Oprah is not gay. Not even a little bit.
The rumors have been following her for years, but the talk show queen has told Barbara Walters in a new interview, flatly, that: "I'm not a lesbian."
"I'm not even kind of a lesbian. And the reason why [the lesbian rumor] irritates me is because it means that somebody must think I'm lying."
O, NO YOU DIDN'T: You calling Winfrey a liar?
What really steams Winfrey is people insinuating that she's lied in past denials: "Why would you want to hide it? That is not the way I run my life."
The rumors center around Oprah's friend Gayle King. Winfrey says that relationship is extremely close, but in a very different way. She says:
"She is the mother I never had. She is ... the sister everybody would want. She is ... the friend everybody deserves. I don't know a better person."
Oprah got choked up speaking about King.
"It's making me cry because I'm thinking about how much ... I probably have never told her. Tissue, please. I now need tissue. I've never told her."
The occasion for the interview, airing Thursday night, is the end of her talk show next May and the beginning of OWN, The Oprah Winfrey Network.
Winfrey admits how daunting the new project is.
"I was very scared," she says. "I would wake up in the middle of the night literally clutching my chest, like, 'What have I done? What have I done?' "