The gay thing in showbiz is nothing new. I don't know any hard statistics but I would guestimate that the ratio of gays in showbiz to be at least 25% if not higher, although even today many are still closeted. But now that it's seen as trendy for gay characters to be mainstream, the tendency is to retcon older characters as gay. The Bert & Ernie thing is a clear trendline following from Sulu in Star Trek Beyond. George Takei didn't like his own real-life homosexuality being used as a marketing gimmick to score virtue points retroactively making Sulu gay. But unlike Sesame Street, the creators behind Trek threw George under the bus and swj-splained down to him that this is a new era and this is just how things should be for the greater good.
And guess who's next after Bert & Ernie?
Elsa from Frozen, of course, following the first toe in the water of retconning LeFou from Beauty and the Beast.
![[Image: mqdefault.jpg]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/l7TS-UuiByE/mqdefault.jpg)
Sexuality is different from race/gender because it's not immediately identifiable. Having to apply "gaydar" to sniff out whether a character is gay or not is sort of a humorous sport. In most cases, the accusations are not that serious. Kirk/Spock were clearly not gay. Batman/Robin weren't. And not Bert/Ernie either (who are really more akin to the Odd Couple which was on TV around the same time Sesame Street started).
But the sense that the next stage in cultural evolution is to normalize gayness, then it seems like the right thing to do to go back to these properties and make these things overt. Just because gays could relate on an abstract level with Bert & Ernie or to Elsa's outsider status or to X-Men mutants doesn't mean they have to be explicitly made gay. The whole strength of fiction is to be able to identify across demographic barriers. But these days people insist on 1:1 represtations. If you're a gay, black, female, muslim, paraplegic, you INSIST that there be gay, black, female, muslim, paraplegics on TV or film. It's just not possible to follow along and care for a character otherwise.
So the net effect is sort of an atomization of entertainment along very narrow identity lines.
Again, since gays are in creative roles at much higher percentages than the general population, and Hollywood is predominently left and hence SJW, we're going to get a glut of gay characters and gay storylines, overcompensating and over-representing how common homosexuality is.
BTW, a little evopsych to explain why people generally don't like watching stuff that runs across the grain of their sexuality.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20576388
https://benthamopen.com/FULLTEXT/TOPSYJ-9-75
And guess who's next after Bert & Ernie?
Elsa from Frozen, of course, following the first toe in the water of retconning LeFou from Beauty and the Beast.
Sexuality is different from race/gender because it's not immediately identifiable. Having to apply "gaydar" to sniff out whether a character is gay or not is sort of a humorous sport. In most cases, the accusations are not that serious. Kirk/Spock were clearly not gay. Batman/Robin weren't. And not Bert/Ernie either (who are really more akin to the Odd Couple which was on TV around the same time Sesame Street started).
But the sense that the next stage in cultural evolution is to normalize gayness, then it seems like the right thing to do to go back to these properties and make these things overt. Just because gays could relate on an abstract level with Bert & Ernie or to Elsa's outsider status or to X-Men mutants doesn't mean they have to be explicitly made gay. The whole strength of fiction is to be able to identify across demographic barriers. But these days people insist on 1:1 represtations. If you're a gay, black, female, muslim, paraplegic, you INSIST that there be gay, black, female, muslim, paraplegics on TV or film. It's just not possible to follow along and care for a character otherwise.
So the net effect is sort of an atomization of entertainment along very narrow identity lines.
Again, since gays are in creative roles at much higher percentages than the general population, and Hollywood is predominently left and hence SJW, we're going to get a glut of gay characters and gay storylines, overcompensating and over-representing how common homosexuality is.
BTW, a little evopsych to explain why people generally don't like watching stuff that runs across the grain of their sexuality.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20576388
https://benthamopen.com/FULLTEXT/TOPSYJ-9-75