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engaging in spirited debates with Gerry Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton. By the time his show was canceled in New York due to low ratings, talk show television had changed, becoming less thoughtful; the terrain had been invaded by men like Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer, Morton Downey, Jr., Montel Williams, and Maury Povich, who presided over screamers and chair-throwers. The goal was no longer to combine education with entertainment, but rather to pander to the lowest taste to get the highest ratings. “They’re all my illegitimate children,” Donahue said of his successors, “and I love them all equally.” He never criticized his competitors, including Oprah, but he did acknowledge that she had muddied the turf. “After she hit … the talk show game took a significant turn toward the sensational and the bizarre,” he said. His most frequent guest, Ralph Nader, was blunter in blaming her for plunging talk shows into the sewer, but Donahue said that daytime television was closer to the street, more irreverent than any other spot on the dial. “Does it mean that everything on daytime television is wonderful and deserves a Nobel Prize? No,” he said. “There are sins. But I’m saying, let the wildflowers grow.”

In that unruly garden with Oprah were Rosie O’Donnell, Ricki Lake, Sally Jessy Raphael, Jenny Jones, Joan Rivers, and Rolonda Watts. Each strained to do the kind of memorable television Donahue did at his best. He once lay in a satin-lined coffin to interview a funeral home director. Another time he and his cameras followed a couple as they gave birth. They showed the mother in labor, pushing as hard as she could, with her husband helping, while their three-year-old wandered around the living room. Just as the baby was born, the toddler came into view and shouted, “Mommy, it’s a puppy!”

At the time, Oprah was getting high ratings with titillating shows on homosexuality, up to then a taboo subject for talk show television. Reflecting her interest in the subject, she continued to explore the topic of gay men and lesbians over the next two decades. Here is only a partial list:

11/13/86 “Homophobia”

1988 “Women Who Turn to Lesbianism”

2/88 Lesbian separatists

1990 “Gay Adoption”

1991 “All the Family Is Gay”

2/24/92 “Straight Spouses and Gay Ex-Husbands”

1993 “Lesbian and Gay Baby Boom”

5/4/94 “School for Gay Teens”

2/27/95 Greg Louganis, Olympic diver, on revealing his homosexuality and AIDS

7/11/96 “Why I Married a Gay Man”

4/30/97 Ellen DeGeneres’s coming-out episode

5/5/97 “Are You Born Gay?”

1998 Cher and Chastity Bono regarding Chastity being outed as lesbian

4/16/04 “Secret Sex World: Living on the Down Low”

10/27/04 “My Husband’s Gay”

10/20/05 “Gay for 30 Days”

11/9/05 “Bestselling Author Terry McMillan Confronts Her Gay Ex-Husband”

11/17/05 “When I Knew I Was Gay”

7/7/06 “The Stars of Brokeback Mountain and Tyler Perry’s Next Big Thing”

9/19/06 “Former Governor Jim McGreevey, His Gay Sex Scandal”

10/2/06 “Gay Wives Confess”

1/29/07 “Fascinating Families” (including a gay male couple in California who are foster parents)

5/1/07 “Dana McGreevey, Estranged Wife of the Gay Governor”

6/6/07 “Left for Dead: The Gay Man Who Befriended His Attacker”

10/24/07 “Gay Around the World”

2/1/08 “America’s Toughest Matchmaker, Plus Katherine Heigl,” including video of T. R. Knight after Isaiah Washington referred to him as “a faggot” on the set of Grey’s Anatomy

11/14/08 “Oprah Fridays Live” (with Melissa Etheridge on Prop. 8, the anti–gay marriage amendment)

1/28/09 “Evangelist Ted Haggard, His Wife, and the Gay Sex Scandal”

3/06/09 “Women Leaving Men for Other Women”

3/25/09 Rerun of “Women Leaving Men for Other Women”

In 1997, long before Ellen DeGeneres entered the talk show arena, she decided that she was going to make television history on her ABC sitcom by coming out as a lesbian. She called Oprah and asked her to appear on the show as the therapist to whom Ellen confides her sexual feelings for women. Oprah agreed, but Ellen was nervous because she had seen one of