After more than five decades of enjoying status as two of the most beloved characters on television, a former Sesame Street writer has confirmed that Bert & Ernie were written as a same-sex couple.
For years now, there has been plenty of rumours and innuendo that Bert & Ernie are a gay couple. While most people didn’t even raise an eyebrow at this notion, others tended to use it for the basis of childish jokes.
In fact, back in the ’90s, Rev. Joseph Chambers tried to get the characters banned from TV by utilising an obscure anti-gay law in America’s south. While Chambers was referred to as a “crackpot preacher from Charlotte, North Carolina,” he kept on trying to make the character’s supposed orientation very clear.
“Bert and Ernie are two grown men sharing a house and a bedroom,” he explained on a radio show. “They share clothes, eat and cook together and have blatantly effeminate characteristics.”
In response to this, the show’s production company Children’s Television Workshop, were forced to issue a statement setting the record straight.
“Bert and Ernie, who’ve been on Sesame Street for 25 years, do not portray a gay couple, and there are no plans for them to do so in the future,” the statement explained. “They are puppets, not humans. Like all the Muppets created for Sesame Street, they were designed to help educate preschoolers.”
“Bert and Ernie are characters who help demonstrate to children that despite their differences, they can be good friends.”
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Now, one of the show’s former writers, Mark Saltzman, has confirmed that the characters reflected his own relationship with film editor Arnold Glassman at the time.
“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?”,” Saltzman explained to Queerty. “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 & Ernie, they were. I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them. The other thing was, more than one person referred to Arnie & I as “Bert & Ernie.”
“I was Ernie. I look more Bert-ish,” he continued. “And Arnie as a film editor—if you thought of Bert with a job in the world, wouldn’t that be perfect? Bert with his paper clips and organization? And I was the jokester.”
“So it was the Bert & Ernie relationship, and 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 & Ernie dynamic.”
So there you have it, after years of jokes, speculation, rumours, and innuendo, we now have a definitive answer that can finally put that age-old question to bed.
Check out one of Bert & Ernie’s highlights:
