With Dolly Parton’s death this week, the world lost an icon. The queer community, though, lost one of its most steadfast advocates.
For the LGBTQ+ community, losing Parton goes beyond simply mourning a beloved cultural staple. This is a woman whose outspoken advocacy made us feel seen and valued within the notoriously conservative world of country music. For us queers from the South, Dolly bridged the gap between the often-hostile homes we’d left behind and the worlds we’d created for ourselves. She was the person who showed us how to exist in both places at once, and now that she’s gone, there’s a real concern about who could even begin to span that divide.
When news of Dolly’s passing hit Tuesday, my social media feed was filled with tributes from countless celebrities and world figures, but the two that stood out to me most were the effusive post from Donald Trump calling for the lowering of flags to half-staff for the week followed by a heartfelt remembrance of Dolly from Hillary Clinton, who called the country star “the best of America” who “did all the good she could, for all the people she could, for as long as ever she could.”
No one else on earth could get those two to agree on anything, but that’s the power of Dolly Parton. Throughout her career, Dolly used her platform to help us see past our differences to the humanity that unites us all, and she always made sure everyone knew that humanity included the LGBTQ+ community. It was inspiring, and sometimes puzzling, to watch her pull it off, too.
This is the same woman who recently released an album, Rockstar, featuring a collaboration with anti-LGBTQ+ poster boy Kid Rock next to duets with queer icons Melissa Etheridge, Brandi Carlile and Elton John. And both sides seemed to accept it, because it was Dolly. Even in the midst of that album launch, Dolly spoke of being called to love and accept Kid Rock just as she did her queer fans.
At the time, I admit I had trouble accepting Dolly’s message of grace for Kid Rock. Here was an artist actively working to annihilate members of the LGBTQ+ community for sport, and Dolly tells me to still show love to him? Now, with some distance and a broader view of Dolly’s role on the world stage, I see this response for what it is: Dolly living out her faith and working to keep building bridges, even if it got messy.
As Carlile pointed out in her tribute to Dolly on Instagram, “before I met her, I loved her because she took a risk and accepted me (and all of us) for being gay in a time where she didn’t need to say anything. And she has been asked to comment and speak on MANY things over the years … choosing only to speak on that which brings love and mercy to real people, and shutting down any line of questioning that won’t. She never wavered on accepting anyone for who they were, and who they were meant to be.”
As Brandi said, Dolly spoke up for queer folks at a time when it could have cost her a large chunk of her country music audience. She was already a superstar in the mid-1980s, just as the AIDS crisis was coming into focus and conservative Christian groups were ramping up their anti-LGBTQ+ attacks in the Reagan-era culture wars. But Dolly disregarded the possible consequences.
“I got a huge gay following and some really macho-looking women,” Parton told Andy Warhol in a conversation for a 1984 Interview cover story. “To me, people are people. … Many of my friends are gay, male and female. I don’t judge people. I don’t care what people do in their bedrooms and people shouldn’t care what I do in mine.”
Even today, a country artist speaking this plainly in support of LGBTQ+ people is not the norm. There are just a handful of openly queer artists (such as Brothers Osborne’s T.J. Osborne, Chris Housman, Adam Mac, The Kentucky Gentlemen, Brooke Eden and Denitia) even attempting careers in mainstream country music. But through the decades, Dolly has been at the forefront as the standard-bearer for LGBTQ+ acceptance in country music, writing and recording a queer-affirming song called “Family” on her 1991 Eagle When She Flies album, appearing on the cover of Out magazine in 1997, recording a fabulous collaboration with Culture Club in 1999 titled “Your Kisses Are Charity” and speaking out for marriage equality in 2014. In 2020, I started hosting Proud Radio, an LGBTQ+-themed country music show on Apple Music, and Dolly was one of just a few artists to appear on the show twice in our four-year run.
Dolly and the queer community just got each other. We recognized in each other a longing for self-realization, as Dolly sang about in so many songs, such as “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” or my personal favorite, “Wildflowers.” For many of us LGBTQ+ folks, becoming ourselves meant moving away from our hometowns to find acceptance in a big city nearby or perhaps a different region of the country. As a southern woman bucking at the limitations of the male-dominated country music industry in the mid-1970, Dolly Parton felt those same strictures around her and longed for creative freedom.
That’s why she uprooted herself from Nashville and headed out to Los Angeles to join forces with Sandy Gallin, an openly gay super-agent who became her business partner and used his Hollywood connections to land Dolly mainstream pop hits, major TV appearances and, ultimately, starring roles in major films like 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Steel Magnolias.
As she told me later, her rise to superstardom wasn’t built on blind ambition. It was a spiritual quest to fulfill her destiny.
“I read something Mother Theresa said once: ‘When I stand before God, I want to be able to say, “God, I used everything you gave me.”’ And so that was kinda my attitude,” she said. “I feel God gave me my talent, and I didn’t think he meant for me to be restricted. I wanted to be all I can be. I want to know what’s out there. And if I do good at it, I’ll maybe help some other people.”
With all that success, Dolly never forgot her goal of helping others. In 1986, Dolly and Sandy formed Sandollar, a production company that would go on to produce Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well as Dolly’s own TV and film projects. But their first major project under the Sandollar banner made a bold statement about Dolly’s LGBTQ+ advocacy — 1989’s Common Thread: Stories From the Quilt told the story of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and won the Academy Award for best documentary feature the next year.
In 2005, Dolly wrote and recorded “Travelin’ Thru” as the inspirational theme song for the film Transamerica, starring Felicity Huffman in the role of a transgender woman. The song was nominated for best original song, and Dolly performed it on the 78th Annual Academy Awards, leading a crowd including Jack Nicholson, Amy Adams, Meryl Streep and her 9 to 5 co-star Lily Tomlin clapping along as she sang of the enveloping love of God for everyone, especially trans people.
When she spoke with me about writing the song a few years back, Dolly described the process in spiritual terms.
“I just asked God to kinda, you know, work it through me,” she said. “And I just felt like it would have to be horrible to be trapped in your own body, to be one person and have to live another way. I just think we should all be free and should all be loved and accepted. And so that song came to me very much on wings of spirit.”
We know now that Dolly’s advocacy for the transgender community started within her own organization. Dolly’s book editor, Elissa Altman, revealed on Tuesday that Dolly actually paid the medical costs for a member of her staff to transition back in the 1990s.
For so many of us queer folks, Dolly showed us a way to still hold love for where we came from, even as we acknowledged the real hurt and harm being done. But most importantly, she showed us how to keep the lines of communication open while still insisting on this simple truth — that queer people are a beloved and beautiful part of God’s creation.
In the past decade, Dolly’s home state of Tennessee has led the nation in introducing and passing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, according to the Human Rights Campaign. While most country artists stayed silent on the matter, Dolly once again spoke up about the situation facing her fellow Tennesseans in a 2023 Hollywood Reporter story, saying “I see how broken-hearted they get over certain things, and I know how real they are. They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton. … If there’s something to be judged, that is God’s business. But we are all God’s children and how we are is who we are.”
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