Sesame Street Writer Confirms Famous Roommates Bert and Ernie Were Written as a Gay Couple
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." 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."
Following Saltzman's interview, the show doubled down on that statement, re-releasing it on Twitter 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, and he would know: he created them. In his interview, he goes on to suggest that Bert and Ernie 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."
