Oprah is known everywhere around the world and has touched nearly everyone. Her media stardom and public ministry make her omnipresent as well as omnipotent. Her converts would argue she is also omniscient, especially with her monthly oracle – “O, The Oprah Magazine” -- pontificating the principles of self-help, self-love and self-giving. Oprah's principles empower women the world over and are derived from her personal narrative.

Because she has been so public about her life it appears that no topic is off-limits with the Queen of daytime talk. But when it comes to talking about her private sexual life the public feels Oprah is neither honest nor open.

The public / media no longer queries Oprah about her longtime boyfriend, Stedman Graham, of twenty plus years -- they met in 1986, were engaged in 1992, and now no wedding is in sight. It’s rumored the relationship soured and that Oprah and Stedman no longer reside together -- something Oprah has denied -- but rather he ceremonially shows up as Oprah’s escort for important photo-op moments, like the Kennedy Center Honors on Dec. 5. According to the recent  Star Magazine article titled “O, Please!: Oprah & Stedman Put on a Show,” the “distance between the two isn’t just geographical.”

But the distance, as the public has witnessed, both geographically as well as emotionally, between Oprah and her gal pal, Gayle King, editor-at-large forO, The Oprah Magazine, isn’t.  And for more than two decades Oprah has denied the rumors that she and Gayle are more than just two sistah-girls being sister-friends.

But after 30 years of four-times-a-day phone calls and frequent sightings of Oprah, with Gayle often by her side, the public continues to question Oprah about their relationship.

"No, I'm not a lesbian, I'm not even kind of a lesbian," Oprah stated on A Barbara Walters Special: Oprah, The Next Chapter.

“The reason why it irritates me is because it means that somebody must think I’m lying. That’s number one,” Winfrey told Walters. “Number two … why would you want to hide it? That is not the way I run my life.”

In a culture that constantly sexualizes the coupling of same-gender and opposite-gender- consenting age adults, we ignore our own friendships with our “best friends forever” (BFF).

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In all human relationships -- sexual or platonic -- we long for a relational connectedness to spend as much time as possible with at least one person in our lifetime who shares our common interests and highest ideals.

The words "friend" and "freedom" derive from the same Indo-European and Sanskrit etymological roots, meaning "to be fond of" or  "to hold dear." When it comes to having a friendship with someone, the relationship should never be predicated on gender, age, race or sexual orientation, but rather it should be built on the deep heart-to-heart sharing, accountability and sustainability that only a good friend can give you.

Feminist theologian Mary E. Hunt states "Friendship is a relatively rare topic in patriarchal Christian theology, having long taken a backseat to marriage as the normative adult human relationship. This led to the hegemony of heterosexual marriage as the standard...friendship is the most inclusive way to describe a variety of voluntary relationships, including women with women, men with men, women with men, adults with children, humans with animals, persons with the Divine, and humans with the earth."

This is how Oprah explained her relationship with BFF Gayle to Walters:
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.”
 
In our culture of constantly labeling same-gender relationships as gay it diminishes and distorts the romantic relationships we lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people have with our significant others. As a matter of fact, constantly labeling same-gender relationships as gay not only wrongly assumes that the only reason for two people of the same gender getting together is for sex, but it also keeps in place the myth of the hypersexual and predatory homosexual.
 
In the Hebrew Bible, the Ruth and Naomi narrative is an iconic text used in civil unions and weddings of LGBTQ couples.
 
It reads:
 
“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me,” Ruth uttered to her mother-in-law Naomi.
 
The narrative holds high esteem in my community not because the women are lesbians, but rather because the narrative depicts an unconventional relationship about loyalty and love that crosses the boundaries of age, nationality and religion; thus, by extension, embracing a variety of voluntary same-gender coupling – straight or gay.
 
Oprah is not gay folks!
 
And she’s not a closeted dyke either, but rather the world’s beloved daytime talk show diva.

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