Recently I found myself revisiting the big Tinky Winky brouhaha of 1999. You must remember the Tinky Winky controversy --that was when Jerry Falwell announced that Tinky Winky is gay.

I was thinking about that insane cultural moment because of a fresh controversy that involves another set of allegedly gay PBS puppets.

There’s a new satirical eight-minute movie called Ernest & Bertram, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The premise of the film is that Bert & Ernie of Sesame Street are gay lovers whom a supermarket tabloid has outed.

Even though Sesame Street has featured parodies of pop culture for 34 years, the producers of Sesame Street are unamused. In a tone of high earnestness, a company spokesman said, "Ernie and Bert are friends who live together. There’s nothing sexual in their relationship."

And Sesame Street lawyers have sent a cease-and-desist letter to the creator of the movie. But the Bert & Ernie spoofs seem to be proliferating.

At the Manhattan Theater Club in New York last month, a new musical comedy called Avenue Q was staged. Avenue Q is performed by puppets. The show’s MC announces that it's, quote, "Sesame Street for grownups." And a Bert & Ernie-esque couple in the show named Rod & Nicky are quite possibly gay.

When I searched the Internet to see if the Sesame Street lawyers have sent a letter to the producers of Avenue Q, I came across an account of the Bertram & Ernie tussle. It was on a British gay news web site called RainbowNetwork.com. "Rumors concerning the puppets' supposed sexuality have dogged the Children’s Television Workshop for years, according to the Urban Legends Reference Pages Web site."

So I went to the Urban Legends Reference Pages, where I read the following definitive urban-legend explanation.

"Though it's impossible to pin down where the ‘Bert and Ernie are gay’ rumor began, one potential source is The Real Thing, a 1980 book by Kurt Andersen. In this book Andersen makes the whimsical claim that among homosexuals, Bert and Ernie are ‘the Real Thing.’ Could this cheeky comment have been the genesis of the rumor that now so plagues Sesame Street?"

What can I say? It was a joke. I’m not sure if this qualifies as life imitating art, or art imitating life imitating art. But I have learned something that never really occurred tome before: all those urban legends floating around do not just spontaneously pop out of the ether. They’re concocted by individual mischief-makers. Most of whom get to remain anonymous.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.