Long before she was a billionaire media mogul romantically linked to Stedman Graham, young Oprah Winfrey reportedly had a different boyfriend: John Tesh, usmagazine.com is reporting.

In a new, unauthorized Winfrey tell-all, celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley claims that Winfrey and the one-time Entertainment Tonight co-host were lovers who shared an apartment in Nashville, Tenn., in the mid-1970s.

According to New York’s Daily News, an excerpt from the book reveals that Tesh, now 57, abandoned Winfrey, now 56, because of the intense “social pressure” of their interracial romance.

“(He) couldn’t take it anymore … He walked out in the middle of the night … he told me he later felt very guilty about it,” a Tesh source told Kelley in the book.

The pair both had broadcast TV jobs in Nashville at the time. Tesh, now a New Age musician and syndicated radio host, appeared on the 10th anniversary of Winfrey’s show, when Winfrey claimed that they had simply shared a “platonic dinner date.”

Another topic explored in Kelley’s book: speculation about Winfrey’s relationship with friend Gayle King.

“I know people are expecting me to ‘out’ her,” Kelley tells USA Today. “But I think she’s just asexual. She’s poured all of her energies into her career. And if she is, she is never, ever going to come out. So relax, people.”