Gayle King on the Oprah Rumors: ‘If We Were Gay, We Would Tell You’

Gayle King has addressed the Oprah rumors before. But on Wednesday’s episode of Call Her Daddy, she went further than usual — including the part where she and Oprah actually disagreed about what to do.

Sitting down with host Alex Cooper, King, 71, was asked directly how it felt to have spent decades fielding speculation that she and Oprah Winfrey, her best friend of over 50 years, are secretly in a romantic relationship. Her answer was candid and a little funny and a little pointed all at once.

“It used to really bother me,” King said. “I was recently divorced, and there was — the National Enquirer did a story about ‘that’s the reason for the divorce, because they’re secretly gay.’”

She set the record straight with characteristic directness: “Number one, if we were gay, we would tell you because, believe me, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just, I prefer a man. I prefer a man.”

The Disagreement They Don’t Talk About Much

The more revealing part of the conversation was what King said about her and Oprah’s different approaches to handling the rumors. King wanted Oprah to address them publicly. Oprah refused.

“I would say to her, ‘You’ve got to say something on your show, because it’s hard enough for me to get a date on a Saturday night and now people think I’m a lesbian, you’ve gotta say something,’” King recalled. But Oprah’s answer was firm: leave it alone.

That was a real moment of friction in a friendship that is famously tight. King’s frustration was legitimate — she was the one navigating a public divorce while the tabloids ran stories about her sexuality. Oprah’s calculation, apparently, was that responding only adds fuel. They each had a point. Oprah won.

Bossip noted that King admitted she never saw herself in Oprah’s shadow during all of this. “I always say I see myself in her light,” King said. “And I do mean that. I have never, not once thought, ‘God, I wish I could be her.’” She went on to describe how different they actually are at their core: “I love people, I love lights, camera, action. And Oprah’s very fine sitting at home with a book.”

The Divorce, and What Oprah Said

King also opened up on the podcast about the end of her marriage to William Bumpus, and how Oprah helped her through it. The TODAY segment on the interview highlighted the eight words Oprah told her after she discovered Bumpus had been unfaithful — King’s account of Oprah’s support in that moment was one of the more personal things she shared in the episode.

It’s the kind of friendship that makes sense when you hear her describe it. Not frictionless, not without the occasional disagreement over how to handle a tabloid story. But 50 years deep and apparently still the thing she leans on when everything else gets hard.

The Call Her Daddy episode is out now.