Most ’90s kids will remember learning important lessons with Elmo, Big Bird, and the rest of the Sesame Street characters. Even though the show has been around since 1969, it has remained one of the most groundbreaking series on TV, adding an autistic Muppet in 2017 and tackling important issues like gender equality. So we were excited (though admittedly not entirely surprised) to learn that former Sesame Street writer Mark Saltzman modeled iconic duo Bert and Ernie after his own romantic relationship with film editor Arnold Glassman.
In an interview with Queerty, Saltzman, who is openly gay, said:
"I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert & Ernie, they were," he told Queerty. "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.'"
Saltzman went on to say that Bert and Ernie’s personalities were also modeled after himself and Glassman.
"Yeah, I was Ernie," he admitted. "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 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."
However, today, September 18th, the show released an official statement regarding Bert and Ernie’s sexuality, stating that, “they remain muppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.”
Twitter users were quick to point out the potential cracks in their logic:
Official statement or no, it makes us beyond happy to imagine our favorite Muppet duo as happily in love. Maybe one of the these days Sesame Street will come around to the idea. And either way, art is always open to interpretation…even Muppet-based art.
