LGBTQ+ Allyship
2014
Love is love — said from the stage, and lived off it
Photo credit“If you're the fine Christian that you think you are, why are you judging people? That's God's job.”
Dolly's LGBTQ+ allyship was not a modern rebrand. In the 1980s she lost friends to AIDS and helped fund the Oscar-winning documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt through her production company Sandollar — while much of Nashville stayed quiet. In 1991 she put gay relatives directly into the country song "Family." She built one of country music's largest gay and drag-queen followings by refusing judgment: on Larry King Now in 2017 she said, "If you're the fine Christian that you think you are, why are you judging people? That's God's job." She backed marriage equality, opposed bathroom bills, apologized when Dollywood mishandled a marriage-equality T-shirt, and in 2023 told The Hollywood Reporter that trans people "cannot help" being trans "any more than I can help being Dolly Parton."
Did you know
In 2023 she told The Hollywood Reporter: trans people "cannot help" being trans "any more than I can help being Dolly Parton."