It also acknowledges that queer fans are used to being erased, and have been trained by decades of media to extrapolate queer subtext from canonical narratives that refuse to openly acknowledge their existence.įor those queer fans looking for narrative subtext, there’s plenty to be found in the personas of Bert and Ernie after all, there’s a reason we as a culture have been discussing their relationship for decades, a reason that they continue to be held up as gay icons across generations - and a reason people have spent decades being hopping mad about it. This second remark from Oz underscores the faulty assumptions behind Sesame Street’s response. The official negation was echoed by puppetmaster Frank Oz, who originally performed Bert opposite Jim Henson as Ernie, and who stated on Twitter that “They’re not, of course.” Yet Oz went on to admit, when challenged by fans who wondered why he seemed to be assigning Bert a heterosexual orientation by default, “I have not had to think about my own sexual orientation as something that needs to be validated.” The new attempt reminded everyone that Sesame Street is “ inclusive” but that Bert and Ernie are still just friends.
Many people expressed sadness and outrage, pointing out that Sesame Street and the Muppets have always included a wide range of heteronormative romantic (and implied sexual) expression and that the official statement seemed to be ignoring this history to erase queer identity.Ī few hours later, the company tried again with a different statement, apparently intended to override the previous tweet, which was deleted on Wednesday afternoon. The Sesame Workshop’s statement that Bert and Ernie “do not have a sexual orientation” provoked a day of widespread backlash. On Tuesday, Saltzman’s “answer” went viral, prompting a massive outpouring of debate and controversy over the two Muppets - and a official negation from Sesame Street - in the form of a now-deleted tweet that contained the following statement: But Queerty ran the article with a headline announcing an “answer” to the question, “Are Bert and Ernie a couple?” And the age-old debate about Bert and Ernie became the story. Saltzman’s comments about Bert and Ernie were given in the context of a profound interview with David Reddish about Saltzman’s experience coming out and coming of age in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. “I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them.” “When I was writing Bert & Ernie, they were ,” Saltzman said. In it, he discussed writing Bert and Ernie as reflections of himself and his longtime partner, Arnold Glassman (a renowned editor who worked on films like Raising Arizona as well as the iconic queer documentary The Celluloid Closet before his death in 2003). On Sunday, Mark Saltzman, who won seven Daytime Emmys for his work as a writer on Sesame Street between 19, gave a deeply moving and wide-ranging interview to the queer culture outlet Queerty. Controversy over their perceived homosexuality has raged intermittently for decades, spearheaded by both allies and adversaries - and a new flare-up shows that it’s not going away anytime soon.
Sesame Street has always had one consistent official answer (no, they’re not), but that hasn’t stopped the two famous felt roommates from becoming gay icons and occupying a unique role in the queer rights movement. Are Bert and Ernie gay? It depends whom you ask.