Here’s the thing nobody’s obituary is going to lead with, so I will: Dolly Parton picked up the phone for queer press. Not just the glossies with the biggest circulation — she talked to a small LGBTQ+ paper the same way she talked to Rolling Stone or Playboy, at a time when most of country music wouldn’t return that call at all. There was no algorithm rewarding her for it, no cultural mandate yet that made it the safe or expected thing to do.
I got to ask her about her gay family, her trans employees, her drag queen name (she told me “P. Titty, like P. Diddy”), whether Willie Nelson’s tour bus gave her a contact high — sometimes in the same conversation — because she never once treated an LGBTQ+ outlet like a liability to be managed. She treated it like a call from a loved one.
“There are no angel wings,” I wrote in 2016, watching Dolly Parton scoot into a drab garage in a canary yellow dress and more rhinestones than the room could reasonably hold. I meant it as a joke about costuming. I didn’t know I’d be reaching for that same sentence a decade later and meaning something else by it entirely.
That night she worked the line the way she always did — moms, dads, kids, an elderly woman in a wheelchair and at the end of it, me, a gay reporter and a fan like everybody else waiting their turn. I called her, in print, the only religion we might all agree on. I stand by it. Around that same stretch, I got her on the phone, too — 11 whole minutes, timed and everything, her manager’s small mercy of a bonus sixty seconds tacked on at the end. I didn’t know then my career would allow me to check back in with her over the years, or that I’d eventually be writing that sentence about her in the past tense.
Everybody wants to call Dolly “the great unifier” now, ever since the 2019 podcast “Dolly Parton’s America,” from Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad, made the case for her as maybe the last person left in America who both sides claim as their own. It’s not wrong. It’s also a little bit of a cop-out to call her that, because it makes her sound like she got there by staying quiet, by being agreeable enough that nobody could pin anything on her. She didn’t. She got there by answering hard questions in a way that made it very hard to be mad at her for the answer because it was honest, and honesty was Dolly’s default.
I asked her once, point blank, on a Zoom call the morning after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the bruising 2020 presidential election, what it meant to reach people across “the spectrum of religion, race, politics, gay, straight.” She didn’t dodge into a talking point. “I just love people,” she said. “I love that God light and that God core that is in every single one of us. I do not judge or criticize or condemn.” Fine, sweet, very Dolly. Then I pushed a little further — does it hurt you, knowing not everyone can love like that? And she didn’t do the thing famous people do, where they pivot to gratitude and grace. She just said yes. “Well, yeah, it does hurt me that anybody cannot open their heart to love people in the way they should.”
I was not supposed to ask about anything remotely political that day. She answered like a person who’d decided the question was bigger than politics anyway.
In that same conversation, we spoke about “Family,” a song of hers from 1991 that — by her own account — might be the first country song to say the word “gay” right out loud, no euphemism, no clearing of the throat first. “Some are preachers, some are gay, some are addicts, some are strays, but not a one is turned away, when it’s family,” she sings.
I asked how country fans reacted to that word landing in a genre that, in 1991, mostly pretended it had never heard it. She said she didn’t remember anybody objecting, because to her it wasn’t a provocation, it was just true. “I really do believe whether you accept ’em or not, we all have gays and lesbians and transgenders in our family or in our family of friends,” she told me. Whether folks wanted to admit it or not. She wasn’t announcing a position. She was describing a guest list that, in her mind, had already been set.
That’s the part of Dolly that’s going to get flattened if we let the tributes run on rhinestones and Dollywood and “9 to 5” alone. She wasn’t doing allyship as brand extension. She was talking about an actual family. Hers — which, it turned out, was a lot bigger and a lot more specific than the metaphor.
In 2016, I asked her the plain version of the question: growing up in the Smoky Mountains, did you know any gay people? No, she told me — not because there weren’t any, but because nobody had the words yet. The two guys in town everybody whispered about were just “queer,” “sissies, they’re girls,” in the ugly little shorthand of the era. She didn’t have a category for “different” back then. She just already knew, somehow, that different was fine, on account of being pretty different herself.
“I have many gays and lesbians in my own family,” she revealed to me, and then she used a word that’s stuck with me for a decade: ours. “They’re ours and they’re who they are and we know they’re wonderful and they’re like us.” Some relatives back in the mountains, she admitted, still weren’t quite sure what to make of it.
She also told me — casually, like it was nothing, which is exactly how she wanted it treated — that she had transgender employees on salary in her own company, years before most corporations would say that sentence out loud, let alone mean it. People came to her the way they used to come to her mama, she said: to be told it was safe to be honest. “You need to let people know who you are and you need to come on out,” she’d tell them. “You don’t need to live your life in darkness.”
That interview didn’t stay ours for long. CBS News and HuffPost both picked it up within days, running her words about becoming the family member her gay and lesbian relatives call when it’s time to come out. National outlets didn’t get their own version of that quote. They ran ours. What she said to a small LGBTQ+ paper became, for a few days, the version of the story the rest of the country’s press was working from.
I ended that conversation the only way that felt right, thanking her for the joy she’d brought to my life. She didn’t say anything a celebrity says to a reporter. She said what your mother says when you tell her you love her, without missing a beat: “Love you too!”
Somewhere in the middle of all that sincerity, I should say: Dolly was also just deeply, reliably funny about all of this, in a way that mattered just as much as the earnestness did. Back in 2014, I asked her about the National Enquirer story that had her secretly marrying her longtime friend Judy Ogle, with her husband Carl supposedly fine with it. Most stars in that position reach for the lawyer-approved denial. Dolly reached for a bit. “I am not gay,” she told me, “but if I were I would be the first one running out of the closet.” I asked, naturally, if that meant running straight into Judy’s arms. “Yeah, who knows!” she said. “I might’ve said, ‘Judy, you wanna get something going with me?'” Then, because she never let a joke overstay its welcome without landing somewhere true, she added that their friendship was simply “a precious friendship.”
That 2014 conversation found a second life, too. Three years later, it turned up in “Dolly on Dolly: Interviews and Encounters with Dolly Parton,” a career-spanning anthology of 25 interviews pulled from her five decades in the spotlight, alongside her conversations with Playboy, Rolling Stone and her chat with Andy Warhol for Interview magazine. Whoever decided which 25 of Dolly Parton’s interviews actually mattered decided that one belonged. That’s not a small thing. That’s a book editor, working with no stake in queer press whatsoever, looking at everything Dolly Parton ever said to anyone and deciding the version of her that talked to us was essential to the record.
I didn’t fully understand how deep this ran for me personally, though, until my aunt texted me the day Dolly died. We don’t speak that often, which made this message all the more meaningful: “Hi Chris, I feel like another family member has passed. I’m sure you already know about Dolly…it’s heartbreaking and I know you’re feeling it.”
I read that on my phone and started crying over a woman I’d interviewed a handful of times across a decade, always on the clock, always with a publicist somewhere in the room watching the minutes tick down. My aunt, who has no idea how any of that works, understood something faster than I did: that this one belonged in the family column. She was right. That’s exactly where Dolly put herself. Not just for the relatives she actually employed and defended and called “ours” without blinking, but for a lot of queer people who only ever got her 11 minutes at a time.
She said the word “gay” in a country song in 1991 and didn’t flinch. She kept answering the phone for gay press for the better part of two decades, long after she had anything left to prove by doing it. And somehow, from that distance — an interview here, a Zoom call there — she made enough of us feel like family that when she died, my aunt’s first instinct was to check on me.
I once asked Dolly why she’d taken that step, becoming one of the first major country artists to stand up for LGBTQ+ equality. She didn’t treat it like a stance at all. Just unconditional love. “Why wouldn’t I stand up for everybody, for all people?” she said. “In the country field, we’re brought up in spiritual homes, we’re taught to ‘judge not lest you be judged,’ and it’s always been a mystery to me how people jump all over things just to criticize, condemn and judge other people when that is so un-Christian — and they claim to be good Christians! We’re supposed to love one another. We’re supposed to accept and love one another. Whether we do or not, that’s a different story. But that’s what we’re supposed to do.”
Not a one is turned away, when it’s family. She meant her own. Turns out she meant ours too.