Former “Sesame Street” writer Mark Saltzman recently revealed that he viewed Bert and Ernie, two muppets who are best friends on the show, as gay.
Saltzman compared their relationship to his own closeted relationship with documentary filmmaker and editor Arnold Glassman.
“I remember one time that [according to] a column from the San Francisco Chronicle, a preschooler in the city turned to Mom and asked, ‘Are Bert & Ernie lovers?’” he told Queerty this week.
“And that, coming from a preschooler, was fun. 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 and Ernie, they were. I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them. The other thing was, more than one person referred to Arnie and I as ‘Bert and Ernie.'”
Saltzman wrote 31 episodes for “Sesame Street” from 1985 to 1998.
However, he did not invent the Bert and Ernie characters; they have been around since the show’s test pilot in 1969.
Since the claims Saltzman made attracted significant attention from the internet, Sesame Workshop — which describes itself as “the nonprofit educational organization behind ‘Sesame Street’” — put out a statement refuting their former writer’s claim.
In it, they wrote, “As we have always said, Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from 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.”
Please see our statement below regarding Bert and Ernie. pic.twitter.com/6r2j0XrKYu
— Sesame Workshop (@SesameWorkshop) September 18, 2018
PBS’ own website says the target audience for “Sesame Street” is preschool children.
That said, the intended viewers most likely do not know what sexual orientation is, nor are they at an age where they are ready to learn about such things.
The purpose of the show is not only to entertain children, but to help them learn to read and count numbers.
To see more about Saltzman’s theory about Bert and Ernie, check out the video below:
Tom Joyce is a freelance writer from the South Shore of Massachusetts. He covers sports, pop culture, and politics and has contributed to The Federalist, Newsday, and other outlets.
(photo credit, homepage and article images: Bert and Ernie, CC BY-SA 2.0, Cropped, by See-ming Lee)
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