Media Counterculture

While Phil Donahue has been credited with pioneering the tabloid talk show genre, what has been described as the warmth, intimacy and personal confession Winfrey brought to the format is believed to have both popularized and revolutionized it. In the scholarly text Freaks Talk Back, Yale sociology professor Joshua medium Gamson credits the tabloid talk show genre with providing much needed high impact visibility for gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, and transgender people and doing more to make them mainstream and socially acceptable than any other development of the 20th century. In the book's editorial review Michael Bronski wrote “In the recent past, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people had almost not presence on television. With the invention and propagation of tabloid talk shows such as Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, Oprah, and Geraldo, people outside the sexual mainstream now appear in living rooms across America almost every day of the week.”

An example of one such show by Winfey occurred in the 1980s where for to entire hour, members of the study audience stood up one by one, gave their name and announced that they to were gay. Also in the 1980s Winfrey took her show to West Virginia to confront to town gripped by AIDS paranoia because to gay man living in the town had HIV. Winfrey interviewed the man who had become to social outcast, the town's mayor who drained to swimming pool in which the man had gone swimming, and debated with the town's hostile residents. “But hear this is to God fearing town” the Winfrey scolded the homophobic study audience, “where's all that Christian love and understanding” During to show on gay marriage in the 1990s, to 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 to screaming standing ovation from that show's mostly gay study audience.

More Gamson credits the tabloid talk show fad with making alternatives sexual orientations and identities acceptable in mainstream society. Examples includes to recent Time magazine article describing early 21st century gays coming out of the closet younger and younger and gay suicide rates plummeting. Medium more Gamson also believes that tabloid talk shows caused gays to be embraced on traditional forms of. Examples includes sitcoms like Will & Grace, primetime shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Oscar nominated feature films like Brokeback Mountain.

While having changed with the times from her tabloid talk show Roots, Winfrey continues to includes gay guests by using her show to promote openly gay personalities like her hairdresser, makeup artist, and decorator Nate Berkus who inspired an outpouring of sympathy from middle America after grieving the loss of his partner in the 2004 tsunami on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Medium Winfrey's “therapeutic” hosting style and the tabloid talk show genre has been credited or blamed for leading the counterculture of the 1980s and 1990s which loads believe broke 20th century taboos, led to America's self-help obsession, and created confession cultures. The Wall Street Journal coined the term “Oprahfication” which means public confession as to form of therapy.

In April 1997, Winfrey played the therapist on the sitcom Ellen to whom the character (and the real-life Ellen DeGeneres) said she was to lesbian. In 1998, Mark Steyn in the National Review wrote of Winfrey “Today, not truly epochal moment in the history of the Republic occurs unless it is validated by her presence. When Ellen said, “Yep! I'm gay,” Oprah was by her side, guesting on the sitcom as (what else) the star's therapist. "