The origins of the tabloid talk show format have been traced to 1970 with Phil Donahue, as host of The Phil Donahue Show. Although Donahue's show originally started off as a show similar to the others of its day, he soon began to push the envelope with the discussion of topics deemed to be taboo such as atheism, anatomically correct naked dolls, and homosexuality. Donahue also distinguished himself from traditional talk shows by being the first to get off the stage, and take his microphone directly into the studio audience. For over a decade, Donahue's was the only show of this kind, and so tabloid talk shows had not yet been described as a genre, lucrative industry, or counterculture movement. All of that changed in 1986 when a relatively unknown 32 year old African American woman named Oprah Winfrey became the first broadcaster able to challenge Donahue in the ratings. Winfrey's show quickly doubled Donahue's audience as her personal confessions and focus on therapy were seen by many as redefining the format. Time magazine wrote, "Guests with sad stories to tell are apt to rouse a tear in Oprah's eye....They, in turn, often find themselves revealing things they would not imagine telling anyone, much less a national TV audience. It is the talk show as a group therapy session." By confessing intimate details about her weight problems, tumultuous love life, and sexual abuse, and crying along side her guests, Time Magazine credits Winfrey with creating a new form of media communication known as "rapport talk" as distinguished from the "report talk" of Phil Donahue: "Winfrey saw television's power to blend public and private; while it links strangers and conveys information over public airwaves, TV is most often viewed in the privacy of our homes. Like a family member, it sits down to meals with us and talks to us in the lonely afternoons. Grasping this paradox, ...She makes people care because she cares. That is Winfrey's genius, and will be her legacy, as the changes she has wrought in the talk show continue to permeate our culture and shape our lives."[4] Winfrey continued Donahue's pattern of exploring topics that were at the time considered taboo. For an entire hour in the 1980s, members of the studio audience stood up one by one, gave their name and announced that they were gay. Also in the 1980s Winfrey took her show to West Virginia to confront a town gripped by AIDS paranoia because a gay man living in the town had HIV. Winfrey interviewed the man who had become a social outcast, the town's mayor who drained the swimming pool because the man had gone swimming, and debated the town's hostile residents. "But I hear this is a God fearing town" Winfrey scolded the homophobic studio audience, "where's all that Christian love and understanding?" During a show on gay marriage in the 1990s, a 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 a screaming standing ovation from that show's mostly gay studio audience. Guests included Neo Nazis, polygamous men and their partners, and Black and Jewish activists. By the fourth season, a show was dedicated to guests who claimed they had seen Elvis Presley alive in a variety of different locations throughout the country, with one man revealing to the host that he talked to the singer in his local Burger King. Oprah's best friend, the former news anchor and talk show host Gayle King said during an A&E profile on Winfrey in 2003 that when they recently looked back at an episode list of the first six seasons, Oprah could not believe she used to host such provocative shows. With titles such as "I'm a Cross-Dresser" and "Priestly Sins", King believed the topics "didn't seem so sleazy" when Oprah did them.