An emotional Oprah Winfrey teared up as she spoke to Barabara Walters about her relationship with rumored lover Gayle King.

“I have said we are not gay,” she tells Barbara Walters on “A Barbara Walters Special: Oprah, The Next Chapter,” airing Thursday on ABC. “I’m not lesbian. I’m not even kind of lesbian. And the reason it irritates me is because somebody must think I’m lying. That’s number one. Number two, why would you want to hide it? That’s not the way I run my life.”

Oprah says that despite rarely being seen in public together, Stedman is still “the love… the lover… the man… the partner… the mate” of her life.

“[Gayle] is the mother I never had, she is the sister everybody would want, she is the friend everybody deserves,” she says. “I don’t know a better person. It’s making me cry because I’m thinking about how I’ve probably never told her that.”

Somebody should tell Oprah that she can be in an intimate relationship with another woman and not engage in sexual acts with her.