I was six, in Catriona’s living room in Kidbrooke, singing “I Will Always Love You” into a shoe. Laura had chosen the shoe. I’ve never fully recovered: thirty-odd years on, I still hear that song and picture footwear.
Dolly Parton died nearly two weeks ago, and on the night it happened right before we went to print I scrapped this month’s column within about an hour of finding out. I had to. Like a lot of gay boys who grew up short on role models and shorter on politicians who made us feel safe, I went looking in pop culture for something maternal to hide behind – and nine times out of ten, it was a woman. It still is.
Dolly arrived via Catriona’s cassette player: a blonde woman on the cover who looked obscenely glamorous, and a voice my six-year-old ears decided was landing somewhere near Minnie Mouse. The songs did the rest. It really says something about a songwriter that the same tune can hold a six-year-old and an eighty-six-year-old in the same room.
Dolly felt like the glamorous auntie you could tell your naughtiest stories to and watch her laugh before you’d finished. I could very comfortably see myself coming out to Dolly Parton. I suspect several million of us could. That’s an extraordinary kind of power from a woman almost none of us ever met, but who made us feel completely safe.
She seemed to have it all. Dolly was intelligent, talented, beautiful, and armed with undeniable business acumen. She walked into country music – a massively male-dominated field – and took it over. In April, UMass Lowell’s Center for Public Opinion polled Americans on their favourite public figures and Dolly came out top at +65, eighty-three points clear of the sitting president.
Decades before the Kardashians, there was Dolly Parton and Elizabeth Taylor putting their brand name out there. But Dolly took it a step further: she didn’t just lend her image to products; in 1986 she bought into a failing attraction in the county she’d grown up poor in and turned it into the Dollywood theme park. Isn’t that the campest and most fabulous thing ever?
Dollywood was to become a multi-million-dollar economic lifeline for the Smoky Mountains, driven entirely by her vision and sharp instincts. It’s now the largest employer in Sevier County, and its education scheme covers tuition fees and books for staff from their first day – seasonal and part-time included.
I have wanted to go my entire life. Every time I’ve had the money, Trump has been in office or COVID has intervened. I could easily spend this column simply listing the ways in which Dolly made the world a better place with her programs, donations, and alignments.
However, I think that would take months. Dolly extended a baseline of dignity to countless people who rarely got it anywhere else. Watching the world react to her loss, the internet became a joyous flood of hidden histories and quiet, discreet gestures of support she’d never bothered to publicly take credit for.
And that, my friends, is how you leave a legacy. And then there’s how Dolly spoke about the LGBTQ+ community. Not the focus-grouped version that arrives in June for Pride Month and gets deleted in July – Dolly was doing it in 1991, on a track called “Family”, which quietly lists gay people among the ones who never get turned away.
Asked why the gays loved her; she didn’t reach for a condescending slogan. She said everybody should be “allowed to be who they are, and to love who they love” – then explained how she knew: she’d spent her own life fighting to be understood. She was never going to give us more than that, mind. When Tennessee started legislating against trans people, she said she wasn’t interested in the politics of it – she’d rather talk about the human element. Smart.
Some of us wanted a war cry and Dolly gave us a hug. I’ve come round to thinking the hug was the strategy: she held on to the very people who’d have walked out on a war cry, and then made them adore a woman who would not say one word against us. She trojan horsed people, which is in my opinion, the best way.
Thirty-odd years after singing into a shoe in a Kidbrooke living room, she is gone, and it feels very surreal. Dolly’s impact is so much more than big songs, big hair, and big boobs – it’s how she made us feel.
Rest well, Dolly. Thank you for making space for the rest of us.
@tophertaylor
