From Fox News, Tyler McCarthy reporting, we learn [worth quoting in full]:
Although they’re puppets, people have speculated for years that “Sesame Street” characters Bert and Ernie are more than just roommates and best friends. However, after a former writer’s comments on the matter, the minds behind the show are setting the record straight.
The debate gained new life when Mark Saltzman, a writer on the show from 1984 to 1998, spoke to Queerty in an interview where he revealed that he always thought of the characters as a “loving couple.”
Saltzman was asked by the outlet directly if the characters were gay, and he recalled reading about a child asking his mother that question. Saltzman, a gay man, said the story made him laugh.
“I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert & Ernie, they were,” he revealed noting that he drew inspiration from his relationship with film editor Arnold Glassman. “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.’”
He continued: “Because how else? That’s what I had in my life, a Bert & Ernie relationship. How could it not permeate? The things that would tick off Arnie would be the things that would tick off Bert. How could it not? I will say that I would never have said to the head writer, ‘oh, I’m writing this, this is my partner and me.’”
Although Saltzman wrote for “Sesame Street” for many years, it’s worth noting that he did not create the characters, he merely wrote for them and several others in his long career. He also never made a canonical declaration, only gave insight into his writing process. Still, many took his words as confirmation of the long-running rumor that the characters are more than just roommates.
However, to quell rampant speculation about the “Sesame Street” canon, Sesame Street Workshop, which runs the children’s show, released a tweet explaining that the characters are meant to be without sexual orientation.
“As we have always said, Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most ‘Sesame Street’ Muppets do), they remain puppets, and do not have sexual orientation.”
The show is still on the air after its initial debut in 1969. As a result of its long run, Saltzman is hardly the first to address the idea that Bert and Ernie are a gay couple. However, the tweet from Sesame Street Workshop on Tuesday confirms that the answer to whether they are gay or straight is a resounding, “neither.”
So…one of the writers on Sesame Street says he wrote Bert and Ernie with his homosexual relationship in mind. In response, the people running the show claim that B&E are neither straight nor homosexual.
It’s come to this, eh?…of course it has; what did we expect?
Innocent Children are being dragged into a situation where one of the people who put dialogue into Bert and Ernie’s mouths admits he was using his Abnormal Sexual Relationship with another man as inspiration. This is not surprising because we live in an age where the love that dare not speak it’s name can never seem to shut-up. And, oh my, how subversive of Saltzman! — he’s one of them there ‘#Woke Gays’, too!
This Dullard’s response has become par for the course.
The reply of the Sesame Street officials is more disturbing and just another example of the Corrupting of our Children by our ‘Superiors’ in all-things Cultural. It is also part of an effort to Politicize our Children, brainwash them into thinking that it’s perfectly ‘Okay’ to make the Abnormal Normal.
We have reached a stage where Parents and Families and Friends have to monitor EVERY LITTLE THING that is being thrust at our Children, where no Child is safe anywhere at anytime from the attempt to turn them into Weak, Insufferable, and Useless members of Society.
We allowed this to happen — this infusion of the Depravity of the Leftist Thinking Virus — by not taking the Threat seriously enough when it first showed it’s Deviated Head.
‘Live and let live’ is a fine philosophy to follow until it destroys you and your Children’s Souls.
But who, if not we ourselves, constitutes society? This realm of darkness, of falsehood, of brute force, of justice denied and distrust of the good, this slimy swamp was formed by us, and no one else. We grew used to the idea that we must submit and lie in order to survive -and we brought up our children to do so….
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, From Under The Rubble