National Post (National Edition)
Can Ernie, Bert be anything but gay?
So ARE Bert and Ernie gay? This question was widely discussed this week after Mark Saltzman, a former writer for Sesame Street, said he had thought of the Muppet pair as a gay couple while devising their dialogue. The issue proves surprisingly elusive on scrutiny. It won’t do to say that Bert and Ernie are just pieces of felt, because the people who want Bert and Ernie to be gay have an easy comeback for that one. Kermit and Miss Piggy are pieces of felt, too, yet they are pretty clearly heterosexual creatures with a sex life.
Sexuality is permitted to Muppets in the adult corner of the fictional Muppet verse: so reads the holy corporate writ. (As this newspaper explained on Thursday, the Children’s Television Workshop has been putting out versions of the same “Bert and Ernie are not gay” press release for almost a quarter-century, usually in response to increasingly trite depictions of the pair as gay.)
But remember that Kermit the Frog lives in both worlds! Like some Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he fraternizes with kids on Sesame Street during the day, then fends off advances from a ravenous porcine fiancée by night. Anyone who is tempted to propose a two Kermit hypothesis would surely just be proving the point made by advocates for a gay Bert and Ernie: we are less comfortable with gay identity on innocent Sesame Street than we would be with a straight one.
Another strategy for settling the question that might come to mind is to consult the intentions of the creators of Bert and Ernie. Well, anyone with an arts degree will have seen you coming, and will be lying in wait with postmodern news of the “death of the author.” But if you take the oldfashioned view that authorship is a thing, it becomes relevant that Bert and Ernie were created by Muppet founding fathers Frank Oz and Jim Henson through a process of improvisation. Henson is no longer available to testify, but Frank Oz insisted this week that, as the primordial voice of Bert, he knows that Bert and Ernie are not a gay couple: full stop. Oz then got in some social-media hot water for suggesting that the question of their orientation is itself odious.
What perhaps should have been said is that if you hire other people to write the character you created, you necessarily open the door to the personal views of those people — which brings us back to Saltzman. Saltzman’s actual thoughts were really a good deal less propertarian and stubborn than those of Oz: he told an interviewer that he “always felt” that the puppets were gay, which does not imply that Bert and Ernie are gay in some objective sense, and he added that “I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them.”
The puppets, as devised by Henson and Oz, were an improvisational vehicle for making the educational point that friends can get along despite their differences. Saltzman was helped in writing the same characters — as a matter of creative convenience— by thinking of his own cosy same-sex relationship. Everybody needs a map to navigate, even in fictional territory.
The question of Bert and Ernie’s sexuality must perhaps remain undecided, or stamped “meaningless” and cast into a positivist oblivion. If Frank Oz cannot declare Bert straight, it certainly must also be the case that wishing Bert and Ernie to be gay will not make them so. And this, I must say, is what most of the arguing consists of: very strong wishes for “representation” on the part of gay consumers.
My colleague Chris Hanna, elsewhere in this newspaper, makes the (important) point that there is no sign of resistance when the gay community co-opts a colourful vampire or a cool serial killer or some other villain. The Children’s Television Workshop has been doing subliminal liberalism for generations, but in 2018 the company remains mysteriously reluctant to take two icons of domestically united same-sex fondness and declare them gay, as Arnold Lobel’s daughter did with children’s-lit favourites Frog and Toad last year.
I understand the impatience some people have with the CTW’s attitude: viewed a certain way, it does seem perverse. But if I’m being honest, I wonder whether it is a failure of inclusiveness to insist that Bert and Ernie cannot be straight. In the Victorian period it was socially accepted that some heterosexual men were unsuitable for marriage, or opposed to it, and might prefer to live in a celibate same-sex menage with friends. Such people were referred to as “confirmed bachelors,” a phrase which only later became an ironic, catty way of identifying somebody as homosexual.
There is also a lost cultural category of heterosexual “womanhater”: think of Jughead Jones in the old Archie comics. Jughead was a kind and generous friend to women (more so than the inveterate seducers with which he was surrounded) and he expressed no romantic interest in men, even cryptically. (I admit to having been reluctant to see what the current TV series Riverdale has made of Forsythe P. Jones.) What comic-book Jughead really hated, as readers of a different time understood, was not women per se. It was marriage.
As a bachelor who also has a bachelor’s degree in history, I do feel the disappearance of these concepts, which are surely useful in an era of declining lifetime marriage rates. We have more confirmed bachelors than ever, but have misplaced the apparatus for labelling them. What else but gay could Bert and Ernie be? Our imagination leaves us with “no other way to contextualize them” ...
FRANK OZ (SAID THAT) BERT AND ERNIE ARE NOT A GAY COUPLE.