So by that point Sesame Street was already legendary. So were you out by the time you joined the staff?
Well, it’s more levels. I already had my life partner, the love of my life. We weren’t living together. All our friends knew, but I don’t think I was professionally out.
[Saltzman pauses in thought. I don’t have to ask why. The “love of his life” was acclaimed editor Arnold Glassman, who edited films like Frailty and The Celluloid Closet. The two were together more than 20 years before Glassman’s death in 2003.]
I think I was cautiously out. I remember not inviting Arnie to the first Christmas parties, you know. But then I have memories of bringing him to beach house parties with everybody. I think during Sesame Street was when I came completely out. By ’86 we had an apartment together. My father knew. There was no hiding it.
Ok, so we have to address—that’s the big question, right? In the writer’s room, you’re all adults. Were you thinking of Bert & Ernie as a gay couple? Did that question ever come up?
I remember one time that a column from The San Francisco Chronicle, a preschooler in the city turned to mom and asked “are Bert & Ernie lovers?” And that, coming from a preschooler was fun. And that got passed around, and everyone had their chuckle and went back to it. And I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert & Ernie, they were. 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.”
That’s telling.
Yeah, I was Ernie. I look more Bert-ish. And Arnie as a film editor—if you thought of Bert with a job in the world, wouldn’t that be perfect? Bert with his paper clips and organization? And I was the jokester. So it was the Bert & Ernie relationship, and I was already with Arnie when I came to Sesame Street. So I don’t think I’d know how else to write them, but as a loving couple. I wrote sketches… Arnie’s OCD would create friction with how chaotic I was. And that’s the Bert & Ernie dynamic.
So you’re saying that Bert & Ernie became analogs for your relationship in a lot of ways?
Yeah. Because how else? That’s what I had in my life, a Bert & Ernie relationship. How could it not permeate? The things that would tick off Arnie would be the things that would tick off Bert. How could it not? I will say that I would never have said to the head writer, “oh, I’m writing this, this is my partner and me.” But those two, Snuffalupagus, because he’s the sort of clinically depressed Muppet…you had characters that appealed to a gay audience. And Snuffy, this depressed person nobody can see, that’s sort of Kafka! It’s sort of gay closeted too.
The secret friend…because at that point Snuffy was Big Bird’s secret friend. It was later on he out and everyone realized he actually existed.
That happened while I was there, yeah. But they haven’t…the New Yorker cover was kind of vindication, but there’s not a Bert & Ernie float in the Pride Parade.
We wish!
And because it was always diversity, diversity, it’s a shame [Sesame Steet] wasn’t leading the charge. Here’s a story about pushing the gay envelope of Sesame Street…
saying okay and sitting closer to their stuff while ignoring it
I used to take naps in the student union between classes because I lived off-campus and I would set my phone alarm but I didn’t trust it so I would prop signs on top of me that said what time my next class was and basically “if I’m not up by (X) o’clock please wake me.”
Ancient moon priestesses were called virgins. ‘Virgin’ meant not married, not belonging to a man – a woman who was ‘one-in-herself’. The very word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virle. Ishtar, Diana, Astarte, Isis were all all called virgin, which did not refer to sexual chastity, but sexual independence. And all great culture heroes of the past, mythic or historic, were said to be born of virgin mothers: Marduk, Gilgamesh, Buddha, Osiris, Dionysus, Genghis Khan, Jesus – they were all affirmed as sons of the Great Mother, of the Original One, their worldly power deriving from her. When the Hebrews used the word, and in the original Aramaic, it meant ‘maiden’ or ‘young woman’, with no connotations to sexual chastity. But later Christian translators could not conceive of the ‘Virgin Mary’ as a woman of independent sexuality, needless to say; they distorted the meaning into sexually pure, chaste, never touched. —Monica Sjoo
Is there any hatred stronger than the rage kids get towards Barney the dinosaur as soon as they are just a little too old for Barney the dinosaur
So, this guy, Martin Pistorius, fell into a coma when he was 12 years old and eventually awoke completely paralyzed, at least physically. He was misdiagnosed. Doctors believed he was in a completely vegetative state, but in reality, he had regained full consciousness and awareness. He just didn’t possess any motor function, so he couldn’t communicate to anyone that he was alive in there. He lived this way for 12 years before he overcame it by sheer force of will and was given the tools to communicate. He tells his story in his book, Ghost Boy. Since then he’s also been the subject of the first episode of Invisibilia on NPR and had his own TedTalk.
Anyway, the breaking point that incited his plan of escape was being forced to watch Barney reruns all day, everyday at his care center. Sitting in front of the TV, he learned to tell the time by the shadows on the wall. If he had time he could know when Barney would end. With the ability to measure his days, he was able to pull himself out of the void and ultimately start down the path to recovery. Today, Martin can communicate whatever he wants with the help of a computer program, but there’s one thing he can’t articulate: “I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney.”
So it turns out that the primal hatred people have toward Barney is strong enough to pull a disembodied consciousness out of the abyss of existential despair and into the physical world out of pure spite
bongdanceking 