HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Oprah Winfrey is thankful for her close relationship with Gayle King, but she wants everyone to know that the two are just good friends.
"I’m not a lesbian … I’m not even kind of a lesbian," the media mogul tells Barbara Walters when asked about gay rumors surrounding the pair. "And the reason why it irritates me is because it means that somebody must think I’m lying. That’s number one. Number two … why would you want to hide it? That is not the way I run my life."
Winfrey sat down with Walters for an upcoming interview airing Thursday on ABC. She gets emotional as she describes her relationship with King, whom she first met in the 1980s.
"She is … the mother I never had. 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," Winfrey says through tears.
"It’s making me cry because I’m thinking about … how much … I probably have never told her that," she continues. "Tissue please. I now need tissue. I’ve never told her that."
Winfrey’s relationship with King has led many to question the legitimacy of her romance with businessman Stedman Graham, whom she’s dated since 1986.
"The love … the lover … the man … the partner … the mate," she says of Graham. "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."
The talk-show queen also reveals they don’t have plans to marry or start a family, although they’ve considered adoption in the past.
Say Winfrey, "For a while I thought, ‘Well, maybe,’ every time I went to Africa, and Stedman says this too. Every time I went to Africa he didn’t know when I got off the plane if I was going to have one or two or ten children."
A Barbara Walters Special: Oprah, the Next Chapter airs Thursday at 9 p.m. on ABC.
