Sesame Workshop clarified Tuesday that Bert and Ernie are just “best friends” after a Sesame Street writer said over the weekend that he wrote the Muppets couple similar to his own homosexual relationship.
“As we have always said, Bert and Ernie are best friends,” Sesame Workshop posted in a statement to Twitter Tuesday. “They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves.”
The educational organization always said that the characters are merely puppets and do not have a sexual orientation at all.
Please see our statement below regarding Bert and Ernie. pic.twitter.com/6r2j0XrKYu
— Sesame Workshop (@SesameWorkshop) September 18, 2018
In an interview published on Sunday to Queerty, an online outlet that covers LGBTQ news, Mark Saltzman, a writer for Sesame Street, alluded that the two puppets were a gay couple.
“I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert & Ernie, they were [gay]. I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them. The other thing was, more than one person referred to Arnie and I as ‘Bert & Ernie,’” Saltzman said, referencing his relationship with his male partner.
Saltzman, who wrote for the show in the 1980s, also said he based the dynamic of Bert and Ernie’s relationship of his relationship with Arnie.
“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,” Saltzman said.
