Gay Big Bird costume creator Kermit Love dead at 91
Costume Designer Kermit Love worked with Jim Henson to design Big Bird and other “Sesame Street” characters. Love was also know for his work with a some of ballet’s most prominent choreographers, Twyla Tharp, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine, as well as puppets and costumes for film and TV (he also created the Snuggle Fabric Softener teddy bear).
Kermit Love died on June 21, 2008, of congestive heart failure, in Poughkeepsie, New York. He had lived in Stanfordville, N.Y. He is survived by Christopher Lyall, his partner of fifty years.
via Towelroad and Yahoo News
If you liked this, try these...
(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
Loading ...Tags: Big Bird, Kermit Love, SFW
June 27th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Thanks for that bit of queer history.
BTW: was Kermit the Frog named after him?
June 27th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
It has always been a point of debate, but Kermit the frog is believed to have been named after Jim Henson’s childhood friend Dr. Kermit Scott - who coincidentally died June 16th of this year. Scott, 71, was a Yale professor and a longtime advocate for the poor. He reportedly asked that instead of sending things for his funeral to perform a random act of kindness. Sounds like Kermit to me.
Big Bird performer Caroll Spinney reports lovingly about Kermit, “He looked very much like Santa Claus but was a little bit more like the Grinch.” In the lean years that Spinney wanted to give up living hand-to-mouth in New York and his role as Big Bird it was Kermit Love who encouraged him to hang on just a little bit longer. The very next Big Bird appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. Kermit Love was a very creative man and kind of seemed like a Muppet in his own right. If not for him our childhoods would have been very different!
Hope this helped. I’m the uber fan that inspires much of these Muppety mentions.
June 28th, 2008 at 1:48 am
indeed he does. Although I myself am a bigtime Muppet fan, most of the Muppet mentions go out to the frogboy.