Blue’s Clues premiered in September of 1996. A year or so later, when I met my Middle School BFF, the show was already immensely popular. With preschoolers. But we were twelve and thirteen respectively.
And so we did what all tweens do when they love something that they’re “not supposed to” love and they’re too insecure to admit it—we mocked it mercilessly (privately, thank goodness). Specifically, we mocked the host, Steve. Not the actor, Steven Burns, let’s be clear, but the character of Steve. We wrote song parodies about him. We joked about him picking his nose and just generally being stupid.
And the more we watched the show, the more we loved it. The more we loved it, the more comfortable we got saying so (to each other, never to our other peers). We played Blue’s Clues during our slumber parties. We bought endless merch (she always Blue and I always Magenta). This award from a Blue’s Clues coloring book is one of my most prized possessions:
[Image description: Top line: “Beth Cook”; middle line: “For being a great best friend!”; bottom line: “{name redacted, covered the the green-striped Handy Dandy Crayon}, 12-30-98.” Yellow inside border, light purple outer border with white polka dots, red spirals in each corner, Blue’s Clues logo top center, Blue and Tickety Tock bottom center.]
Fast-forward twenty-something years. In reconnecting with each other over text message, this friend and I came out to each other. Turns out we’re both bisexual and, more notably, both on the asexual spectrum. Then we had this shared realization of “Ohhh… Of course you are! Of course we were!” Everything just clicked. How we gravitated toward each other before we had the words to know why.
Excerpts from texts between me [B1] and my middle school BFF [B2]:
9/7/21
B2: Oh my GOODDDD
😭😭😭😭
B1: Holy wow 😭✨
B2: Steeeeeeve
B1:
[Image description: 3-panel meme, base images from The Emperor’s New Groove. Top panel: Llama Kuzco with a sad expression and watering eyes, captioned “Me about to watch the video from Steve from Blue’s Clues that he made for us grown up kids…” Middle panel: Pacha labeled as Steve, gentle expression, one hand gesturing; captioned: “I never forgot about you… ever…” Bottom panel: Llama Kuzco sob-wailing, captioned: “Me going thru one of the hardest times of my life learning that Steve still loves me”]
B2: You’re g—-mn right Steve, I’ve accomplished a lot and some of it WAS hard and we’re all grown ups now and aaaaa
And you DID leave abruptly, thank you for acknowledging this
9/9/21
B1:
[Image description: Tweet from user @adashtra, display name ‘Lil Nas Ash’: “Blues Clues Steve is proud of me and says i still look good so you can’t tell me S— for the rest of the week”]
[Image description: Tweet from user @veganeggma, display name ‘free palestine’: “Let it be known that Steve from blues clues apologized for abandoning me before my dad did”]
[Image description: Tweet from user @jaronmyers, display name ‘Jaron Myers’: “We’re all so emotionally damaged from this last year and a half that Steve from Blue’s Clues was like ‘I have to address the nation’”]
B2: I really feel like Steve reached more of us than any presidential address in living memory tbh
B1: For real
9/10/21
B2: I feel weird about the Steve speech cuz like
We spent all that time making up songs about how dumb he is and how funny it would be if like, they got evicted
We were not good friends to Steve ;;
B1: It’s true
At least he never knew?
B2: Yeah
B1: I think when we were pretend-crying at the end of Blue’s birthday episode we kinda admitted how much the show meant to us
B2: That’s true. No doubt we owe a lot of our friendship to it.
B1: Absolutely
B2: But as touching as that speech was, like. I feel disingenuous
B1: I think it was a safe space to explore snarky meanness, as all tweens and teens do to some extent
B2: You have a good point. We definitely were at odds with our own maturity and growing up and wanting to stay kids but like. We knew we couldn’t. So we got mad at Steve.
Because Steve got to be a kid even though he was an adult and maybe we were jealous
B1: Yup, he was an easy target and we were in that weird age where we had to make fun of it because we couldn’t publicly admit that we loved a show meant for preschoolers
I remember it took me a LONG time to learn that you could be funny (one of my highest aims) without being mean to anyone
B2: This goes way deeper than I thought wow.
This is ridiculous but I’ve felt weird about it for years subconsciously???
B1: Oh absolutely, I’ve felt weird about it for years, too
B2: When you’re sort of an outcast, or maybe bullied, I think you learn to laugh at least a little bit at the insults people sling at you. A survival mechanism.
So it makes sense that the humor you learn is punching down, at least until you mature a little
B1: Exactly
Like we and C. used to (privately) mock anyone who we deemed as stupid or shallow
Because we thought we had the moral high ground
B2: Very true
Because we were sh—y little teenagers just like everyone else
And when you get to be OUR age, and everything around is in fact BS, you realize f–k it, like what you like
B1: Hundo p
B2: Like how I learned I can like pink and pastels and girly stuff and still be a badass
B1: F–k yeah
And how I can become increasingly more nerdy about the Muppets with each passing year but I’m more emotionally mature than some people with careers and children
B1:
[Image description: 2-panel meme, base images from the animated series Invincible. Top panel: A yellow-gloved fist, labeled “Me having a rough week,” moves toward Omni-Man’s face. Bottom panel: Omni-Man, labeled “Steve from Blues Clues telling me he never forgot me,” catches the fist with his hand.]
B1: Maybe Steve is proud of you and me because of personal growth—we didn’t deserve him back then, but we do now
B2: Why do I need a therapist when I have you ❤️
Steve coming back into our (collective Millennial) lives hit as hard as it did because we’re in the adult healing process of coming to grips with what we wish had gone differently in the past and how we’re facing a totally, unknowably chaotic future.
Middle School BFF and I got to hang out together for several days last year on my trip back to Arizona. We read through old handwritten notes on school notebook paper, watched our old favorite movies, and talked about old times. But mostly we reconnected as adults. We talked about late-diagnosis neurodivergence and mental health and the trials of being a recovering goody-two-shoes. I watched her work on some intricate and beautiful art pieces, and heard about the complexities and frustrations of being an independent artist. But mostly we spent a ton of time just hanging out with her kids. It’s a real trip, to see someone you knew as a kid now having two kids of her own, and being awesome at it.
As I recounted about in my guest blog post for Zeitgeist Academy, “Childhood Music and the Shaping of Identity”:
B2: I think about our “Bi Bi Bi” [parody] fairly often
B1: Right? The d–n foreshadowing
B2: And I marvel at how solidly we equated bisexuality to infidelity
B1: Oh d–n yeah I forgot that. Man, the 90s and aughts really loved their ‘bisexual = slut’ thing, didn’t they?
B2: A bisexual girl is a girl who is willing to make out with another girl in front of your boy eyes and for your benefit
It was Big Fun! coming out as bi in like 2004
B1: You know what I just realized? With society’s impressions of bisexual and asexual back then, with the media we had available to us, I don’t think there’s any way we *could have* realized we were both bisexual AND asexual. They would’ve seemed inherently contradictory.
We didn’t have the tools we needed to understand ourselves. As human beings, we can only become who we become inasmuch as we can imagine ourselves to be so. And while not impossible, to imagine yourself as something without ever having seen someone else like you be that something…is a one in a million miracle. As I wrote in my ToughPigs article “Fozzie Bear is My Ace of Hearts”:
How much pain and confusion over those decades could we have been spared if we’d been able to understand ourselves at thirteen instead of thirty? If you’ve ever googled a term and then started crying with the sudden realization of “Oh my god. It’s a thing. I’m not broken,” then you know what I mean.
So my bestie and I wish to offer our heartfelt apology to Steven Burns for the taunting he never deserved, from two former clueless thirteen-year-olds. When I interviewed David Bizarro for ToughPigs, I was surprised and delighted to hear that David and Steve have been working on an upcoming project together. David confirmed that Steve genuinely is that “really amazing, beautiful human being” that we’ve gotten to see in his viral video, speaking engagements, and TikToks. Thank you, Steve, truly, for everything you’ve done and continue to do to make this world a kinder place to live.
What gives me such glowing hope and gratitude is this:
The great media we consumed as kids—Blue’s Clues, Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Fraggle Rock—gave us the compassion and creativity and confidence as grownups to make our own “children’s” media: Bluey, Steven Universe, Hilda, Owl House, Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, Coco, Encanto, Turning Red. We’re taking it to the next level. We’re imbuing it with all the emotional intelligence and healing and social awareness we wish we’d gotten as kids. The OGs got a lot right, but we’re dialing it up.
Making new art is part of the healing process. Maybe someday, some twelve-year-old kid who is like twelve-year-old me will hear the things I needed to hear because I’m saying them now. I’m using my mind, taking a step at a time, and, slowly but surely, doing what I wanna do.
Beth Anna Cook 