Bay Area Reporter honors and says goodbye to Oprah



"For 25 years, Oprah Winfrey has defined and redefined the American zeitgeist. The quintessential rags-to-riches success story, the girl from Kocsiusko, Mississippi who grew up so poor she was dressed in potato-sacking, Oprah was ranked the wealthiest African American of the 20th century, the greatest African-American philanthropist in American history and the world's first black billionaire. She is also credited with getting Barack Obama the extra votes that won him the Democratic nomination in 2008.
Oprah was the first TV talk show host to make LGBT issues a regular feature of her show, including groundbreaking shows in the 1980s on AIDS, an annual Coming Out Day show in October, and some extremely intense and informative shows on transgender issues. The immensity of her impact on getting people to understand what LGBT is cannot be overstated.
On May 25, the daytime diva leaves her talk show behind after a quarter-century and moves over to her OWN network full-time. Among the queer celebrities Oprah will do shows with are Carson Kressley, Suze Orman and Rosie O'Donnell. She also produced a documentary on Chaz Bono's transition from female to male. In the ensuing weeks, Oprah plans to go out with a bang with shows she's always wanted to do, bring back favorite guests and a do few final giveaways.
Oprah has often been a figure of controversy, but we have worshiped at her altar unabashedly over the years. We admire her generosity (with money and spirit), and we admire her guts. She's broken a lot of ground political and social, not to mention gender. And while we haven't always agreed with her and sometimes felt she went too far in endorsing people we felt were spiritual charlatans, we also know she's saved thousands of lives with her programs, especially those on abuse, homophobia, racism and mental and physical health issues.
There are many Oprah shows that stand out for their poignancy and depth. Among them was a show on transgender children in which we saw a father realize that if he continued to force his son to stop dressing and acting like a girl, the child might commit suicide. Another was with a woman whose husband had murdered her children and killed himself one morning while she was out running; she was trying to help other women whose children had died or been murdered. Another was with a woman whose boyfriend had set her on fire, another whose boyfriend had killed her mother and shot away most of her face.
Oprah has done many shows on international issues, many with journalist Lisa Ling, who will continue to work with her at OWN. Ling has taken Oprah's viewers into dangerous territory, including foreign countries where she's had guns pointed at her head, and into the terrible domestic arenas of drug abuse and poverty.
Oprah has championed the plight of girls worldwide, and one of her most powerful shows featured the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia. Girls are married so young, many of them die giving birth at 12 and 13. Others have such horrific labor and delivery their insides are torn up and they develop fistulas, gaps between the vagina and the rectum that cause a constant stream of waste to ooze from them. They are then ostracized by their families, and many are left to die alone in huts kept away from the general population of their villages. Oprah's show featuring the hospital helped raise millions for the work of Dr. Catherine Hamlin, who has spent more than 50 years saving these women's lives.
One of the most powerful recent shows we've seen was with black actor/director/playwright Tyler Perry, who talked about being physically and sexually abused as a child. Oprah followed up that interview with a second show, co-hosted by Perry, for men who had been sexually abused.
Oprah has also brought her audiences myriad programs on health issues, many of them with the noted cardiac specialist Dr. Mehmet Oz, who now has his own program. Oprah has also jump-started the careers of other notables like Dr. Phil, Rachael Ray, Nate Berkus (the most adorable queer interior decorator ever, who now has his own syndicated show) and financial guru Suze Orman. Oprah's book club got America reading everything from Eat, Pray, Love to Faulkner and Tolstoy. She actually got Anna Karenina on the bestseller list. Her final book-club selections were Dickens' Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. Penguin printed special editions just for her."
Victoria Brownworth
Bay Area Reporter
April 28, 2011