Are Bert and Ernie gay?

It's a question that anyone who has watched Sesame Street would have asked themselves and a reasonable interpretation of the relationship between the puppets who descibe themselves as best friends. They are the animated original Odd Couple who live together, share a bedroom and get on each other's nerves but love each other anyway.

Now, after decades of speculation, we have been given a definitive answer. Sort of.

Mark Saltzman, one of the show's writers from 1984, said that when he wrote Bert and Ernie's segments, he imagined them as lovers. And not only that, but as puppet versoins of himself and his late partner, Arnold Glassman.

“I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert and Ernie, they were [lovers],” Saltzman told LGBTQ publicaton, Queerty. “I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them. The other thing was, more than one person referred to Arnie [and] I as ‘Bert & Ernie.’”

Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organisation behind the long-running children’s television programme, have always maintianed that Bert and Ernie are just friends and reaffirmed that in a statement released this week.

“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. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets do), they remains puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.”

Please see our most recent statement regarding Bert and Ernie below. pic.twitter.com/gWTF2k1y83

— Sesame Workshop (@SesameWorkshop) September 18, 2018

However, Bert and Ernie have held an unofficial iconic status in the gay community, inspiring parts of the Broadway musical Avenue Q, and even inspiring an online petition in 2011, calling for them to marry.

Did Saltzman also inject a bit of yidishkeit into his muppets? According to The Forward: “Heavy-hearted, long-suffering Bert, yes.”