Not even puppets are safe
ONE of my favourite Sesame Street episodes as a kid was the one where Ernie eats cookies in bed and Bert gets mad because he doesn’t like crumbs on the sheets.
Do I now have to overthink this as something sexual?
Such was my devotion to this fictional New York neighbourhood that my mother once joked that it was a bunch of puppets like Big Bird, Grover, Ernie and Bert who helped me learn the alphabet.
As I sat cross legged on the carpet with a bowl of cornflakes wedged between my knees, I also loved watching the warmth and friendship that permeated every scene in a very natural way, the dialogue connecting with me as an Aussie kid making my own pals and cherishing them.
A kids’ show about friendship and helping around the neighbourhood, right?
No. As we know, the idea of a childhood free from political agendas is all but forbidden.
Every book, movie, song and TV show has to be retrospectively torn to shreds and analysed for signs of manufactured offence or failed inclusion.
And so this week we turn to Bert and Ernie who, I feel compelled to point out, are puppets made of felt.
But that has had zero impact on the furore triggered by a recent interview by Mark Saltzman, who wrote for Sesame Street over a 13-year period.
Saltzman was quoted as saying that, when he penned scenes for Bert and Ernie, he thought of them as gay.
“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 said.
Director Frank Oz, long-time collaborator of Muppets creator Jim Henson, then waded into the dispute saying no, Bert and Ernie are not gay. They are simply friends.
“It’s fine that he feels they are,” he tweeted. “They’re not, of course.”
And to the crux of the issue, Oz continued: “But why that question? Does it really matter?”
Oz added, further tweeting, “I created Bert. I know what and who he is.” And that’s when the crisis began. Oz, among other crimes, was accused of being dismissive of “those interpretations which are extraordinarily important to a whole host of people that just want to see themselves represented as equals in pop culture.”
And Oz — when many would have ignored the haters — was generous enough to write in reply: “You’re right. I have not had to think about my own sexual orientation as something that needs to be validated. Thank you for writing that. It must hurt. I’m so sorry. I just hate to have people seen as only one way when, straight or gay, we have so many more layers in us.”
How proud the thought police must be to know that they have created a controversy about a simple preschoolers TV show where there is nothing to be controversial about.
Characters and platonic pals Bert and Ernie are. Sexual pioneers they are not.
Of course this is not the first time stories of friendship have been latched upon by activists trying to turn innocent children’s’ tales into adult gay relationships.
Two years ago The New Yorker published a long article suggesting that the amphibian stars of the 1970s era Frog and Toad books were themselves in fact a couple.
One of the wonderful things about childhood is its innocence of all the complicating things like politics and sex that make the adult world so messy.
It isn’t that kids should be kept in the dark that same-sex couples are a normal part of our society. Of course they are, and they exist as part of countless children’s family lives as aunts or uncles or parents.
But if the message is about the childlike love of friendship, whether as Bert and Ernie or Frog and Toad, why does it need to be larded up with the adult complications that come from turning a pairing into a relationship?
It makes me sad that children have to be burdened with so much complication. Why are we pushing issues of sexual orientation into TV shows for young children?
That, I would argue, is the real scandal here.