For years, decades, eons, Sesame Street viewers have grown up watching Bert and Ernie, potentially wondering, once they reached adult years, if the Muppets were gay or not.
Now, it seems, our questions and long-held ideas have been answered, after the writer who helped shape the characters himself lifted the lid on how he pictured them.
And, who better to confirm they were in fact gay than the man who wrote them into the show?
When asked the golden question, Mark Saltzman, said he based the two men on his own relationship with partner Arnold Glassman when it was his turn to write them into his songs.
‘I remember one time that a column from The San Francisco Chronicle, a preschooler in the city turned to mom and asked “are Bert & Ernie lovers?” And that, coming from a preschooler was fun,’ he told Queerty. ‘And that got passed around, and everyone had their chuckle and went back to it. And I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert & Ernie, they were.
‘I didn’t have any other way to contextualise them. The other thing was, more than one person referred to Arnie & I as “Bert & Ernie.”’
So there you have it – while Sesame Street bosses in the past have denied the two characters – who debuted with the show in November 1969 – are in a same-sex relationship, or have any sexuality at all, this might be the most solid confirmation we’ll get from someone in the know.
He then went on to confirm he was the Ernie in his relationship, while his partner Arnie was more Bert – and continued to write the pair based on his own experiences.
He added: ‘I was already with Arnie when I came to Sesame Street. So I don’t think I’d know how else to write them, but as a loving couple. I wrote sketches…Arnie’s OCD would create friction with how chaotic I was. And that’s the Bert and Ernie dynamic.’
He added there were other gay dynamics in the long-running children’s show its younger audience might not have tapped into at the time.
‘I will say that I would never have said to the head writer, “oh, I’m writing this, this is my partner and me.” But those two, Snuffalupagus, because he’s the sort of [a] clinically depressed Muppet…you had characters that appealed to a gay audience,’ he said. ‘And Snuffy, this depressed person nobody can see, that’s sort of Kafka! It’s sort of gay closeted too.’
This is just blowing out minds, not going to lie.
Bert and Ernie have been sleeping in the same room for 50-odd years and often squabble like an old married couple, but television bosses tried to nip the conversation in the bud years ago.
Back in 2011, as New York City, where the show is based, legalised gay marriage, a spokesperson for the show denied these two might get hitched following the landmark decision, initially created by Frank Oz and Jim Henson to ‘teach pre-schoolers that people can be friends with those who are very different to themselves’.
‘Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics [as most Sesame Street Muppets do] they remain puppets and do not have a sexual orientation,’ a spokesman said.
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