WWW- OPRAH Winfrey made a big mistake by “outing” herself and Gayle King as non-lesbians in the latest issue of her O magazine, according to public-relations experts.
The “best friends” – “after 30 years of four-times-a-day phone calls” – deny “those tabloid rumors” that they are gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
“I’ve told nearly everything there is to tell. All my stuff is out there,” Oprah says. “People think I’d be so ashamed of being gay that I wouldn’t admit it? Oh, please.”
But public-relations gurus – most of whom declined to speak on the record – say the maneuver will backfire by only bringing more attention to the rumors.
“There must be a billion people who would have never even suspected it,” said Bobby Zarem, the legendary spin-master portrayed by Al Pacino in “People I Know” (2003). “This brings attention to something that the average person never thought about. It’s a huge, huge mistake.”
Winfrey’s and King’s denial also gave rival TV hosts the chance to lambaste Oprah with skepticism and snide innuendo.
“When did we reach the place where celebrities feel the need to announce this?” wondered MSNBC’s king of snarkiness, Keith Olbermann, on Tuesday night.
“The evidence, theoretically, for Oprah being gay is really strong,” replied Tom O’Neil of In Touch Weekly. “Oprah is really butch. If you took a good drag queen, a good drag queen version of Oprah, and put it next to Oprah, you would not be able to tell these two apart.
“No. 2, she and Stedman [Graham], they’ve never gotten married,” O’Neil told Olbermann. “Come on, we know what that’s about. No. 3, her friendship with Gayle, she keeps saying, has been a ‘fun ride.’ Well, I think I know what it’s about when two chicks say they are having a fun ride.”
The next night, Joe Scarborough, on the same low-rated cable channel, implied that Winfrey, if she were gay, would have very good reason to hide the fact.
“Yes, right, she could just come out and announce it. She’d still be the queen of daytime TV, right? Middle-class women across America would still follow her, right?” Scarborough scoffed.
His guest, Tina Dirmann, of Star magazine said, “They want to know why people think they’re gay? Because they talk about how much they love and how much they mean to each other all the time . . . Oprah calls their friendship ‘otherworldly’ . . . We’re all sick of it at this point.”