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Oprah gets on my nerves these days but there'll always be a part of me that completely idolizes her. Just the fact that she got where she is being a black woman - just being black OR a woman makes it a lot more difficult to really make it in the media, and once upon a time, being both made it damn near impossible.

That and many of us gays have a special relationship with Oprah because of her support for the gay community. In the early days when her show was more about sensationalistic topics, she gave a lot of visibility to the GLBT community, which she continues to do today, but her show was one of the first to give more positive exposure to us. Especially the transgendered community, who in those days were often painted as freaks of nature, especially by sensationalist bullshit like Jerry Springer, which continues to exploit the transgendered community and paint them as complete freaks and perverts. She also stood up for the gay community on several occasions, back when it wasn't the most popular thing to do:

An example of one such show by Winfrey occurred in the 1980s where for the entire hour, members of the studio audience stood up one by one, gave their name and announced that they were gay. Also in the 1980s Winfrey took her show to West Virginia to confront a town gripped by AIDS paranoia because a gay man living in the town had HIV. Winfrey interviewed the man who had become a social outcast, the town's mayor who drained a swimming pool in which the man had gone swimming, and debated with the town's hostile residents. "But I hear this is a God fearing town," Winfrey scolded the homophobic studio audience; "where's all that Christian love and understanding?" During a show on gay marriage in the 1990s, a woman in Winfrey's audience stood up to complain that gays were constantly flaunting their sex lives and she announced that she was tired of it. "You know what I'm tired of", replied Winfrey, "heterosexual males raping and sodomizing young girls. That's what I'm tired of." Her rebuttal inspired a screaming standing ovation from that show's studio audience.

I guess that's why, as annoying and self-righteous as she is and as much of a self-parody as she's become, she still appeals to me.

DoesThatSparkle wrote:

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Absolutely any woman could have done what she has done given the opportunity.

If that were the case, Queen Latifah, Roseanne, Vicki Lawrence, Gabrielle Carteris, Megan Mullally, etc.'s shows would all still be on the air. There has to be something there to make a talk show successful enough to last more than a year or two.