'Sesame Street' writer thinks of Bert and Ernie as a 'loving couple'

UPDATE: Sept. 18, 2018, 2:55 p.m. EDT Sesame Workshop has since released a statement denying that Bert and Ernie have any sexual orientation at all on the grounds that they are puppets.

UPDATE: Sept. 18, 2018, 5:12 p.m. PDT Frank Oz, one of the original Muppeteers also disputed Saltzman's view on Bert and Ernie's relationship.

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The queer fan community have long suspected that Bert and Ernie were gay Muppets. It's just taken a little bit longer for the rest of the world to catch up.

In an interview with Queerty, one of Sesame Street's former writers, Mark Saltzman, seemed to finally confirm the rumors. According to Saltzman, Bert and Ernie aren't just gay. He thinks of them as a "loving couple."

"I remember one time that a column from The San Francisco Chronicle, a preschooler in the city turned to mom and asked 'are Bert & Ernie lovers?'" Saltzman told Queerty. "And that got passed around, and everyone had their chuckle and went back to it. And 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. The other thing was, more than one person referred to Arnie [Saltzman's partner at the time] & I as “Bert & Ernie.”

Of course Bert and Ernie are gay. No one wants to hang around their roommate that much, regardless of how good they are at chess. How could Ernie put up with Bert's pigeons if he didn't love him in that way?

Saltzman explained how his own same-sex relationship became a model for Bert & Ernie -- even if the rest of the cast wasn't aware of the underlying queer dynamics:

"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. 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. I wrote sketches … Arnie’s OCD would create friction with how chaotic I was. And that’s the Bert & Ernie dynamic," Satlzman said.

Justice, served. Twitter seems to think so too:

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However, I have more questions for Bert and Ernie: Are they still monogamous after all these years? Do they have to attend couple's therapy to manage Bert's anal retentiveness? Did any of them ever have a thing with Big Bird?

Regardless of their answers, we should all be so happy for their love.