Dolly
Like all sentient beings, I loved Dolly Parton. If anything could have kept humanity from self-destruction, it was the congregate love she evoked from the rest of us. It was impossible to see her and avoid a rush of feeling: here is goodness incarnate, unconditional love, radiant self-acceptance, and pure spirituality, leavened with a taste for human connectedness and earthy humor. She pumped herself up with a kind of pneumatic joy, earning in the process a material fortune. Then she gave it away by the generous fistful to support causes like childhood literacy and vaccination. For a while Whoopi Goldberg triggered some of the same feelings in me. I have thought of them both as national treasures.
Much has been written about how Dolly operated, how exactly she positioned herself in our culture. I reject the premise of this part of the conversation because she did not seem to go in for strategy or calculation. She went where she went by force of intuition or what she described about her songwriting as urgent enthusiasm. She was always writing songs. It was a volcanic force in her soul. And it stirred the same in those who paid attention. I spent part of the morning listening to covers of “Jolene,” including an unforgettable version in Yiddish.
But there is a consensus idea that she ended up in the center of things because she studiously avoided taking sides, rejecting the temptation of political alignment. To use the relevant phrase, she made herself pareve, neither meat nor milk, a kind of intermediate entity. The result is that wherever you were on the spectrum, hardline MAG-ster or Democratic Socialist, Dolly threw up no barriers to forming a relationship, even a powerful, passionate form of fandom.
I reject that, too, if for no other reason that Dolly took stands on many issues, particularly the most divisive ones in our culture having to do with gender, sexuality, and the politics of identity. She personally embraced her army of gay fans, including drag queens and female “impersonators.” She legendarily told of a lookalike competition where she entered as a contestant and lost to someone who looked more like Dolly Parton than she did. Her summary statement was that if she had not been born a woman, she would have become a full-blown drag queen, presumably down to the surgery of enhancement.
Beyond that she stood for marriage equality and took issue with lawmaking in her native Tennessee that sought to marginalize trans folk and complicate their lives. Her blunt force statement about restricting access to the lavatory is that if she had to go she would use any open bathroom. By report she employed a trans male chauffer for nearly the whole of her career. I love the fact that her life was free of an “ick” factor, that she personally embraced the consequences of her commitments.
Perhaps the best thing here is that she mobilized the fullness of her religiosity to speak a message about “divergent” sexuality. It wasn’t merely a statement about the nature of creation, but a no-prisoners takedown of bigotry and discrimination. She said that anyone with harsh words about the LGBTQ+ community was guilty of sinful, exclusionary behavior. That’s the next step up, where you go when you really mean it. It wasn’t just wrong; it was a sin against God. Take that, along with her support for Hillary Clinton, and the rightness of a female American president, and you have a model progressive for the twenty-first century.
What I’m saying here is that Dolly wasn’t pareve at all. She took the sides that mattered to her and spoke powerfully about the issues, especially those which form an axis of conflict. She did not avoid the controversies that mattered but engaged in a way that could easily have endangered her career. Just ask the Dixie Chicks what that might have felt like. In the process, Dolly normalized ideas that might have been challenging and even repellant to many of her fans.
That alone means that she is now with her family in Heaven. May the memory of the righteous be for a blessing.