For this Pride Month at ToughPigs, we’re raising money for charity and giving away some super cool prizes in the process. But while we’re enjoying Pride Month, we’re reminding you again that gay, transgender and queer people of all kinds are just people in your neighborhood like everyone else. We’re not evil or weird, or even new, despite what a lot of people want you to think. We’ve always been here, living our lives, hanging out with our friends, and sometimes, making the art you love.
Case in point: The Jim Henson Company, Sesame and Disney have worked with a number of queer puppeteers, performers, and creatives over the years. They’re a part of shows you enjoy, like Muppets Mayhem and Back to the Rock. Every Pride Month, I reach out to some of them and have amazing conversations with some of the most genuine, passionate artists I’ve ever spoken to. Below, I’m going to profile one of them and share some stories.
Jennifer Capra (she/her)
Muppet and Adjacent Projects: Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Johnny & the Sprites
Introduction:
In August 2025, Sesame Street aired an episode titled “No Wrong Way to Be You,” in which J.V.N. from Queer Eye gives a gender-nonconforming makeover to fan favorite Sesame Muppet Niamh. I wrote extensively about this episode, which I felt had powerful elements for all children. Writing about it made me want to interview the episode’s queer, bisexual writer, Jennifer Capra. I hadn’t heard of Jen before, but some time on Muppet Wiki made it clear that she has had a huge impact on Sesame Street for over 16 years, starting at Season 41 with work that still has yet to air. Clearly, I had to interview her, and I’m so glad I was finally able to.
On Her Way to Sesame Street
Jen told me that she was “one of those weirdos who always wanted to be a writer.” As a child, she would write stories and newsletters on her mom’s typewriter. Additionally, she became entranced by the Muppets, trying to figure out how the “actual real-world magic” behind them worked. In high school, she wrote for the school’s newspaper, and in college she published her work in on-campus literary journals. Jen studied writing at UMass Amherst, but wasn’t able to finish her degree. Years later, in her mid-20s, Jen enrolled at Evergreen State College in Washington. With its open-ended curriculum and focus on written evaluations rather than number grades, Jen jokes that Evergreen was “the perfect environment for an overachieving hyperlexic nerd who didn’t want to take math.”
Eventually, Jen’s path led her to a job as an assistant for a television-industry bigwig (who will remain nameless). While working there, she met Brown Johnson, future Sesame Street executive producer, as well as someone who suggested she try to get a job on Johnny & the Sprites. That show wound up being Jen’s first real job in the industry. Though she was a production assistant on Sprites, everyone there knew Jen’s real goal was to break into writing. When Johnny & the Sprites ended, Jen moved onto other gigs before finally landing a script coordinator job at Sesame Workshop’s reboot of The Electric Company 18 years ago. When the script supervisor at Sesame Street left to have a baby a few years after that in the lead-up to the show’s 41th season, Jen covered for. She remained on staff for over a decade after that.
A Script Supervisor is a Person in Your Neighborhood
What is a script supervisor? Well, a script supervisor organizes the writing department, helping manage the overall production. They coordinate everyone’s schedules and serve as a point of contact for the whole writing team. They make sure that script documents go to the necessary people and, in the case of Sesame Street, they make sure that the research and curriculum teams get the opportunity to speak to the head writers.
Jen did all of this for six years, even though everyone knew that her dream was not to supervise scripts, but to write them. Having this job helped Jen get her foot in the door, but her chance to finally start writing came when Brown Johnson took over at Sesame. Johnson held an internal, anonymous pitch competition, asking all staff members to pitch a sketch featuring a specific character. While we can’t go into detail here about what Jen wrote, her sketch beat 200 other submissions and had the opportunity to develop animatics for her sketch with other members of the Sesame team. The bigger win here, though, was that people realized Jen could write! Jen joined the writing team in Season 47, all while continuing to serve as a script supervisor. This often meant Jen had to write on nights and weekends, but she still loved getting this opportunity.
Jen’s first Sesame writing job was scripting internal messaging for Sesame’s partners, but she soon moved onto writing intros, outros, and other wraparound segments. From there, Jen helped develop and wrote for the show’s recurring segments like Elmo’s Wonderful World, Abby’s Amazing Adventures, and Cookie Monster’s Foodie Truck. In Season 55, Jen got to write a full episode: Episode 5532, the aforementioned “No Wrong Way to Be You.” While she no longer works regularly on the show, one of her scripts was filmed for a future season and will debut soon.
Oscar was Jen’s favorite character to write for, because he’s so nuanced. “Everyone interprets him differently,” she noted. “It’s a delicate balance with him, making him gruff without being too mean.” Her all-time favorite Sesame Muppets are the Twiddlebugs and the Two-Headed Monster.
No Wrong Way to Be You
Jen is very proud of the work she was able to do on the “No Wrong Way to Be You” episode. She says that this episode was “a story about being able to be your authentic self and advocate for yourself, supported by your community.” She added, “At the end of the day, this is the salient point I want even the smallest child to take away: that it’s up to you how you want to move through the world, and you have the agency to choose what feels real and authentic to you.”
The best part of our conversation about this episode, however, was Jen explaining an Easter egg she snuck into it. She notes that the episode features a long-haired monster named Leo in a shirt with a rubber duck on it. Leo goes to J.V.N. for a haircut and returns with much shorter hair. Jen explained that Leo was a very important addition to the episode, because he was a tribute to her friend Leo Abramov, who served as a model for the Muppet’s hairstyle. Leo was a trans man who came to the United States from Russia to be able to transition freely. He and his wife Kerry established a pride event in Burlington Massachussetts, the first one to be publicly acknowledged in that town. However, Leo recently passed. Jen said, “A few years ago, we lost him to cancer. It was devastating. He was one of the only truly good, pure people I met on this planet.” The Leo Muppet’s duck sweater was chosen because when Kerry travels, she leaves rubber ducks with tags that tell Leo’s story to whoever finds them. This was Jen’s tribute, and she said everyone on set was crying when they heard this story. “It was important to have a gift for Kerry,” Jen said.
Future Plans
After Season 55, Jen left Sesame Street, but she still keeps busy with writing in a variety of forms. Currently, she’s writing a “new adult” novel, SHELLEY, which she describes as being about “a queer Buffy-esque hero descended from Mary Shelley in a secret matriarchal lineage of powerful sorcerers with deep occult knowledge (and an AP English exam on Monday), tasked with saving the normie world from the unseen horrors that plague her coastal New England town and her bloodline. It answers the burning question: what if Sam and Dean Winchester were a magical gay teenage girl growing up in Widow’s Bay?” She is also working on pitches for a procedural drama and a children’s series, both of which we can’t discuss at the moment. One of Jen’s biggest dreams, however, is to write on The Muppet Show if future episodes get made. She has been trying hard to get noticed and in that writer’s room!
At the moment, you can hear Jen on a variety of podcasts, including the Gen X Summer Reading series on This Book Made Me. She was also recently invited as a red carpet guest at the gala for Outright International, an organization that supports LGBTQ+ people around the world, especially in countries where it is dangerous for folks to come out. “I wanted to shout them out!” she says.
Of Queerness and Puppetry
Jen says that she brings her queer identity to everything she does. “It’s so important for me to be a voice for my community, especially the members of the LGBTQ+ family who don’t get a platform.” She adds that “When I’m at the table, I feel the weight to speak up even if other people don’t want t to hear it, to be the feminist killjoy in the room. I’ll point out the issues with writing that are based on a lack of intentionality with tropes, language, and stereotypes.” Jen feels the responsibility of providing for an overlooked community in everything she does, seeking to show queer representation in all its forms.
We also chatted a little about puppetry in general. She says, “I don’t think it’s an accident that so many queer people gravitate towards puppetry. It’s a very unique medium where you can actualize something, handcraft it, and bring it to life. For anyone who feels others and like an outsider, there’s something attractive about that level of control that other forms don’t offer in the same way.”
Along those lines, I asked Jen if she had a message for our readers this month, especially those in the LGBTQ+ community. She says, “I always want to lead with hope and joy. Those are the only things that can sustain us in the darkest of times. There are things we can foster together in our community, to be supportive and a chosen family, especially in terrifying times and hostile climates.”
She adds, “You can’t pour from an empty cup. You can’t fight if you’re always encumbered by tragedy. We’re more than those fraught moments and topics. Sometimes the safest place for us to find joy and hope is in community with each other. So find your people, stay connected to your people, and don’t let the world wear you down. It’s okay to take a beat and dance because that’s the only way we can keep going.”
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