In addition to being a TV trailblazer, Donahue was also a longtime LGBTQ+ ally. As he told fellow talk show icon Oprah Winfrey in a 2002 interview, within a year of launching The Phil Donahue Show at Dayton, Ohio, TV station WLWD in late 1967, the host invited "a real, live homosexual" to be a guest on his show. That 1968 episode aired prior to the Stonewall uprising in the following year.
Donahue admitted to Winfrey, "I was terrified. I'm from Notre Dame. And believe me, the one thing you didn't want to be doing at Notre Dame was hangin' with gay people. Sure enough, during that show, the third caller said, 'Birds of a feather....' Then another caller said to the guest, 'How does Phil look to you?' The guy said, 'That's an irrelevant question.'"
As the years went by after that show, I got involved in gay politics. And through my activism, I began to realize what it must be like to be born, to live, and to die in the closet. I can't even imagine it.
Donahue emphasized, "Gayness is not a moral issue, yet no institution on earth has promoted homophobia more than the church. That's what's so ironic about the scandal in the Catholic Church."
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