Remembering the magical moment he interviewed Dolly Parton as a young journalist, Georgia-born Cory Albertson offers thanks for the ways her music, stage presence, and insistence on being different spurred him to “hitch a ride with the wind” and embrace the wonders of his queerness.
Essay by Cory Albertson | Illustration by Abigail Giuseppe
“Hi, this is Dolly,” said the sugary voice through the phone.
My heart began to race. I wanted to blurt out, “Dolly, I’m a raging, flaming, queer because of you!”
Instead, I took a deep breath and managed to get out a still unbelievable, “Hi Dolly, how are you?” This was work, I told myself. Perform journalist.
“Well, I’m good, what’s this area code?” she shot back like an aunt I should’ve called more often. “Where are you?”
Boringly, I was in my bedroom in my mother and stepfather’s house in Kennesaw, Georgia, so I just replied, “Atlanta.” More glamorously, I was at the unnamed journalistic pinnacle of interviewing Dolly for “Paste Magazine” just a few days before her 60th birthday — or as she called it, her “SEXtieth.” We were supposed to discuss her Oscar-nominated song “Travelin’ Thru,” which she’d written for the 2005 film “Transamerica” — then considered a significant representation of trans women’s experiences.
In my mind, though, I was in my early childhood growing up in Douglasville, Georgia — a small Atlanta suburb that, in the ’80s, was still more Jim Crow than Rick James. I was struggling to tamp down what Dolly meant to my younger self: That she — a white, straight, cisgender, once-poor country music icon — was the first person to teach me — a white, gay, cisgender, working-class southern writer — how to be queer.
I typically reserve queerness for those who, as Moon Charania says, destabilize “normalizing and liberal configurations of sexuality, gender, freedom, and power.” Historically, lesbian, gay, bi, and trans folks did that heavy lifting and, consequently, endured a unique history of violence. So usually, I loathe attaching queerness, in any amount, to straight, cisgender people no matter how much they buck the system.
But damn if Dolly Parton isn’t queer. And her first queer lesson for me came 22 years earlier when I was 4 years old.
My parents were recently divorced, and my mom and I had moved in with my grandparents while my dad had moved into a small townhome with his brother. Tucked away off of Douglasville’s main thoroughfare and behind its more expensive houses, the rows of townhomes were drab, with more concrete than yard.
“Please don’t make me go to Dad’s,” I’d cry to my mother. “It’s dark. And none of my things are there.”
“I’m sorry, but you have to,” she said, with a smile that dripped in Southern ease and friendliness. “Every other weekend.”
What I was really trying to tell my mother was that what I did bring to my dad’s — my size, my vulnerability, and my Miss Piggy doll — felt disruptive. Most disruptive, though, was my fear. My dad had a rampant gruffness that easily tipped over into anger. My first memory in this world, from just before the divorce, was him yelling at my mom and then, with his brown eyes seething, telling me to “shut up” when I asked him to quit. I don’t even remember what he would get upset about. I only remember the yelling. Because most of the men around me were like that, I thought they must be normal. But if they were normal, then my fear of them and the fact that I wasn’t like them made me abnormal.
I would try to alleviate my loneliness and fear by discovering new worlds to retreat into at my dad’s house. The Muppets. Comic books. One weekend, I spied a contraption in his bedroom that would change everything.
“What are these?” I asked him.
“Headphones,” he said, nonchalantly placing them over my bowl cut and onto my ears. They dwarfed my tiny 4-year-old head, but their thick padding completely sealed me off from the sounds of the real world. I felt like I was suiting up to fly.
I thumbed through his record collection. Neil Young. Fleetwood Mac. Don McLean. I was anxious. I just wanted to hear something. Then, a “limited edition picture disc” with a hot pink cover reached out like a dragon-nailed hand. And on the record, against a black background, was a creature I’d never seen before. Working-class, white, straight women permeated my childhood. My mother, my grandmothers, and my teachers were the most central figures in my life. But this woman emblazoned on the record was unlike any woman — nay, person — I’d ever seen. Purple neon lights shot up both sides of an augmented body caught mid-twirl. It was covered in layers of floating white chiffon and long, shimmering beads that were on the move to what looked like another planet. Beneath mounds of blonde curls, she flashed a wide, infectious smile similar to my mother’s.
“You know, I make a joke, but it’s true, that I kind of patterned my look after the town trash,” Dolly admitted during our interview. “And Momma said, ‘Awww, she’s just trash.’ And I thought, ‘That’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up. I’m gonna be trash.’”
Dolly had most likely seen in the town “trash” what I later realized I had initially seen in Dolly: that rare, purest form of camp that was “always naïve,” as Susan Sontag noted. Without access to the aesthetics of urbane high culture, camp in poor and working-class communities was often unintentional. But while Dolly’s love of exaggerated femininity stemmed from a sincere longing, the practice of it disrupted the serious, infamous double bind where women were supposed to look pleasing to men, erotic even, but not “trash.” Dolly deftly forced her audience to objectify her, yes, but with a gloriously wild femininity that demanded awe, if not respect.
“Can you play it?” I sheepishly asked my dad, expecting backlash. Though Dolly was confident in her femininity, I grew worried because I knew I wasn’t supposed to like such girly things.
“Sure,” he said easily, probably assuming that I was, like him, drawn to her boobs. Wishful thinking.
As the scratchy pops of the record began, I settled down, cross-legged on the bed. Then, a voice that sounded like a sparrow riding lightning shot through me:
You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain
Too much love could drive a girl insane
You broke my will, but oh what a thrill
Goodness gracious, great balls of fire
In shock, I didn’t move — I just sat there, eyes wide. I felt connected, on the lightning with Dolly toward her planet of possibility.
“Again?” I asked my dad.
While not considered her finest work, musically, Dolly’s 1979 cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire” took a pushy, macho song that verged on sexual harassment and made it, in the hands of a woman, an audacious insistence on sex. “Kiss me baby … hold me, ” she sang forcefully. I’d later learn women were not supposed to demand such pleasure. And neither were queer men — we weren’t supposed to be having sex in the first place. But at my dad’s, and to the chagrin of anyone within earshot, I learned the lyrics and would just sit on the bed belting, demanding, “I’d love to love you like a lover should.”
The confidence I felt through Dolly took its first hit when I learned soon thereafter that I was a specific kind of different.
“Don’t be a sissy,” my uncle snarled at me one day when I refused to be shirtless outside like him and all the other men.
“But I don’t want to get sunburned,” I replied, beginning to sniffle.
My uncle just laughed at me and shook his head. I quickly understood that “sissy” described a boy who didn’t like to do boy things; a boy who minded getting hurt outside; and a boy who cried. I knew I was a boy who’d rather sit inside at a table for hours to draw Miss Piggy and, eventually, Dolly. And, as my mom liked to remind me, all she’d have to do was raise her voice a decibel before I’d start crying.
Maybe I was a sissy, I thought. And then I’d cry about that.
I didn’t know other boys like me. I also didn’t know any different girls, though it was always more acceptable for them to play with gender. I had little interaction with people of color — my racist, paternal grandfather bluntly told me not to talk to Black folks. And there was almost no discussion of being trans or non-binary in ’80s pop culture, much less suburban Georgia. Those around me no doubt saw Dolly’s brand of white femininity and lumped her in as “one of us,” letting her into my conventional cocoon. In actuality, she was the only person who challenged it. And once her 1987 primetime variety show “Dolly” premiered, there was no turning back.
I was about to turn 8, and Mom and I had moved into a small apartment, just the two of us. As we snuggled on the couch in anticipation, I was completely still. This was the first time I’d get to see Dolly live. My eyes widened as a synth-heavy update of Dolly’s disco hit “Baby I’m Burnin’” roared through the screen:
Oh, baby I’m burnin’
Woo, baby I’m burnin’
Hot as a pistol
Oh, baby I’m burnin’, you got me on fire
I bobbed my head as it played, transfixed on Dolly’s various parts that flashed frenetically on the screen: her hands, with dangerously long pink nails, clapping; her cleavage bursting out of a low-cut red dress; her blonde hair, now straighter and teased, even taller and wider than when I’d first seen it on the record; and that familiar, welcoming smile, now accompanied with high-pitched giggles.
During the show, Mom and I hummed along with Dolly on her buoyant “Bubbling Over” and tried to sing along on an impressive a cappella version of “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind?” Most impressive, though, were the other segments. In the course of the hour, Dolly flirted with actor Dudley Moore in one sketch called “Dolly’s Date,” “married” wrestler Hulk Hogan in a wrestling ring in the next, then sang “Hey, Good Lookin’” (i.e. more flirting) with comedian Pee-wee Herman in his playhouse after that.
“Dolly sure likes a lot of guys, doesn’t she?” I asked Mom, grinning.
“Yes, she does,” she replied curtly, careful to not elicit further discussion.
At the time, Dolly had already been married to her husband for 20 years, but I didn’t know that. On “Dolly,” she took the “variety” in “variety show” seriously, displaying a persona married to her own pleasure and the thrill of being attractive to multiple men.
The most important lesson, though, came at the end of the show. Decked out in a copper and silver gown beaded within an inch of its life, she sat ever so commonly on a stool to answer questions from the audience.
“Do you ever wish you were born a guy?” asked a young woman who, with her half feathered, half mullet hairstyle, looked, in hindsight, like a blossoming butch lesbian.
“Do I ever wish I was born a guy?” Dolly replied. “Lord no, I’ve always been a sissy. And if I’d been born a man, I’d been a drag queen. Because I love to primp!”
Dolly acknowledged the struggle of mixing femininity with manhood, knowing it was easier for her to be a sissy as a woman. But she also reclaimed “sissy” — her femininity — as something she was comfortable with and, actually, liked. And with the commandment that she would be a drag queen, Dolly knew she would be queer in an alternate, gender-reversed universe.
In this universe, though, Dolly wasn’t the real sissy. I was. She was talking about herself, yes, but also me. I leaned back and looked at Mom for a reaction, wondering if she knew Dolly was talking about me. Mom didn’t flinch. I exhaled, feeling calmer knowing Dolly thought of herself as a sissy, too.
On the show, Dolly giggled after her answer. But making a joke out of something also meant there was pain there. During our interview years later, I gathered my nerve and asked her about it.
“Did you ever have any moments where you felt like an outsider?” I asked.
“Yeah, I did,” she replied, with no hesitation. “I was always so odd. I was always kind of in trouble with my family — a lot of my family were very religious. But I looked like a whore from day one. I acted like one, I talked like one, but I wasn’t one. … I just loved everybody and still do to this day. It’s like I love the difference in people, I don’t care what they are. But because I was always ... so outgoin’, so different from so many, you know, people up there in the hills, I often felt like a total outsider. And so I know how that feels.”
Imagining Dolly with even one rhinestone less of the glittering confidence she currently radiated jarred me. I pictured her being called “whore” and wondered how she coped, but couldn’t bring myself to ask. And then I remembered what I did when, around age 10, I graduated from “sissy.”
“You walk like a faggot,” a male classmate yelled almost daily. “Your hips move too much.”
Please don’t cry, I’d beg myself while riding the bus on what felt like a never-ending bumpy ride home. I’d usually make it home, but, by the time I got through the front door, I’d sufficiently suppressed my feelings. Once up in my room I’d travel somewhere different: Planet Dolly and to what I imagined was its hot pink, shimmering library.
Safely there, I’d study every album, every television and movie appearance, and every Dollyism. My favorite from that first episode of “Dolly” was “I never stopped tryin’ and I never tried stoppin’.” I would arch my heels and make my hand into a fist, pretending to hold a microphone. Then I’d burst through a door to my empty bedroom, swaying my hips as I bounced toward the imagined crowd. I’d raise my left hand to acknowledge them and flash a wide smile. Then I’d launch into a song, strutting around lip-synching and flapping my arms like a chicken, just like Dolly does — rudimentary drag before I fully understood what drag was.
I never had the urge to look like Dolly; I just wanted to feel like her. I wanted to feel that confidence and the celebration surrounding it. Like many queers, Dolly brazenly used performance — an outsized, bubbly look and stage persona — to navigate the shame heaped on her as well as to get what she wanted. And in doing so, she provided me with a road map to do the same. Only I didn’t want to stand out as she did; I just wanted to fit in. If I could perform Dolly, I thought, I could perform a normal boy.
At school, I planted my heels firmly on the ground. I walked measuredly so my hips wouldn’t sway. I kept my arms at my side, trying not to gesticulate. And there was no smiling. Much to my relief, the focus on my faggotry subsided.
The real test, though, came with my dad.
“If you don’t finish your plate, you can’t watch Dolly on TV tonight,” he threatened regularly, knowing I searched “TV Guide” every week for Dolly appearances. If I could perform a normal schoolboy, I thought, I could perform the good little macho son who eats all of his manly portions.
“OK!” I’d grin, stabbing at my plate and putting a big piece of meat in my mouth. As soon as Dad went into another room, though, I’d spit out the food and give what I didn’t want to the dog under the table.
“Good boy,” Dad would say after he walked back in and looked at my plate.
“Good boy,” I’d whisper to the dog.
No one could stop my appetite for Dolly. And my brain raced for professional ways to articulate to her just how much nourishment she provided. But I’m a journalist, I said to myself, again. Perform journalist. So, I took a more general approach.
“I have to tell you that a lot of dreamers also feel like outsiders,” I said.
“That’s true,” she replied. “Like, when I graduated from high school, which you’ve probably read, when I said what I was gonna do. Everybody was saying ‘Oh, I’m goin’ to college’ or ‘I’m gonna get married.’ And I said ‘I’m goin’ to Nashville to be a star,’ and everybody laughed, even the parents and stuff. And it just crushed me. I was so embarrassed. So hurt. And I thought, ‘Well that’s exactly what I’m gonna do, what’s the big damn deal? Why are you laughing? That’s exactly what I’m gonna do!’ Now I know how innocent that was. But I think in my mind, I wasn’t goin’ to do anything different. Thank God it happened. It could’ve gone the other way. But, yeah, it’s like dreamers are often outcasts in amongst, you know, just like my song ‘Wildflowers.’”
Oh shit, she’s going to do it, I thought. I won’t be able to keep it together. Sure enough, she launched into a recitation of my favorite Dolly-penned song:
The hills were alive with wildflowers
And I was as wild, even wilder than they
For at least I could run, they just died in the sun
And I refused to just wither in place
“You know?” she asked, as she finished the lyrics. “That’s how I felt. I’m goin’.”
I did know. Because of “Wildflowers,” in particular. I’d first heard it on her variety show about a year after its 1987 release on her “Trio” album with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. Though it read like a children’s story, which was probably why I understood it at such a young age, the song was exquisitely harsh — one of the rare times Dolly didn’t exalt her Appalachian childhood or the people that shaped it. The lyrics acknowledged the beauty of her fellow “wildflowers,” but chastised them as “common and close” with an incapability to see beyond the hill they were on.
“I had an aunt that thought I was wastin’ my time [with my music], thought I should just get married,” Dolly told me later in the interview. “She said, ‘Why don’t you just settle down and be somebody.’ I said, ‘Hey, I am somebody!’”
And that “somebody” knew that any beaten path, especially a traditional marriage, would be a quick death for her and her dreams as she felt it was for people like her aunt who, according to the song, “died in the sun.”
José Esteban Muñoz argued queerness goes beyond an identity, be it lesbian, gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, cisgender, “wildflower,” or otherwise. Instead, it’s a constant movement toward an accepting utopia not yet realized. Or, in Dolly’s case, a garden not yet planted. She — the “wild mountain rose” in her song — eschewed fitting in and actively sought belonging — a physical and emotional place to cultivate a community of like-minded others. And, as the song stated, she knew she’d have to “uproot” herself and “hitch a ride with the wind” to either search for a new garden or grow one herself.
Hearing Dolly talk of wildflowers, my heart sank. I was living with my mother and stepfather during grad school, and, in my room, I was interviewing Dolly Parton while just downstairs, in a deceptively inviting French country kitchen, sat my mom and another man that, like most of the men before him, tried to relegate me.
When they got married a few years earlier, my stepfather began calling me “son” while wanting me to call him “father.” But as a young man approaching 20, even the original, biological version of that relationship had sailed.
“I don’t feel comfortable with those labels,” I told him one day, my mother at my side. “They’re earned and not just given because you got married.”
He just stared at me, like an opossum ready to attack.
“Maybe in the future,” I offered.
Then, he stormed off.
I’d not stood up to another man since I asked my Dad to stop yelling at my mom when I was 4. I didn’t feel less of a sissy afterward, though. I just felt sad, wishing that I could’ve done it more as a kid. And wishing I wouldn’t have needed to.
After seeing that I had my mother’s unequivocal support, my stepfather turned the house’s common areas into venues for pissing contests. He even tried various tactics to drive a wedge between my mother and me. Apparently, men were not supposed to be so close to their mothers, especially if that meant the mothers placed their husbands second.
Planet Dolly worked great as a kid but I needed to find actual, queerer gardens. Even though it meant leaving Mom, I needed a chosen family with a radical, disruptive acceptance of each other. I don’t know how, but I’m goin’, I thought.
“I always say a lot of people don’t come to see me be me,” Dolly told me earlier in the interview. “They come to see me be them or that part of them that they would like to be.” For some she was the humble Christian that’s “too good to be really bad and too bad to be really good,” as she often says. For others, she was a shrewd rags-to-rhinestones capitalist that created jobs for her community (albeit jobs that often romanticized Confederate-era, Southern whiteness). Still, for others, she was a feminist icon that gave voice to women, especially in the white working class.
She would definitely reject a “queer” label much like she’s rejected “feminist” — a distaste for labels and identity politics that just made her that much more queer.
For me, she was queer because she fought for the freedom to create the body and the body of work she wanted. She was queer because she bulldozed through the limits patriarchy placed on femininity. She was queer because she refused to dim her uniqueness as well as the amount of pleasure and acceptance one life can have. Mostly, though, she was queer because I needed her to be.
And, as we began to say our goodbyes, the urge to explain that journey with her, to her became almost palpable. But you’re a journalist, shouted the voice in my head.
I took a deep breath.
With the exhale came a new, calmer voice: You’re talking to the one person that would want you to throw norms out the window.
So, I leapt.
“I do want to say something before I let you go,” I said. “My very first record I listened to was yours.”
“Really?” she squealed.
“It was,” I said. “It was the ‘Great Balls of Fire’ record, and I used to sit on my dad’s bed and listen.”
She let out an “Awww,” and asked, “Was ‘Baby I’m Burnin’’’ on that?”
I didn’t have the guts to tell her that that was on another record (1978’s “Heartbreaker”). Instead, I just muttered “Yeah,” and continued, “I measured my journalism career by when I got to interview you, so thank you very much for talking with me.”
“Well, I think it went real good,” she replied. “I enjoyed talkin’ to you.”
“I hope I provided you with something that was a little different,” I said, worried I didn’t offer a discussion worthy of her time.
“You did,” she said. “And you sound like a very dear person. I can feel you.”
A lump shot up my throat, bursting out as a shocked, “Oh!” followed by nervous giggles. Then, my eyes started to well up.
“Thank you,” I said. “I can feel you, too.”
I didn’t need to hear or say anything else. And she knew it.
“Well, I’ll see you later,” she replied.
“Have a great birthday, Dolly.”
Then I sat my phone down and unabashedly wept.
Cory Albertson is the author of A Perfect Union? Television and the Winning of Same-Sex Marriage (Routledge) and a lecturer of sociology at Smith College. His essays and interviews have appeared in The Rumpus, The Huffington Post, Interview, Out, Paste, and The Atlanta-Journal Constitution. His scholarship has appeared in Contexts as well as the anthologies Youth Sexualities and Feminist Approaches to Media Research and Theory. His life remains incomplete without the full dance album Dolly promised him she would record. Read more of Cory’s writing at cory-albertson.com.
Abigail Giuseppe is an illustrator, portrait painter, and pattern designer based outside of Washington, D.C., who loves bright warm colors, pop culture, and exploring historic landmarks. When Abigail isn’t drawing and painting, she can be found in the back corners of antique malls looking for odd plates to add to her collection or ordering her third espresso shot of the day.
