Sesame Street celebrated Pride Month by introducing its first married gay couple, Dave and Frank, during the show's Family Day episode.
The synopsis for the episode reads as follows: "It's Family Day on Sesame Street! Relatives from all over are coming to celebrate, but Big Bird thinks his Granny Bird isn’t going make it to the party. Big Bird's in for a big surprise when his friends work together to bring Granny Bird to the celebration!"
Sesame Street's Family Day episode shows the street's residents preparing for the eponymous holiday event. Among the guests are Nina's brother Dave, who appears at the party with his husband Frank and daughter Mia.
Alan Muraoka, who plays Alan on Sesame Street, co-directed the episode. He posted about the experience on Facebook, writing, "Sesame Street has always been a welcoming place of diversity and inclusion. So I'm so excited to introduce Nina's [brother] Dave, his husband Frank, and their daughter Mia to our sunny street... I am so honored and humbled to have co-directed this important and milestone episode. Love is love, and we are so happy to add this special family to our Sesame family. Happy Pride to all!!!!"
Speaking to The Washington Post, Christy Tirrell-Corbin, the executive director of the Center for Early Childhood Education and Intervention at the University of Maryland, explained the importance of Sesame Street introducing a queer married couple to its young audience. “One of the many wonderful things about young children is they are very accepting -- it’s really when they are exposed to attitudes or context where there’s bias that they begin to develop those biases," she noted.
Created for the U.S. national public television broadcaster PBS in 1969, Sesame Street is an educational series famous for making social issues understandable to children -- something that hasn't changed since it moved to HBO in 2016, then HBO Max in 2020. Other examples include a March episode in which the muppet father/son duo Wes and Elijah talk to Elmo about the differences in people's skin color. The show similarly tackled the subject of opioid addiction in 2019 by introducing Karli, a muppet who's in foster care while her mother is in recovery.
New episodes of Sesame Street are streaming on HBO Max.
Source: YouTube, Facebook, The Washington Post