It has emerged that Ben and Ernie, the lead characters of popular children TV show, Sesame Street were gay.
A longtime writer for the hit show, Mark Saltzman, revealed this in an interview with Queerty, an LGBT magazine, according to Breitbart.
Saltzman disclosed that the characters’ relationship was modelled after the relationship between himself and gay partner, Arnold Glassman, who is a film director.
The writer, who joined the show in 1984, said, “I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert and Ernie, they were. I didn’t have any other way to contextualise them.”
He added, “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 paperclips and organisation?
“And I was the jokester. So, it was the Bert and 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 and Ernie dynamic.”
But the official Sesame Street official Twitter account has in a Tuesday statement denied that the characters had a “sexual orientation”, stating that Ben and Ernie “remain puppets”.
Read statement:
