Confirmed: Bert and Ernie were a thingYes, Bert and Ernie were written as a gay couple
Decades of speculation over two of Sesame Street’s most famous characters is over.
After of the iconic show’s writers revealed that Bert and Ernie were in fact written as a gay couple.
Joining the Sesame Street team in 1984, Mark Saltzman told Queerty the two beloved characters reflected his own same-sex relationship with film editor Arnold Glassman at the time.
He said that he wrote them as a loving couple, and felt that he didn’t have any other way to portray them.
“I remember one time a preschooler (in San Francisco) turned to her mum and asked ‘Are Bert and Ernie lovers?’ and that, coming from a preschooler, was fun,” he said in the interview.
“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 contextualise them.”
The charismatic puppets even famously found themselves at the heart of a fierce debate about discrimination and religious beliefs in 2015, when a baker in Northern Ireland refused to bake a cake advocating gay marriage with their faces on it.
However, the confirmation from Saltzman ends years of speculation as to the pairs exact relationship.
The writer even confirmed to Queerty who was who in the relationship.
“Yeah, I was Ernie,” he said.
“I look more Bert-ish. 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 paperclips and organisation?
“And I was the jokester. So, it was the Bert and 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 and Ernie dynamic.”
