Despite denying those pesky rumors that she and best friend Gayle King are anything more than friends, Oprah Winfrey is once again setting the record straight.
In an upcoming ABC interview with Barbara Walters, Winfrey flat out states, “I’m not a lesbian.”
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“I’m not even kind of a lesbian,” the talk show queen, 56, tells Walters. “And the reason why [the rumor] irritates me is because it means that somebody must think I’m lying. That’s No. 1. No. 2 … why would you want to hide it? That is not the way I run my life.”
Winfrey’s friendship with King dates back 30 years, when the two women worked at a local Baltimore TV station in their 20s. And while their relationship has remained strictly platonic, Winfrey says their friendship means the world to her.
“She is … the mother I never had,” Winfrey says as she chokes back tears. “She is … the sister everybody would want. She is the friend that everybody deserves. I don’t know a better person. I don’t know a better person.”
“It’s making me cry because I’m thinking about … how much … I probably have never told her that,” she adds.
Winfrey also speaks candidly about her long-term relationship with businessman Stedman Graham.
“The love … the lover … the man … the partner … the mate,” Winfrey says of Graham, her partner since 1986. “I do not know of another man on this planet … who could have lived this life with such dignity, with such grace and such respect and humility in it. And still hold his own and be his own.”
