One difference between Oprah and Ellen: Oprah, ever the capitalist, has known from Day One to keep her trap shut about her lesbianism, and this is where nonsense like “Oprah and Stedman on their Carribean Love Cruise” screaming at us from supermarket checkouts comes in. Ellen, on the other hand, had to learn the hard way. Once she came out and her sitcom turned lesbo, she was clobbered for “flaunting it.” Although publicly out with Portia on tabloid news, on her own show she has no particular sexuality or even gender one way or the other. And so for that concession, she’s America’s Sweetheart.

I doubt Oprah’s a lesbian. She was a promiscuous teen who had a baby at 14. She tried to kill herself over an affair with a married man in her twenties. And a former boyfriend sued Oprah for allegedly blocking a tell-all book in which he claimed they lived together for months and did drugs. One thing I respect Oprah for is playing the therapist on Ellen’s coming out show back in the 1990s. Oprah got the worst hate mail of her career for that, though one reason I think Ellen wanted her was that a Yale study found that the tabloid talk show craze Oprah popularized in the 1980s did more to make gays mainstream than any other development of the 20th century. I also thought it was cool when Oprah sent a platoon of helicopters to search for the gay lover of Nate Berkus who btw she has just named host of her new reality show.