Some kinds of Love

PeeWee Herman is dead. More accurately, we should say Paul Reubens has died from the effects of cancer, which he had for 6 years. The character that he invented, PeeWee Herman, is forever alive in the movies and tv shows he made.

I loved PeeWee Herman. His Saturday Morning show was groundbreaking. I have some PeeWee memorabilia, including a pack of gum, and the original cast album from his stage show, that predated the tv show and is on vinyl picture disc. Who doesn’t remember the salesman who came to the door if the playhouse?

In the 90’s I put together a one off band called Les Goodman and His Great Swingin’ Dick. We had an original song called Free PeeWee. The lyrics were quite funny if I remember. I envisioned this band as a longer running project, but we only played one gig at the Railway. The band included punk superstar Jon Card on drums, jazz superstar Tony Wilson on guitar, I think Greg Boothroyd from Jazzmanian Devils on bass, and me. Our original songs were My Dick Broke ( and it ain’t no joke), God Shaped Hole ( with lyrics drawn from the National Enquirer), All Teens Must Die, and a few others whose titles escape me. Suffice to say we were brilliant and tragically ignored.

The free PeeWee movement resulted from the arrest of Paul Reubens on a charge of public indecency, for allegedly masturbating in a movie theatre. Of course the media did not say Paul Reuben’s, but instead assigned the allegations to his character PeeWee.

Author Laurie Stone wrote about this event in the Village Voice in 1991, after Reubens was arrested. It is important to read because you see this incident in an entirely new light. “Paul Reubens was visiting his parents in Sarasota Florida when he went out for a wank at one of the local porno theaters that replaced the last picture show. He didn’t even take out his pud, he said.

According to Celeste Finn, “The official police report described the silhouette of the man they later identified as Paul Reubens using his left hand to commit ‘the crime’. Reubens is right handed. If it had gone to trial, an expert witness from Masters and Johnson was prepared to testify that, in their exhaustive research on human sexuality, they had never recorded a subject who used their non dominant hand to masturbate.

“The case didn’t go to trial because Reubens was also shown on the theater’s security footage in the lobby, with a time stamp at the time ‘the crime’ was taking place in the theater, according to the detective’s report. Also, Reubens was advised to avoid the publicity of a trial.”

Are these facts even remembered? No. All we remember is that PeeWee was arrested. The guy who wanked in a theatre. After reading the piece by Laurie Stone, it appears obvious that he was not guilty, but was set up.

Paul Reuben identified as gay. Obviously gay. An obviously gay man who had had a children’s show on network tv. We also know the bias of small town police in rural America. “Try that is a small town?”  Today, try that with a Woke Mob. There are people on the left and the right who rush to public judgment without having the facts. If the facts do not serve their bias, they are conveniently forgotten, distorted or invented.

Reports on his death note that he had cancer for the past 6 years. Any death is a horrible and sad event, but cancer has a special place in celebrity deaths, only superseded by suicide. In the past few weeks, we lost Sinead O’Connor, who presumably took her own life. Sinead had suffered public condemnation for ripping a photo of the Pope on SNL. She was a very independent, talented woman, who did not suffer fools. She was made to suffer for her authenticity.

If she had not been a woman would she have been so pilloried? She was an outsider with a shaved head. She was political. She spoke up for the abused children who couldn’t speak for themselves. Later, she developed mental issues that became worse as she grew older. But consider the abuse she suffered in her childhood from her mentally ill Mother, and the way she was treated by these men of power. Are we surprised she suffered from mental illness?

Both PeeWee and Sinead are examples of a type of preemptive small town justice that singles out gay men and strong women.  This warped justice is a type of Cancel Culture, before it was even called Cancel Culture. For those who challenge the rules of toxic masculinity, the iron fist comes down to put the offending person “back in their place.”

This weekend is Pride weekend in our town. It is important to remember why Pride is necessary. There are many kinds of love in this world, just as there are many kinds of sexual expression. Sexual expression and gender identification are not always cut and dry, nor the same thing. Many people do not fit into our binary boxes of male and female, right or wrong, gay or straight, black or white. What about the boxes of safe and unsafe?

I saw two gay men a few months back walking down the street holding hands. A simple gesture of love. And I thought, how brave of them. This was decades after Stonewall. Unfortunately, it is still an act of bravery to show an expression of same sex affection in public. That is truly sad. And Women continue to have to fight for basic reproductive rights, for the rights to control their own body, without having to live under corrupt white male laws that target their ability to choose.

Pregnancy s not hat a choice, as it can literally become a death sentence for women. In the United States, a rich country by any standards, where death from pregnancy is still too common. About 1 in 5 women die during pregnancy, and about 1 in 8 die the day of delivery. Mental health conditions were the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths, involved in more than 1 in 5 deaths among pregnant women and new mothers.

But toxic masculinity is not satisfied with being the cause of death in pregnancy. Actual homicide is a leading cause of death in pregnant women in the US, who are more likely to be murdered during pregnancy or soon after childbirth than to die from the three leading obstetric causes of maternal death (high blood pressure disorders, hemorrhage, or sepsis). Rebecca Lawn at Harvard School of Public Health and colleagues say the majority of these pregnancy-associated homicides are linked to the lethal combination of intimate partner violence and firearms, and are entirely preventable.

Ending male violence, including gun violence, could save the lives of hundreds of women and their unborn children in the US every year, and is an urgent priority for the health and safety of women everywhere. Intimate partner violence is far too common worldwide, with one in three women reporting experiences of violence including physical, sexual, or psychological abuse by a partner in their lifetime.

According to a new study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, LGBT people are nearly four times more likely than non-LGBT people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault. In addition, LGBT people are more likely to experience violence both by someone well-known to the victim and at the hands of a stranger. LBT women are 5 times more likely than non-LBT women to experience violent victimization. The risk of violence for GBT men is more than twice that of non-GBT men.

And these are just the statistics for what is reported. About half of all victimizations are not reported to police. According to Statistics Canada, police-reported hate crimes based on sexual orientation rose nearly 60 per cent between 2019 and 2021 to the highest level in five years.

This is why Pride is so important. People should not be forced to feel shame for their feelings. When I was growing up, anyone who was involved in drama was considered to be gay or effeminate. Jocks in high school threw chairs and even desks at me and my friends calling us drama fags. We were all straight.

Later, in my early twenties, I had a boyfriend for a few months. I wanted to experiment and see if that lifestyle was for me. And while it did not resonate for me, I have total respect for anyone who makes that decision, because it is not easy. In many cases, it is not even a choice, but an attraction they feel at a very young age. So let’s colour outside the lines this weekend, and support the rainbow of choices.

“Some kinds of love
Marguerita told Tom
Between thought and expression
Lies a lifetime
Situations arise
Because of the weather
And no kinds of love
Are better than others”

Lou Reed