I was literally sitting at my laptop writing this week’s blog post when I learned that Dolly Parton had died. And I stopped. Because Dolly Parton has somehow always been here.
I was a little gay Black boy growing up in North Carolina in the 1970s, long before I had language for much of what I was feeling. The world around me did not always offer many images of what it might mean to be different and still be safe, loved, joyful, and completely yourself. But somehow, Dolly did. I mean, there she was: the hair, the rhinestones, the impossible clothes, that unmistakable voice, and absolutely no apology for any of it. She was outrageous and deeply Christian, southern and worldly, funny and wise, completely artificial and somehow completely authentic. And she made me feel safe.
My mother loved Dolly, too. “Jolene” was one of my momma’s favorite songs. Dolly belongs somewhere in that landscape of my childhood: North Carolina, my mother, country music, church, and a little boy slowly discovering who he was. Years later, I understood that I was hardly alone. Dolly became something close to a patron saint for generations of LGBTQ people, particularly those of us who grew up in parts of America where acceptance could not always be taken for granted. Dolly Parton’s America, the wonderful podcast about her life and cultural meaning, called her an “oasis” for LGBTQ people in sometimes hostile territory. Maybe that is because Dolly understood something profoundly Christian about what human beings need. They need to know there is room for them.
Jesus spent his life making room for people pushed aside, judged, forgotten, or told they didn’t belong. “Come to me,” He says, “all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Dolly made room. And not only symbolically. Her Imagination Library has put hundreds of millions of books into the hands of children. She helped families who lost their homes in the Smoky Mountain wildfires. She gave money to hospitals and HIV/AIDS causes. She donated $1 million to research that helped lead to the COVID-19 vaccine. She supported queer and transgender people when doing so was hardly guaranteed to please everyone who bought her records. She explained her philosophy simply: “I try to find the God light in everybody.” That sounds like the Gospel to me.
Maybe that’s why today feels like a genuine loss, particularly for the queer community. We have lost someone who told us, in her own rhinestone-covered way, that God’s light was in us, too. Dolly Parton represented, for me, something of the absolute best of America. Not an America that has always lived up to its promises. We certainly have not. But the America we might still become: where a dirt-poor girl from the mountains of Tennessee can become one of the greatest songwriters in the world and then spend a lifetime giving something back; where church ladies and drag queens can stand beside each other at the same concert and sing the same song; where there might actually be enough room for all of us. One of Dolly’s most beautiful songs begins with somebody who has survived a long, dark night and suddenly realizes that morning is coming. “I can see the light of a clear blue morning,” she sings. Today feels a little darker without her. But we Christians know something about darkness and morning. “Weeping may linger for the night,” the psalmist says, “but joy comes with the morning.”
Dolly Parton knew something about goodbyes. She wrote “I Will Always Love You” when she left Porter Wagoner, and decades later Whitney Houston turned Dolly’s little country song into one of the biggest recordings in history. Dolly delighted in joking about just how much money Whitney made her. And then, being Dolly, she used some of those royalties to invest in a historically Black neighborhood in Nashville. She called it “the house that Whitney built.” So perhaps Dolly should have the last word today.
“I hope life will treat you kind,” she wrote. “I wish you joy… But above all this, I wish you love.”
We wish you love too, Dolly. And we will always love you.
What has moved me in her passing is seeing that so many different communities, not just the gay boys, have felt like they have lost a part of themselves. She was real. She was honest. She was joy. She was – and is – loved.