Last Thursday, The Oprah Winfrey Show aired an episode called "When I Knew I was Gay." The title intrigues. It sparks speculation: Is Oprah announcing that Steadman is a beard and Gayle King is more than a gal pal? Is Winfrey coming out as a lesbian?

No, she’s been there, done that. The "Oprah is gay" rumor ignited in 1997, fueled by her appearance on Ellen. In June of that year, Oprah issued a statement: “I am not in the closet. I am not coming out of the closet. I am not gay.”

"When I Knew I Was Gay" reflects the lives of the episode’s guests.

“Today,” Oprah began, opening the show, “you’re going to meet people hiding the same secret. “Andrew Friedman says he first knew he was gay back in 1969. ‘My father was watching the evening news. The announcer said that Judy Garland had died. I fainted. I was nine.’”

Via voice-over, John Kinnally, a Will & Grace Executive Producer, says he first knew he was gay at 8 when he became obsessed with the man on the Doan’s Back Pain Pills box. He was a rugged, muscled guy, showing some vulnerability.

Through Kate Nielsen’s voice-over, we learn that she first knew at five, when she fell in love with beautiful Julie Andrews while watching The Sound of Music.

The episode's first half was played largely for easy, obvious laughs by Oprah’s in-studio guests: There was Queer Eye’s Carson Kressley, Billy Porter, a singer-writer-author, and Robert Trachtenberg, whose book When I Knew (Regan Books), inspired the episode.

In addition to studio guests, the show was peppered with short, filmed interviews featuring gay men and lesbian women recalling when they first knew. Other filmed segments featured gay teens talking about coming out in the 21^st Century.

“I told her about two weeks before the show (Queer Eye) came out,” Kressley revealed about coming out to his mother. But Carson remembers knowing at 4, when his friends were into Farrah Fawcett, and he fancied Lee Majors.

The show took an insightful turn after Winfrey introduced Alan Downs, author of The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing up Gay in a Straight Man’s World (Da Capo Lifelong Books). For Oprah, Downs defined velvet rage as “the anger that develops inside when you have something inside yourself that you have to hide: a core secret.”

Downs knew his sexual orientation from a very early age, but he didn’t want to believe it. “I came from a very religious family,” he told Winfrey. “I thought if I met the right woman, and I married her, I would change.”

He met and married the right woman. He had sex with her. He didn’t change. Sex with his wife became a “chore.”

After their divorce, Alan told his wife that he had probably always been gay. “She was horrified and angry,” he says. For him, marrying was not an act of deception. “It was an attempt to convince myself that I was straight. My ex wife was my best friend and I confused things by believing, ‘This is going to make me straight.’”

Billy Porter, who came out to his Pentecostal Minister mother three times, told Oprah, “Men are promiscuous, and in heterosexual relationships, women stop their promiscuity.”

Downs noted, “Promiscuity is not unique to gay men.” He believes that shame, to a large extent, powers gay promiscuity. “The shame is a sense of knowing that there’s something about you that’s unacceptable – that’s not okay. And so, we go to other men to try to make ourselves feel better about ourselves.”

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