Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [169]
This became particularly noticeable in 2006, when O, The Oprah Magazine, devoted an issue to friendship and featured a Q&A titled “Oprah and Gayle Uncensored,” which kicked off another furor of gay rumors:
Q: Well, let’s get right to it! Every time I tell somebody, “I’m interviewing Oprah and Gayle,” the response is always the same: “Oh [long pause] are they … you know … together?”
OPRAH: You’re kidding. People are still saying that?
Q: Every single person …
OPRAH: I understand why people think we’re gay. There isn’t a definition in our culture for this kind of bond between women. So I get why people have to label it—how can you be this close without it being sexual? How else can you explain a level of intimacy where someone always loves you, always respects you, admires you?
GAYLE: Wants the best for you.
OPRAH: Wants the best for you in every single situation of your life.
GAYLE: The truth is, if we were gay, we would so tell you, because there’s nothing wrong with being gay.
OPRAH: Yeah. But for people to still be asking the question when I’ve said it and said it and said it, that means they think I’m a liar. And that bothers me.… I’ve told nearly everything there is to tell.
It was the nearly in Oprah’s response that jumped out, drawing media attention and giving comedians a field day. In his nightly monologue, David Letterman mentioned that Oprah had denied she was gay. “I hear that and I go hmmmmm.…” At the American Museum of the Moving Image tribute to Will Smith, Jamie Foxx said, “I was talking about you the other day. I was lying in bed with Oprah, and I turn over to Gayle and I say, ‘You know what?’ ” When Kathy Griffin went on Larry King Live, he asked, “Do you think we’re ready for a gay president?” She said, “I’d love it. By that, I assume you mean Oprah. I tease, Larry. I know we’re scared of her. Oprah, first lesbian president. Gayle, lesbian vice president. Just a thought. I’m not outing anybody.”
The rumors that dogged Oprah probably said more about society’s need to define people sexually and the discomfort many feel about those who do not fit a prescribed definition of heterosexual or homosexual. The category of bisexual is too fraught for most people, although Oprah introduced the subject with a show on “sexual fluidity,” showing women past the age of forty who left their men for other women without necessarily defining themselves as lesbians. She said she understood the resistance to such labeling. After interviewing the evangelist Ted Haggard about the gay sex scandal that forced him to resign as pastor of the New Life Church, she told her audience, “I got [i.e., understood] him as not wanting to be labeled—not wanting to be put in a box.” Throughout the Haggard interview, though, she made a point of saying she did not agree with him that sexuality is complex and complicated. “I am heterosexual,” she stated. “I don’t know what it would be like to have that inclination [to the same sex], but I have many friends who are gay.” Even admitting to having homosexual friends was a big step forward for the young woman who once thought homosexuality was a sin and who told her brother, who died of AIDS, that he would not go to Heaven because he was gay. Still, Oprah was so sensitive to the lesbian rumors surrounding her that she would not allow two women in her employ at Harpo to publicly declare their relationship, although they had been living together for several years. In other words, she seemed to say: It’s okay to be gay, as long as I’m not tainted by it.
Perhaps Oprah’s enthusiasm for her female friends was misinterpreted by those who made assumptions because they were looking through a prism of lesbian rumors and gave her comments far more weight than she intended. For instance, shortly after Liz Smith’s blind item and Oprah’s cameo as the therapist who gently urged Ellen to come out, Oprah and her camera crew went on tour with Tina Turner in 1997, to Houston, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. “We followed her around the country because I wanted to be Tina,” Oprah said. Instead,