The lifelong friends discussed their true relationship status with Melinda French Gates
I think we’ve shared pretty much everything and I would have to say, it wasn’t even a matter of navigation,” she said during the Youtube interview.
“For years, people used to say we were gay, and listen, we were up against that forever. And people still may think it.”
CBS Mornings anchor King agreed and continued: “I used to say to Oprah: ‘You gotta do a show on this because it’s hard enough for me to get a date on Saturday night with people thinking we’re gay’.
“Because if we were gay, we’d tell you!”
Winfrey – who has been in a relationship with her long-term partner Stedman Graham since 1986 – went on to explain that she believes the rumors started as people weren’t used to seeing women share such a close bond.
“One of the things I used to think was that people weren’t accustomed to seeing women with this kind of truth bond,” she stated.

“We ended up talking all night long,” the Mississippi native revealed to People in 2022. “We’ve literally been friends ever since.”
In 2006, King told The Oprah Magazine that she had ‘never met’ anybody like her friend while Winfrey claimed they’d bonded over both being ‘the odd girl out’.
“We didn’t fit into everybody else’s perception of what it’s like to be a Black girl,” she said.
“But we still had a very strong sense of being Black and were very proud of being Black. So to meet another Black girl like that was, wow!”