Hello, Friends!
Dolly Parton died this week, and by the time this reaches you, a hundred tributes will have told her story better than I ever could. I have nothing to add to her biography. I only have one evening in Los Angeles, and what it did to me.
We start here.
The Living Room
It was 2009. I was twenty-eight, a few years removed from North Carolina, living in an apartment in Los Angeles, and I was alone that evening with the television on. I wasn't looking for her. She simply appeared, as she had been appearing my whole life, mid-interview, mid-laugh, and then the conversation turned to something that interviews with country singers did not, in my experience, turn to. The host asked about gay people. And Dolly, without lowering her voice, without a glance toward the exits, said she supported us. That she didn't judge. That she never had.
I couldn't tell you now what she was wearing, or what came before the question, or what came after the answer. Memory keeps what it needs and lets the rest go. What I can tell you is what happened on my side of the screen, which is that I sat there, by myself, in a city three thousand miles from where I grew up, and felt something I had not expected to feel from a television on an unremarkable night.
I felt a little less alone.
The Streets
To understand what that evening was, you have to know what the daytime looked like. A few months earlier, California had voted to take marriage away from people like me, and Los Angeles answered in the streets. I was there with my then partner, and we marched with thousands of others, down boulevards I was still learning the names of, in a city I had chosen partly because it promised I could live out loud in it. The vote had said otherwise, and the marching was what we did with that.
I want you to understand that those marches were not a sad place to be. There was grief in them, but what I remember more is the determination, the feeling of thousands of people moving in the same direction on purpose, none of whom needed anything explained to them. Nobody in that crowd wondered whether I deserved what I was asking for. One day I looked over and realized I was marching beside Wanda Sykes, who had come out publicly just days after the vote, and I remember thinking that this was the whole world I had moved across the country to find. Loud, certain, shoulder to shoulder, mine.
And still. Everyone in those streets, famous or not, was already on my side before we ever showed up. We were thousands of people telling each other something we already knew.
The Old World
So why is it the television I remember, and not the boulevard? Why did one woman on a screen land somewhere that thousands of people beside me could not touch?
Because of where her voice came from. The vote was California's, cast by our own neighbors, but the argument behind it was one I already knew by heart. I had left North Carolina only a few years before, and the case against us — the pulpits it came from, the certainty it carried, the love it claimed to be — sounded exactly like the world that raised me. Places with church signs and gravel driveways and radio stations that played her records. When you grow up gay in the South, you learn early to sort the voices of home into safe and unsafe, and you learn that the sorting mostly ends in disappointment, and at some point you stop expecting the place that made you to speak up for you at all.
And then there she was. Not a comedian from the coasts, not an activist, not anyone the marchers would have been surprised by. Dolly Parton, of Sevier County, Tennessee, granddaughter of a Pentecostal preacher, beloved by the very world whose argument had just won, saying on national television that she supported us. She was not talking to the crowd in the streets; we already agreed with her. She was talking to her own audience, the ones with the most permission to leave her over it, and she was spending something real to say it. The marchers told me I wasn't alone in my new world. Dolly told me I wasn't alone in my old one. Only one of those was news.
Kin
But I should back up, because the reason her voice could reach that far into me is that it had been there almost from the beginning.
I grew up with Dolly. Not personally, of course — but in the South, a face that reliable on your television is a kind of kin. She was in our living room in 9 to 5 and Best Little Whorehouse, in Straight Talk on some rented VHS, and most of all in Steel Magnolias, which I watched more times than I could count and loved with an attachment I couldn't have explained then. Truvy in her beauty shop, running the one place in town where every woman who walked in got looked at like she mattered, teasing and tending in the same breath. I didn't have the words for it as a kid. I just knew that whatever was happening in that shop was something I wanted to be near.
So when she appeared on my screen in Los Angeles all those years later, I did not experience her as a celebrity taking a position. Celebrities took positions all the time, and I could tell you almost none of them. This was someone woven into my earliest idea of home, someone I felt I had known my whole life even though the knowing only ran one direction, and she was saying she was for me. There is a difference between being supported and being seen, and the difference is history. An ally you just met is a gift. But a voice from that far back, telling you that you are worth defending — that goes into a different part of the body. It doesn't land as politics. It lands as family, doing the thing family was supposed to do all along.
The Listening Years
I wish I could tell you that one evening settled it. It didn't do that, exactly. What it did was change what her name meant when I saw it. If you grow up gay in the South, you learn to be careful with voices from home. You learn to check before you trust them, because you know how that usually goes. But after that night, Dolly didn't need checking. When her name showed up in the news near words like mine, what I felt was relief. Sometimes something closer to a smile. A lifetime is a long time to never be disappointed by someone, and she never disappointed me once.
When I went looking backward, the trail was already there. She had written the theme song for Transamerica, a film about a transgender woman, back in 2005, when almost nobody in her genre would have gone near it, and earned an Oscar nomination for the trouble. She had been saying for years, cheerfully, that if she'd been born a man she would have been a drag queen. And looking forward, the record only lengthened. When a lesbian couple was hassled at Dollywood over a t-shirt, she apologized personally and said all families were welcome at her park. When Larry King asked her about people like me in 2016, she said we are all God's children. When her own Tennessee passed its laws against transgender people, she said they couldn't help being who they were any more than she could help being Dolly Parton, that she knew and loved them all, and that she did not judge.
One interview could have been a coincidence, a good day, a publicist's advice. What I watched instead was a woman keep a promise she never knew she'd made to me. It was a Tuesday, every time.
What I Actually Have
Now, some honesty about that evening in Los Angeles, because you deserve to know what I actually have. The internet and I disagree about the details. I remember Larry King's suspenders; the record suggests it may have been Joy Behar's desk. I remember it as one interview, and it may have been pieces of several, stitched together by seventeen years of remembering. I don't know what I did afterward, whether I called anyone or just turned off the television and went to bed.
Here is what I do know, and I know it as surely as I know my own name. A woman from the world that raised me looked into a camera and said I was worth loving, and I was sitting alone in an apartment in Los Angeles when it reached me, and something in my chest that had been standing guard for a long time sat down for a minute. Nobody can fact-check that. I was the only witness, and the only evidence is my life.
And this much I will say plainly: whatever I understand about how people ought to be treated in the moments nobody is watching, I learned some of it from watching her. It is what I hope for each time I write these pages — that somewhere on the other side of them, someone closes their screen feeling what I felt that night. A little less alone.
One Week Before
There is one more thing, and I would not believe it if it hadn't happened to me. One week before she died, I was in Nashville. I walked through the Country Music Hall of Fame and into the exhibit they had built in her honor, and I spent thirty minutes moving from case to case — the sequined costumes, the handwritten lyrics, every description read down to the last word — and I smiled the entire time. Thirty solid minutes of smiling, alone, at objects behind glass. I took photos of her sparkling dresses as if they belonged to someone in my family. Which, by then, in the only sense I've been able to explain in this essay, they did.
I didn't know I was saying goodbye. Neither did she. After a lifetime of her not knowing what she'd given me, we finally had the not-knowing in common.
She Never Knew
She died this Tuesday, at home in Nashville. It happened to be my birthday, and I don't know what to do with that except notice it — the woman who once made me feel less alone in the world leaving it on the day I entered it. It isn't a sign. It's a coincidence. But grief looks for threads, and this one was handed to me, and I find that I feel even more stitched to her because of it.
What I keep returning to is this: she never knew about my living room. She finished that interview, whichever interview it was, and she went on to the rest of her evening, and she had no idea that a twenty-eight-year-old from North Carolina was sitting alone in Los Angeles feeling like someone from home had finally come to find him. She never found out. There was no letter I wrote, no chance meeting where I got to tell her. What she did that night landed in a place she would never see, in a person she would never meet, and it stayed.
I have learned since that this is how she did nearly everything. Somewhere in Tennessee tonight there is a grown man who marched in a high school band uniform she paid for and never claimed. Somewhere there is a kid who learned to love books because one arrived in the mailbox every month with her name on it and no explanation of why. In Nashville there is a strip mall she bought with the money from Whitney's voice, in a neighborhood she wanted to stand beside, and she kept that story to herself for twenty-four years. Millions of rooms she never entered. Millions of evenings she never heard about. She built her whole life in them anyway.
And the rooms she did enter are telling the same story. All week the tributes have been arriving — singers, actors, people who worked beside her for fifty years, people who met her once — and underneath the rhinestones and the one-liners, they are all the same tribute. She saw me. She was kind to me. She treated me like a person whose interior life mattered. Person after person reaching for the same plain words, and I have not found one, not a single one, with a different story to tell. Consider what that takes. Consider how many thousands of moments, most of them unwitnessed, every one of them optional, had to go the same direction for an entire world to agree on what it was like to be near her.
And still, the story I keep thinking about is smaller than any of theirs. An apartment in Los Angeles. A television. A young man three thousand miles from home, hearing a voice from his childhood say that he was worth defending, and sitting with it alone, and feeling grateful to someone who would never know.
She never knew.
She didn't need to. That was never why she did it.
"Find out who you are and do it on purpose." — Dolly Parton