Wicked: For Good star Jonathan Bailey stopped by Sesame Street recently for a dance party with longtime male roommates Bert and Ernie, and LGBTQ+ fans have been eating up the queer subtext.
The clip, posted to the long-running children’s educational show’s social media accounts on November 18, finds the out actor cutting a rug with Ernie as his grouchy “roommate” Bert tries to read. But apparently Bert is a big fan of the Bridgerton and Fellow Travelers star, who was recently named People magazine’s first-ever out gay Sexiest Man Alive.
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“Is that Jonathan Bailey?” the star-struck, unibrowed Muppet, Ernie, asks.
“We’re dancing through life, Bert!” Bailey says, referencing his character’s big number in Wicked.
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Bert quickly joins in on the fun, joking that Bailey “has some wicked moves.”
Fans on Instagram took to the post’s comments, posting lovingly tongue-in-cheek messages.
“Three gay icons,” one user wrote.
“jb dancing with the original gay couple on tv! WE LOVE IT,” another posted.
“Gays of a feather flock together!” yet another comment read.
“When the open couple picks up a third…” out producer and DJ Corey Craig joked.
Of course, leadership at Sesame Workshop as well as Bert and Ernie co-creator Frank Oz have long maintained that the characters are not meant to be a same-sex couple. But that hasn’t stopped fans from interpreting them as such.
Former Sesame Street writer Mark Saltzman went so far as to confirm in a 2018 interview with LGBTQ Nation‘s sibling site Queerty that he, at least, always thought of the characters as a couple.
Recalling a San Francisco Chronicle story in which a mother said her preschooler had asked whether Bert and Ernie were lovers, Saltzman told Queerty that he “always felt that, without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert and Ernie, they were. I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them.”
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