cameras and Close Your Eyes

 

This, then, has been a short story about scandal. Recently, the number of scandals in the United States mass media has risen in direct proportion to the rise of what is called "tabloid television"--Real Video, Hard Copy, Inside Edition, The World's Wildest Police Videos and their ilk. Although they purport to take the pulse of the American nation, these "journalists" are more interested in profiting from a growing hunger (nurturing it as the same time) for the titilla­tion and pleasure (not to say profit) which derives from electronic voyeurism. Needless to say this has led to a reinforcement of some of the more retrograde US "shared" cultural attitudes towards those whose sexual orientation or practices are at odds with powerful fictional oddities of the late 20th century which go by the name of "family values."

 

This essay, then, chronicles a brief interlude in the history of surveillance and the policing of those values. Focusing primarily on the set of events surround­ing the arrest of Paul Reubens in an X-rated movie house for public masturba­tion, it deals also with the status which attaches to the bodies and actions of individuals whose celebrity derives from the gaze of children. Citing various resources (Severo Sarduy, Roland Barthes among others) and media (newspaper stories, photography, and toys), I argue that part of the scandal which arose from Mr. Reuben's unfortunate incarceration derives in large part from the nature of the entertainment he had been producing for CBS during his reign at the network. We have just briefly peeked at parts of one of these entertainments.

 

Though a Saturday morning celebrity's encounter with cinema and some sher­iffs provides the centerpiece of this project, the essay also unfolds with some institutional goals attached. The piece attempts to build a bridge of sorts be­tween the interests and practices of Ethnic American theorists and those pro­fessionals engaged in Gender and/or Gay Male and Lesbian Studies. Ultimately, via Severo Sarduy, I am attempting to fashion a speculation which might span the concerns of Chicano/Latino theory and Gender studies. And if I linger upon the spectacle of the cross-dressed subject, of transexualism on television, it is because I sense in these critical somatic interventions, an ally, or a means of confluence with what Chicana theoretical diva Gloria Anzaldœa calls the Mestizaje. This speaks to my overall goal: articulating recent American cultural trends with regard to the intersect of technology and de­sire--here film, sexual attitudes, surveillance technology, and, what one might call, the pathology of celebrity are all found in bed together simultaneously.

 

Scene 10 | The Final Costume Change

Figure 22

Pee-Wee & the Author, San Diego, 1994

 

In dealing with the epidemic of visibility menacing our entire culture today, we must, as Nietzsche quite correctly said, cultivate mendacious and decep­tive clear-sightedness.[37] So we have assayed the theoretical implications of Pee-wee Herman and the odd, moving tale of a man who profits by dressing as a boy dressed as a man. A television and movie star who, still on camera, bathed in the wondrous carnal entanglements of filmed pornography, gets caught up in the gears of a cultural machinery dedicated to sexual policing, an embarrassing provocative tale of public outrage.

 

We have spoken of spectators and of surveillance--the dueling eyes of camera and detective. Desiring detectives wanting to see, and having satisfied that urge, acting on it after the fact. Our topics have spanned the gamut of cross-dressing, transexualism, transvestism and hermaphrodites, a veritable hodge-podge of ostensibly marginal sexual subject position slots.

 

This essay ends reflecting upon a labyrinth of reflection: Paul Reubens re­turned to the silver screen after his masturbation scandal in the role of the Penguin's evil and heartless father in Batman Returns (1992). The film, the sec­ond in the recent Batman series, was directed by Tim Burton, who also di­rected, more recently, Ed Wood a bio-documentary of a famous bad movie maker, and, not incidentally, a transvestite, played admirably enough by the somewhat handsome, always half-shaved Johnny Depp. One of Ed Wood's first feature films was Glen or Glenda (1953) also known as I Led Two Lives--the movie poster promoting that film reappears here. In it I read an compelling, evocative visual counterpoint to the essay which now draws to a close.

 

Figure 23 Glen or Glenda

 

Some conclusions: Transvestites are more than men who dress like women. Transvestites are less than men who dress like women. The ballad of "more ir­resolvable" is irresolvable--shadows of the stagnant binary which embodies them, resolution of more or less is, in the end, meaningless. Transvestism is a process of self-willed othering, of costume, and camouflage where the othered subject submits gender categories to that most acute analysis which, in the theory of comedy, is known as farce. Farce is serious business, as Freud, that Viennese author of psychoanalysis, was not the first to bring to light with his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. So transvestites are those who dress as someone else, something other than who it is others suppose them to be, perhaps too other than who it is they themselves imagine themselves to be--Paul Reubens approximation of a spoiled child dressed as a middle-aged used car salesman is no less curious than Rue Paul, or Milton Berle for that matter. They are actors in masques that call into question the boundaries of the real, remarking upon it and challenging it in unmatched fashion through un­matched fashion. Ultimately, transvestites, acts of transvestism, reveal the lim­itations of the philosophical category of the existential. For that crime, their trace must be silenced, rendered farcical or be subjected to the eliding ubiquity of televised scandal.

 

 

Post-script, April 2004

 

 

 

In November of 2001, a search warrant was issued for the home of Paul Reubens in connection with another court caseÑthe object of this particular Los Angeles City Attorney-inspired safari? Child pornography.   Reubens understood right away the ramifications of the search, stating, Òthe moment that I realized my name was going to be said in the same sentence as children and sex, that's really intense. That's something I knew from that very moment, whatever happens past that point, something's out there in the air that is really bad.[38] Though he defended the collection as his vast and valuable historical collection of artwork, kitsch memorabilia and adult erotica, he ended up pleading guilty to the possession of obscene material to make the case go away, to make these particular cameras stop, so that the gaudy trappings of a pederast's costume might not be the final wardrobe change for the one and only Pee-wee Herman. [39]