Gay Rumors Plague Bert and Ernie Once Again

By Kilian Melloy -

 

Bert and Ernie: just good friends

Every few years a rumor that Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie are gay lovers resurfaces. It’s an old rumor, possibly dating back to a snarky reference in Kurt Anderson’s The Real Thing, a 1980 book that fingered the two as a loving, if discreet, same-sex couple. Indeed, there were rumblings of that rumor in the 1990s even as Republican lawmakers, led by Newt Gingrich, tried to slash funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the parent company of PBS, on which Sesame Street airs.

A Snopes.com entry on the subject reports that the standard response from Sesame Street producer the Children’s Television Workshop is that Bert and Ernie are not human beings; they are not even alive. Nor do they actually have gender. They are puppets.

Or, as a 1993 statement from the Children’s Television Workshop put it, "Bert and Ernie, who’ve been on Sesame Street for 25 year [at the time], do not portray a gay couple, and there are no plans for them to do so in the future. They are puppets, not humans. Like all the Muppets created for Sesame Street, they were designed to help educate preschoolers. Bert and Ernie are characters who help demonstrate to children that despite their differences, they can be good friends."

Such good friends that some, noting how the two sleep in the same bedroom, insist that they must be meant to depict a gay couple. The Snopes.com article noted how one North Carolina cleric, the Rev. Joseph Chambers, accused the two puppets of being homosexuals and tried to get them banned from the airwaves as such.

Now the rumor is back once more. Irish newspaper The Independent reported on Oct. 26 that a Twitter message from "Bert" last June made an offhand remark about The A Team’s Mr. T. In the original TV series from the 1980s, Mr. T, an actor with a Mohawk, was one of the show’s regular characters. The tweet from "Bert" was made just before opening weekend for a feature film based on the TV series.

"Ever notice how similar my hair is to Mr. T’s?" Bert tweeted. "The only difference is that mine is a little more ’mo,’ and a little less ’hawk.’ "

Gays in America pounced on the similarly-outdated street slang--"mo"--that, in the days of Mr. T and The A Team, was shorthand for "homosexual." AfterElton’s Ed Kennedy got the ball rolling when he posted content at the gay site’s Morning Meme column on June 14 that remarked on the comment and its timing: right when gay Pride celebrations were happening in a number of cities. "The people at Sesame Street are way too clever for their own good," The Independent quoted Kennedy as writing.

Such subtexts have been read into children’s programming before, most notoriously the incident in which Tinky-Winky, a purple Teletubby with a triangular-shaped antenna and a handbag, was pegged as gay by anti-gay televangelist Jerry Falwell in 1999.

The idea that the tweet was a nod to gay audiences took root and grew, until once more the show’s producers were fending off gay rumors and the media was getting worked up. The Los Angeles Times even ran a piece on Oct. 24 that started with the statement, "Bert and Ernie are not gay." The article went on to say, "In their 31 years on "Sesame Street," they’ve never marched in a Pride parade or plastered a rainbow sticker on Oscar the Grouch’s trash can."

Kennedy followed up on his June blog with an Oct. 25 article titled "The Ethics of Outing A Muppet."

"I’m writing this post, and every post for the foreseeable future, from an undisclosed, top secret location," wrote Kennedy. "Why such a drastic action? I was taking out the trash this evening and found a hit-Grouch hiding in the trashcan. I barely escaped with my life and recycling."

Kennedy went on to note that although the people behind the show deny that there is any gay-friendly message, covert or coded, about Bert and Ernie, the show itself has what Kennedy called "an increasingly gay flair to Sesame Street what with Neil Patrick Harris playing The Shoe Fairy," along with guest appearances by lesbian comedian Wanda Sykes and "What I Am" recording artist Will.i.am. Kennedy also quoted Jarrett Barrios, a former Massachusetts state lawmaker and marriage equality advocate who is now the head of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). Barrios said, "Sesame Street has a long history of teaching children about diversity and acceptance, and I don’t expect that our community will be left out of that education."

"My initial post was all in good fun," Kennedy wrote, "and if Sesame Street needs to push Bert back into the closet he shares with Ernie (in the bedroom with the twin beds), that’s fine. We know the truth. *wink-wink*"

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