Jewish sodomite writer for Sesame Street Mark Saltzman yesterday admitted in an interview with a major LGBT website that he wrote the characters of Ernie and Bert based on his experiences as a sodomite in a gay relationship at the time. Now he is attempting to backtrack on his comments, saying that he actually did not mean what he clearly said:
Sesame Street” writer Mark Saltzman says his comments that he wrote Bert and Ernie as a gay couple based on his own same-sex relationship were misinterpreted.
“As a writer, you just bring what you know into your work,” he told the New York Times on Tuesday. “Somehow, in the uproar, that turned into Bert and Ernie being gay. There is a difference.”
He also said that the show should include gay characters, but that they should be humans and not puppets. He also didn’t deny the fact that Bert and Ernie have a deep connection.
“They are two guys who love each other,” Saltzman said. “That’s who they are.”
Saltzman, who joined the show as a writer in 1984, kicked up a furor when he told Queerty that the relationship between the two puppets was modeled on his own with long-time partner Arnold Glassman.
“And I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert & Ernie, they were [gay],” Saltman said in the interview. “I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them. The other thing was, more than one person referred to Arnie & I as Bert & Ernie.”
His comments ricocheted around the internet, with many seeing it as confirmation of the puppets’ subversive, same-sex relationship. Frank Oz, the famed puppeteer who helped create Bert’s character, went on Twitter to shut down claims that the characters are gay.
“It seems Mr. Mark Saltzman was asked if Bert & Ernie are gay. It’s fine that he feels they are,” he said. “They’re not, of course. But why that question? Does it really matter? Why the need to define people as only gay?”
Sesame Workshop also released a statement on Twitter saying that Bert and Ernie do not have sexual orientations.
“As we have always said, Bert and Ernie are best friends,” the statement read. “They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.” (source)
It is also interesting that Saltzman says he was not the only sodomite who worked for Sesame Street. He named two more in the interview- David Hunt, who died of AIDS in 1992 at age 40, and Judith Freudberg, another Jewish sodomite who worked for many years until her death in 2012 of brain cancer.
There was also the 2012 incident involving Kevin Clash, who played the voice of Elmo for many years and was arrested for homosexual assault charges on a teenager working on the Sesame Street set.
Michael Jeter was a regular on Sesame Street who played the character of “Mr. Noodle.” Jeter was an open sodomite with HIV who died in 2003.
So far, it is known that there are at least five people who worked on the Sesame Street set who were homosexuals of which one was arrested for sodomizing a teenage male actor and two more who were infected with HIV. That is a significant number of open sodomites working in any profession, let alone potential sexual predators working for a children’s program.
It is said that often times, the first statement is the truest statement. especially since he made his previous comments with a sense of pride in his work.
Saltzman can try to backtrack, talk around, or shut down his previous comments all that he wants. However, the people already know his original statements. Given how many sodomites work and have worked for Sesame Street, his retraction seems scarcely believable at all, but just an attempt to cover up a truth he realized too late he did not want the average man to know.