This past June 7th, queer content creator Thomas Sanders posted a video explaining which Muppets are gay. He specifically highlighted Sweetums as a burgeoning drag queen still trying to get her proportions right along with Gonzo, a canonically gender expansive character — he full on labelled himself as a “whatever” — who previously dressed in drag as Gonzo-rella in Disney’s Muppet Babies series. Gonzo has long been a queer fashion icon for his seemingly thrifted, brightly patterned button up tops and dapper clothing.
Miss Piggy herself has long been called a drag queen, appearing as a guest on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and content creator @rachleahx posted on X January 2024 that Chappell Ronan’s clothing appears to give some pretty explicit call outs to Miss Piggy. In a follow up video on TikTok, she breaks down how Chappell Roan’s Muppet Easter Eggs not only include Miss Piggy but also Constantine, an evil altar of Kermit, and others.
It’s not a new phenomenon. In the early days of the Muppets, Kermit the Frog even had a drag persona named Kermeena, donning a blonde wig to sing songs by Keely Smith and Rosemary Clooney. Sometimes Muppets would even be recycled from one into another, sometimes a Muppet of another gender — if we commit to the idea that Muppets even have a gender. And most recently in a kiki with fellow drag queen Trixie Mattel, drag queen Bosco celebrated Miss Piggy and Kermit as a t4t couple.
It’s also emblematic of the extremely queer history of the Muppets themselves.
The Muppets were always queer
A central tenet of The Muppets is accepting diversity within their communities and overcoming obstacles. Back in 1981, the song “We All Sing with the Same Voice” on Sesame Street not only sought to promote empathy and coexistence but also subtly hinted at LGBTQ+ families with the lyric, “I’ve got one daddy, I’ve got two.” While Sesame Street could not feature as much adult (queer characters and relationships being unfortunately coded as adult at the time) despite Bert and Ernie’s relationship being openly confirmed by a former Sesame Street writer as reflecting his own, The Muppet Show represented the culmination of Henson’s work to return to subversive content.
Matt Baume highlighted how back in the 1970s, Richard Hunt — a performer on The Muppet Show and gay man who created many of the characters that Muppet fans love, including Beaker and Scooter, was pivotal in incorporating queer content into the early runs of The Muppet Show. As Baume reminisces, Muppets like Statler joked about dating Lionel Barrymore and Bunsen and Beaker’s relationships while the show featured LGBTQ+ performers — Joel Grey, Liberace, Elton John, and Vincent Price. Like Sesame Street, The Muppet Show became a place of acceptance and humor for everyone.
And The Muppets never stopped being a group that openly welcomed LGBTQ+ creatives and uplifted queer characters. In 2005, when approaching Sam the Eagle at the gates of the Emerald City in The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz (2005), Fozzie Bear (as The Cowardly Lion) identifies himself, along with The Scarecrow (Kermit), Tin Thing (Gonzo) and Toto (Pepe the Prawn) as “friends of Dorothy!” a euphemism for a gay man.
Miss Piggy in particular has been a vocal advocate, giving a “snout-out to the gays” in a 2011 issue of Out magazine. The third point she shared was a not-so-subtle call for LGBTQ+ marriage equality, reading “Pigs + frogs. Interspecies marriage. The time has come.” It would be another four years before the US would see federal marriage equality. That same year, Miss Piggy walked the red carpet at OUT100 and was featured at a fundraising event for The Trevor Project. There, she said that on behalf of herself, Kermit, and all of the Muppets, “we support you.”
The publicity spoke to the root of Muppet philosophy while raising awareness for their 2011 film The Muppets. The Muppets plot even resonates today as in the film, the fabric puppets attempt to save their studio from an evil oil baron. It’s a not so subtle nod to anti-capitalism, and a premonition of what would come over ten years later when President Trump cut funding for public media, including funding for PBS and further Sesame Street. Netflix stepped in to purchase Sesame Street while providing funding for it to continue for free on PBS.
The Muppets (2011)
In The Muppets (2011), Walter — the fabric brother of Jason Segel — struggles with his identity: is he a man or a muppet in the aptly named ballad. Which community should he be part of and does he have to choose? In the end, he discovers that he’s a muppet, and his brother Gary accepts and loves this for him. He also discovers that he can exist partially in both and doesn’t have to give up anything about himself to be a Muppet. Heck, Walter’s human form is even played by gay actor Jim Parsons.
The spinoff 2015 television series after The Muppets even returned to Henson’s adult humor roots, where in “Hostile Makeover”, Pepe the Praun commented that he too is attracted to Josh Groban. “What?” he says, “He’s a handsome man, and gender is fluid.”
And as far-right anti-LGBTQ+ hostility grew in the early 2020s and increases today, the Muppets stayed true to their roots. Kermit appeared in the “Can’t Cancel Pride” streamed special during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in a 2021 interview with Kryss Shane, long-time Muppets performer Bill Barretta explained that the well-loved Muppet Howard Tubman is gay and that he based the character on his real-life LGBTQ+ friends in order to avoid making him a stereotype, which some have argued is best represented by Uncle Deadly. Unfortunately, the Muppet Studios shot down the idea of making Uncle Deadly explicitly gay in the 2015 sitcom, despite several writers forwarding the idea.
Despite Sesame Street’s continued official stance that Bert and Ernie are “just friends,” the show has consistently celebrated Pride Month since 2017, and shared posts on their Instagram, X, and Facebook accounts that celebrate how “Sesame Street is proud to support families of all shapes, sizes, and colors.” And The Jim Henson Company has even sold Pride collections, including the Fraggle Rock Pride-themed tees and hoodies. Fraggle Rock, a creation of Henson and Hunt, even features an episode titled “Gone But Not Forgotten” in its final season where Wembley makes a new friend he news will die soon. It paralleled, as Baume explained, Hunt’s own life who lost his partner to AIDS shortly before the episode was filmed.
The queer Muppet fandom and Muppetcore culture online
But the queer Muppet online fandom is much older than 2011’s The Muppets. For years, queer Muppetcore has flourished on the Internet and social media channels. Queer muppet fan Kieran Moore argued that Kermit’s songs like “Rainbow Connection” and “Bein’ Green” have resonated with queer people for decades. Frequent contributor to the Muppet fan blog Tough Pigs, Moore highlighted how behind the camera, the Muppets have also put their money where their fabric mouths are in terms of cutting ties with homophobic corporations like Chick-Fil-A.
And their fan base has remained loyal. Silly Lily Arts, an account run by queer artist Lily Cronin, frequently shares LGBTQ+ Muppet content, including a new Pride design this past May of Janice, the lead guitar player in The Electric Mayhem, alongside the words “Protect the Dolls.” The phrase originates from Black and Latina trans women in 1980s ballroom culture but has become a call for solidarity with and protecting trans women of color. It was recently popularized again when designer Conner Ives wore a t-shirt with the phrase after a runway show.
In the same vein, Gay Muppets, an account on Instagram, has 11,400 followers and claims openly in its title that “all the muppets are gay.” For the account’s owner, “it’s always nice to reimagine and rediscover queerness, seeing myself in my childhood favorites is so empowering.” The Internet helped them find niche communities, specifically other LGBTQ+ people who love and see themselves in the Muppets, and they fully plan to walk down the aisle to Kermit’s Rainbow Connection at their queer wedding.
Some of their most recent posts foreground Bert and Ernie, roommates from Sesame Street that are notoriously queer coded. Former Sesame Street writer Mark Saltzman claimed back in 2018 that their relationship was modeled after his own with his partner Arnold Glassman, whereas Sesame Street countered that they are “best friends” (as straight historians would say).
It’s been the best known secret of The Muppets. A 2013 cover of The New Yorker after the historic United States v. Windsor Supreme Court case pictured Bert and Ernie hugging while watching a television lit with a photo of the justices. Similarly, in 2019, Jazzelle (known as Uglyworldwide) transformed herself into the Muppets, confirming the queer nature of Henson’s puppets depicting herself and another as Bert and Ernie learning in for a kiss.
All Muppets are queer
In fact the Muppet community itself, inclusive of Muppets of different gender and species, is inherently queer. The idea that Muppets have a gender is complex. With their ability to speak for themselves (with the help of a skilled puppeteer), they tell people how they identify and how they would like to be addressed, such as Gonzo clarifying after backlash to him wearing drag on Muppet Babies that he is a “whatever.”
It’s not about what genitalia they have — they are made of fabric; it’s about how the Muppets affirm and celebrate who they choose to be. The difference between flesh and blood and fabric actors in Classic Muppet films like The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island did not exist then and does not exist now, even on the Muppets child-oriented counterpart Sesame Street.
At a time when the United States is facing record anti-LGBTQ+ legislation aimed at erasing representation of queer people in classrooms, books, and television shows and outright denying our existence and survival, the Muppets show how queer representation has been part of children’s public television and film history since the beginning.
For many queer and trans adults, like myself, the Muppets were a huge part of our childhoods and were some of the first groups to love and affirm us as we truly are, allowing us to share how we identify rather than making assumptions or placing expectations on us. As a result, whether explicit or not, the Muppets’ lessons of acceptance and kindness helped many queer people (like me) come out of the closet when we were in a safe place and served as our chosen family when we were alone.
It only makes sense that queer people have remained loyal to a fandom that refuses to abandon the queer children that these Muppets raised.
