Bert and Ernie are finally free to love each other out and in the open. In an interview with Queerty, Sesame Street writer Mark Saltzman confirmed that he conceived of and wrote the longtime fictional roommates as a gay couple. According to Saltzman, he based their relationship on his own relationship with film editor Arnold Glassman. According to Saltzman, he and Glassman, who passed away in 2003, lived together during his time on the show.
"I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert & Ernie, they were [out]," Saltzman explained. "I didn't have any other way to contextualize them . . . I don't think I'd know how else to write them, but as a loving couple." Saltzman also recalled the time a preschooler asked her mother if Bert and Ernie were lovers. "That got passed around, and everyone had their chuckle and went back to it,” he said.
Speculation about the nature of Bert and Ernie’s relationship has been around since they were introduced 49 years ago. After same-sex marriage was legalized in New York, a petition was started to convince Sesame Street to marry the roommates on the air. And while the show was no doubt aware that two of its most famous characters had become gay icons, it still released a statement in 2011 denying that they were gay, calling them "best friends" who were "created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves.” The statement added, "Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics, they remain puppets and do not have a sexual orientation."
The show has since doubled down on that statement, re-releasing it on Twitter following Saltzman's interview, with the lead-in that, "As we have always said, Bert and Ernie are best friends."
Saltzman disagrees with the assertion that the characters don't have a sexual orientation, though. In his interview, he goes on to suggest that Bert and Ernie are aren’t the only muppets designed to appeal to the LGBTQ community. “Snuffleupagus, because he's the sort of 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."
Whether it's truly canon or not that Bert and Ernie are a gay couple, it's certainly canon in the hearts of many Sesame Street fans.
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