Oprah Winfrey courtesy Bill Ebbesen (CC 3.0 unported)

With a wet nose Oprah Winfrey told Barbara Walters that she was/is not a lesbian, despite urban legends to the contrary.

All this out of a tease clip from A Barbara Walters Special: Oprah, The Next Chapter earlier today on Good Morning America (the whole interview is tomorrow evening on ABC).

Winfrey needed tissues describing her relationship with Gayle King (the subject of the carnal rumors), saying that “She is … the mother I never had. She is … the sister everybody would want. She is the friend that everybody deserves. I don’t know a better person. I don’t know a better person.”

Of course she never met Carny Mike Cartel.

Winfrey and King became friends while working at a Baltimore TV station (press releases say) twenty-something years ago.  “I’m not a lesbian … I’m not even kind of a lesbian. And the reason why it irritates me is because it means that somebody must think I’m lying. That’s number one. Number two … why would you want to hide it? That is not the way I run my life.”

But most of the interview is about Winfrey’s new TV network, OWN, where she reveals an unusual insecurity about its success.

Now that all that’s settled we can go on with what to do about world hunger and nuclear proliferation.