Bert and Ernie are a gay couple, says ex-'Sesame Street' writer

boing
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My point is as children, we lack sexuality. We can already have an affinity for the sex we turn out to be attracted to, but actual sexual attraction isn’t something we are really capable of yet until puberty. As an example, seeing boobies or genitals at 5 or 6 is mostly funny or gross and not sexual in nature.

I guess this relates to the issue that I see younger kids being sexualized in various forms and I don’t really like it. For example we had to be choosy with where we had the kiddo do dance lessons, because you would be surprised what sort of costumes some of these places put on 8 year olds. I don’t see the point in introducing the adult concept for sexual or romantic love or sexual identity in a show geared for very young children. As I recall even the married human characters behaved rather Platonic. They have their whole lives ahead of them to wade through the swap of sexuality, let them be kids for now. YMMV.

I am actually all for inclusion in media. I have my own anecdotal tale of relating with a character on TV, which has helped lead to my understanding of why marginalized groups value it so much. But it is probably barf inducing for people who actual face real social hurdles.

Transgenderism I am not an expert on, but seems to entail more than just sexuality. I kinda expect at some point they will have a muppet who doesn’t conform to gender norms.

As a side note - Their most recent muppet is autistic and I saw a clip of the show and found the character very interesting.

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From what I remember of primary school (4-11 year olds), there was a lot of heteronormative pressure and homophobia from the other children long before they started showing sexual attraction towards other people. It became prevalent at around 6. It felt like I was on a neverending tightrope, and once I fell there was no getting back onto it. Maybe I’m just more aware of it because of my childhood.

Sometimes letting children be children is letting them know that it is OK to not be gender or hetero normative. Bert and Ernie help do that for a lot of children.

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Question - would you say they do that in their current form, even if it has ambiguity?

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I would say they did that because they had ambiguity. The writer saying that he based them on his own relationship doesn’t change that, the children watching Sesame Street will not read about it until later.

The later statement by Sesame Workshop saying that they are not gay is more worrying, as that can become the official line and there may be pressure to make them more heteronormative. I hope that isn’t what will happen.

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Cool, thanks for sharing.

For your last point, fortunately, unless parents are prone to sharing official CTW tweets, they aren’t going to know the details either way.

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It’s not through tweets the characters would be made more heteronormative. It’s through scriptwriting.

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