Bert and Ernie’s bond isn’t sexual, it’s dysfunctional

For the last time, Sesame Street is not a real place.

If it were, Elmo would be on Ritalin, the Cookie Monster would have Type 2 diabetes, The Count would be running a pyramid scheme and Mr. Snuffleupagus would be fat-shamed daily on social media.

After years of gentrification, there’d be no Hooper’s Store. That would now be a Starbucks. And do you think health authorities would allow Big Bird’s nest to fester in the open after the first fear of an avian-flu pandemic?

But year after year, the fictional Sesame Street is dragged into the real world.

Since these puppets speak our language and interact with people, they are overanalyzed and anthropomorphized. So instead of just teaching educational lessons to kids, as they were designed to do, they end up in weird debates.

The weirdest debate of all: “Are Bert and Ernie gay?” I can see both sides. I mean, what is up with the shared bedroom?

And all those bubble baths with the bathroom door wide open?

They do bicker like an old married couple.

And remember that time Ernie played doctor or the time he put on a blindfold and started feeling and describing parts of Bert’s anatomy in lucid detail: “This part is kind of smooth … and it feels sort of thin … and, wow, it’s floppy like a garden hose!” Children, cover your ears! Then again, I don’t have any gay friends with unibrows or who wear the same shirt every day. And it’s not like there are any other wretched stereotypes that settle matters. There is no poster of Judy Garland hanging over Ernie’s twin bed. For crying out loud, Bert collects paper clips — that may well be the most unlikely gay hobby of all.

This weird debate was back in heavy rotation this week after Mark Saltzman, a former writer on the show, told Queerty magazine he wrote Bert and Ernie as if they were a loving couple, basing personality traits on his own same-sex relationship with his late partner.

It didn’t take long for the internet to implode with a mix of delight and rage over the alleged new evidence. And the pushback on Saltzman was swift.

The puppeteer Frank Oz, who created Bert, tweeted that it was fine if Saltzman believes the puppets are gay, but “they’re not.”

Sesame Workshop released a statement: “As we have always said, Bert and Ernie are best friends.

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