Moved To Tears: Oprah Tells ABC’s Barbara Walters: “I’m Not A Lesbian”

Daytime TV Queen–and soon to be cable channel honcho–Oprah Winfrey can talk to anyone about anything, but rarely opens up about her own life. So it was all the more surprising when she broke down during an interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters.

In an excerpt from her upcoming A Barbara Walters Special: Oprah, The Next Chapter, which airs Thursday night on ABC, Walters asked about the unusual bond between Oprah and best friend Gayle King. “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,” said Oprah, who frustrated herself by crying when she apparently had decided ahead of the interview she would not.

Following up, Walters asked about “those…dumb rumors” that Winfrey and King are gay:

“I’m not a lesbian … I’m not even kind of a lesbian,” Winfrey said. “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.”

Oprah also revealed she had some doubts about her soon-to-launch network, OWN:

“At first, I thought, ‘Great, a network. Oh, gee, this is the dream I had.’ And … as that started to settle in with me, I thought, ‘Whoa! What is this I’ve gotten myself into? This is a lot more work than I ever imagined,'” Winfrey told Walters.

Winfrey said that taking on a whole new network is frightening.

“I was very scared … I would wake up in the middle of the night literally like clutching my chest, like, ‘What have I done? What have I done?'” she recalled.

Watch the interview here, from ABC: