Country music legend Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80, leaving behind a legacy not just in American country music, or the music industry as a whole, but into the LGBTQIA+ community that she repeatedly embraced.
Parton – whose career spanned six decades, having sold over 100 million records, and written over 3,000 songs including “Jolene”, “Coat of Many Colors”, “9 to 5″, and I Will Always Love You” – was born into a large, poor family in East Tennessee. She started performing as a child, appearing at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry at 13, before moving to Nashville after high school, eventually carving a name as one of the most successful songwriters and performers from the US.
Parton was, nonetheless, not just a singer/songwriter. She was also an actress (appearing, for instance, in “Steel Magnolias”); businesswoman (she built Dollywood); author (“Coat of Many Colors”, “I Am a Rainbow”, “Songteller: My Life in Lyrics”, among others); and philanthropist (she established Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which provides free books to children from birth through age 5 in participating communities).
For the LGBTQIA+ community, however, Parton was among its strongest allies.
In 2023, for instance, when her home state Tennessee attempted to introduce a ban on public drag performances, she broke her “no politics” rule (supposedly so she does not alienate her diverse fans) to express her support for transgender people. “That’s who they are. They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton, you know, the way people know me,” Parton was quoted as saying by The Hollywood Reporter.
“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.”
Her LGBTQIA+ support is not exactly new.
In a 2017 interview with Larry King, she stated that people should be accepting and loving.
“I keep saying: ‘If you’re the fine Christian that you think you are, why are you judging people? That’s God’s job’,” Parton said at that time. “We’re not God, we’re not judges, we’re supposed to love one another, we’re supposed to not judge.”
Also, her pro-LGBTQIA+ stance has actually been embedded in her music.
In her 1991 album “Eagle When She Flies”, a song titled “Family” included the lyric: “Some are preachers / some are gay / some are addicts, drunks and strays / But not a one is turned away when it’s family.”
Some of that song’s lyrics may be questioned now, but it remains among Parton’s early statement of solidarity with LGBTQIA+ families.
