Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [167]
Unintentionally or not, Oprah issued her statement during Gay Pride Week, which Barney’s downtown store in New York City celebrated with a window showing mannequins of Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche popping out of a volcano. The Ellen mannequin is reading a copy of the New York Post’s front page reporting that the Walt Disney Company, which owned ABC, was getting bashed by Baptists over its “gay-friendly” policies. Flying above the whole scene is Oprah Winfrey in an airplane trailing a banner that reads, “I Am Not Gay.” In certain gay circles those words became as infamous as Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”
Years later Rosie O’Donnell, who had come out as a lesbian, speculated on Oprah’s relationship with her best friend: “I don’t know that she and Gayle are necessarily doing each other, but I think they are the emotional equivalent of [a gay couple].… When they did that road trip together [“Oprah and Gayle’s Big Adventure,” featured in five episodes on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006], that’s as gay as it gets, and I don’t mean it to be an insult, either. I’m just saying, listen, if you ask me, that’s a [gay] couple.”
Twelve years later, when Ellen DeGeneres married Portia de Rossi, Oprah presented their wedding video on what The New York Times called “the secular chapel” of her daytime talk show. She chose to make her pro-gay statement and celebrate Ellen’s lesbian union less than a week after voters in Maine, like those in thirty other states, rejected same-sex marriage.
When Liz Smith was asked about the reaction to her blind item, she said, “I am sorry Oprah got what she considered grief because of this.” Years later the columnist said that Mary Tyler Moore had phoned her the day the item ran and joked, “ ‘Liz, I’m not coming out.’ So it has always amazed me that Oprah chose to assume I was talking about her [when I wrote that one of the biggest and longest-running TV stars is coming out].… I came to sincerely regret this stupid blind item, and I have never done another one. [But] as a result, Oprah called a press conference to say she was not gay and would not be coming out. I hadn’t even been thinking of her when I wrote it. But I always felt it created some hard feelings, which I had not intended. So this knee-jerk reaction [of hers] was peculiar, I felt. She should have just ignored it. But it caused enormous speculation, and maybe that’s the kind of thing that keeps her front and center. She always seems to grasp the nettle.”
The suggestion that Oprah purposely teased rumors about her sexuality seemed plausible in light of certain comments she made in interviews, in speeches, and on her show. Two months before appearing on Ellen’s coming-out show, Oprah hosted a Valentine’s Day segment entitled “Girlfriends” in which she mentioned the affectionate nicknames she and her best friend, Gayle King, called each other. Oprah was “Negro”; Gayle was “Blackie.” Oprah joked on the air about rumors that Gayle was the reason Oprah avoided marrying Stedman, and Gayle joked that Oprah was the reason she got divorced. Their jokes led to lurid cover stories in the tabloids:
“Oprah & Gayle Move In Together” (Globe)
“Oprah’s Secret Life: The Truth About Those Gay Rumors” (National Enquirer)
“Oprah & Gayle Like Lovers” (Globe)
“Who’s Gay & Who’s Not in Hollywood” (National Examiner)
It was not just the grocery store press that speculated on Oprah’s sexuality, but also the mainstream media. Writing about her power as America’s “talker-in-chief,” the National Review said, “she may or may not be lesbian.” In an essay about “the strange genius of Oprah,” The New Republic proffered its analysis: “Though she claims to have been romantically involved for years with a man named Stedman Graham … the two have never married. Naturally, gossip has circulated for years that the relationship is a sham and that Oprah is actually gay. Provocatively enough, Oprah rarely refers to Graham on her show. Instead, her most frequent references are to Gayle King.