It doesn’t matter whether Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie were gay or straight

Mark Saltzman, a writer for Sesame Street, gave an interview to the website Queerty this week in which he admitted that he wrote the characters of Bert and Ernie as though they were a gay couple.

I always felt that, without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert & Ernie, they were. I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them.

It doesn’t seem to matter that Saltzman came to the characters fifteen years after they were created or that his writing didn’t speak to any particular agenda. Thankfully, it gave , Bert’s creator Frank Oz a chance to respond and set, perhaps, the right tone, which is somewhere in the middle.

It seems Mr. Mark Saltzman was asked if Bert & Ernie are gay. It’s fine that he feels they are. They’re not, of course. But why that question? Does it really matter? Why the need to define people as only gay? There’s much more to a human being than just straightness or gayness.

People rush to locate experience in sexuality, or gender fluidity. That might sound trite and, certainly, it’s always good to reassess balances that have traditionally been skewed to a white, male, heterosexual audience. But we shouldn’t overwrite other forms of underrepresentation in the process. Bert and Ernie are puppets and whatever they do represent is broad and non-specific for a reason. They no more represent a gay relationship than they represent the eternal dilemma of what is best: vertical stripes or horizontal. Puppets are reductions of real life, simplifications to help children navigate the complexity of the world they’re growing into. These wilful attempts by advocates to turn innocence into worldliness does nothing to either promote inclusion or advance any individual cause. It simply sets a bad example for how to do both.

We are indoctrinated with a belief that we should each see ourselves represented in the media through our sexual choices. It leads to where we are in 2018: obsessing over the shape of the American president’s genitals and facing a future where the website PornHub plans to dominate fashion and culture in the way that Playboy dominated in the sixties. It would be naive to argue that it doesn’t stand a chance to do just that. Sex is everywhere. There is, in Frank Oz’s words, ‘much more to a human being’.

None of this is to dismiss the concerns or advocacy of the LGBTQ community any more than it is to dismiss any lifestyle that has been underrepresented in the media. It is rather to say that such revisionism isn’t necessary. Bert and Ernie teach children about friendship at an age where it is surely a more powerful lesson than anything else you could name, simply because it is so foundational to what comes later. From it emerges the broader understanding of life that should help make them rounded human beings with properly full emotional lives, whether straight, gay or something else altogether.