In this Book
- I Know You Are, but What Am I?: On Pee-wee Herman
- Book
- 2024
- Published by: University of Minnesota Press
- Series: Forerunners: Ideas First
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
How Pee-wee and his playhouse help us reimagine our relationships to technology
I Know You Are, but What Am I? explores the cultural legacy of Pee-wee Herman, the cult television star of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. This children’s show—that was also for adults—ran on network TV from 1986 to 1990 and starred comedian Paul Reubens as Herman, a queer man-boy whose playhouse, the set for the show, was tricked out with a profusion of animate computational toys and technologies.
Cait McKinney shows how three defining scenes from the show inform, and even foretell and challenge, our present moment: the playhouse as an alternative precursor to networked smart homes that foregrounds caring and ethical relationships between humans and technologies; a reparative retelling of Reubens’s career-wrecking 1991 arrest for indecent exposure inside a Florida adult film theater as part of an AIDS-phobic, antigay sting operation; and worn-out, Talking Pee-wee dolls and their broken afterlives on eBay and YouTube.
McKinney looks at how queer people who were children in the 1980s remember and relate to Pee-wee now, showing that the moral panic about sexuality, gender, and children from the past can help us refute anti-trans and anti-queer political movements organized today.
Table of Contents

- Frontmatter
- pp. i-vi
- Introduction
- pp. 1-16
- 1. The Playhouse
- pp. 17-38
- 2. The Porn House
- pp. 39-54
- 3. The Voice Box
- pp. 55-72
- Acknowledgments
- p. 79
- Forerunners: Ideas First
- pp. 80-82
- Author Biography
- p. 83