Bert and Ernie Are Not Gay

If there is one thing that I know for certain in this world, it’s that Bert and Ernie are not gay.

How do I know for a fact that they aren’t gay? For starters, the people at the Sesame Workshop who created the characters Bert and Ernie have been saying for years that they are not gay, and that should be the end of the story right there. But the “are-they-or-aren’t-they" question came up yet again recently when a petition urging Sesame Street’s producers to have Bert and Ernie get married started to circulate. They are New Yorkers, after all, and that state recently passed a law saying that people who are gay may legally marry.

The thing is, I don’t think the lack of such a law is what has been holding the fellas back since we first met them in 1969. Age has to be a major consideration in this situation.

We really don’t know how old the famous roommates are. Ernie is very childlike and silly, while Bert is more of a nerdy grown-up, and to us adults at least, much of the humor comes from the mild annoyance Bert and Ernie feel when their personalities collide. They seem to be adults living on their own, but they don’t have jobs that we know of, so maybe they are actually brothers whose parents we never see on camera. Or perhaps they are cousins living with the grandmother—we just don’t know for sure. So regardless of whether they are gay, children aren’t sexual beings and they don’t marry.

That I don’t think Bert and Ernie should get married doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to gay marriage or even gay muppets. On the contrary, I’m all for gay marriage and hope that every state in the union, including Maryland, quickly follows in New York’s footsteps.

And while I don’t think there is room for any romantic canoodling on a children’s show, I think that Sesame Street would be a great medium for presenting gay parents—human or muppet—as ho-hum as hetero parents, just as it does with the straight couples on the show. (Blogger Julian Sanchez offers a great take on this point with his essay “Why We Need (Openly) Gay Muppets.”) The show has always been visionary when it comes to depicting racial harmony and gender equality, and it could do the same thing for gay rights.

Our window into Bert and Ernie’s world doesn’t go beyond what we see on the screen: two guys of indistinct age who share a special bond of friendship. But just because Bert and Ernie aren’t the men—or boys—for the job doesn’t mean that there can’t be some acknowledgement on the show that homosexuals are a part of Sesame Street and our world as well.