Bert and Ernie were written as a ‘loving couple,’ former ‘Sesame Street’ writer says

Mark Saltzman, a writer who won seven Emmys for his work on “Sesame Street,” tells Queerty magazine that he couldn’t help but write Ernie and Bert as “a loving couple” because that reflected his personal life as a gay man.

“Were you thinking of Bert & Ernie as a gay couple?” writer David Reddish asked Saltzman in an interview posted online Sunday. “Did that question ever come up?”

Saltzman said he 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.”

The interview supports years of speculation about the nature of Bert and Ernie’s relationship. Saltzman won seven Daytime Emmys for his writing work on the children’s TV series in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, according to his IMDB profile.

“It has long been whispered that Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie are gay,” fact-checking website Snopes wrote when it “investigated” the relationship.

“At various times the rumor has escalated into their actually getting married on the show, this event either being planned for a future episode or said to have happened on a previous one.

“Bert and Ernie are not married. They’re not even homosexual (if indeed it’s possible for mere puppets to be sexual). They are nothing but well-loved puppets from a hugely popular children’s TV series.”

Sesame Workshop said as much, too, in a statement issued Tuesday after Saltzman’s interview began making headlines.

“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,” Sesame Workshop’s statement on Twitter said.

“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 a sexual orientation.”

But that’s clearly not what Saltzman had in his mind when he was writing for the characters. He said people often referred to him and his partner, Arnie, as “Bert & Ernie.”

Saltzman’s partner was film editor Arnold Glassman, Reddish writes, and the two were together more than 20 years before Glassman died in 2003.

“Yeah, I was Ernie. 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,” Saltzman told Queerty.

“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.”

Saltzman said he wasn’t “professionally out” when he began working on the show in 1984, even though all his friends knew he and Glassman were in a relationship.

“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,’” he said.

“But those two, Snuffalupagus, because he’s the sort of clinically depressed Muppet … you had characters that appealed to a gay audience. And Snuffy, this depressed person nobody can see, that’s sort of Kafka! It’s sort of gay closeted too ...

“And because it was always diversity, diversity, it’s a shame (Sesame Street) wasn’t leading the charge.”

This story was originally published September 18, 2018 at 3:10 PM.