08/25/2026
😭
Dear friends,
I keep coming back to something small. Dolly Parton once said she'd always had drag queens dress up like her, and instead of being embarrassed by it, she said she was flattered. Instead of drawing a line to protect her image, she opened her arms wider. That was Dolly. Not just tolerant. Not just polite. Delighted by the very people so many others wanted to shame.
She died today at 80, and country radio is already replaying "9 to 5" and "Jolene," and that's fine, that's hers to have. But I want to talk about a different Dolly today. The one our families actually needed.
For decades, Dolly did something a lot of famous, faithful, Southern women were quietly told not to do. She loved her gay fans out loud. "They know that I completely love and accept them, as I do all people," she said. When a Dollywood employee asked a visitor to cover up a marriage equality T-shirt back in 2011, she didn't let it slide. She apologized publicly and said plainly that all families were welcome at her park. When she was asked about trans people, she didn't hedge or soften it into something safer. "We are all God's children," she said, "and how we are is who we are." In 2020, she partnered with drag queen Nina West on a clothing line that funded LGBTQ+ youth programs and literacy, because for Dolly, love without action was just talk.
And when other Christians reached for scripture to draw lines around who deserved dignity, she called them out on their own terms. "The sin of judging is just as bad as any other sin," she said. "Lord, I've got enough problems of my own to pass judgment on somebody else." That wasn't a celebrity managing her brand. That was a woman raised in the mountains of East Tennessee, reading the same Bible as the people judging her neighbors, and coming away with a different lesson: love your neighbor and mean it, and leave the judging to God.
That's the model. Not tolerance with an asterisk. Actual, arms open, table set for everyone, kind of love, the kind that never made anyone prove they deserved it first.
And she loved drag the way she loved everything else that was a little too much, a little too bright, a little too free to fit inside a Sunday morning. She never treated it as a threat to womanhood or to faith. She saw it as art, as craft, as celebration, maybe because it wasn't so different from what she'd spent her whole career doing: turning herself into something bigger and brighter than anyone expected, on purpose, in public, in defiance of anybody who thought a woman like her should shrink.
Here at Mama Dragons, we talk a lot about showing up. Across the table. Across the pew. In the rooms where decisions get made about our kids. Dolly showed us that showing up doesn't have to look like a protest sign, though sometimes it does. Sometimes it looks like a rhinestone, a wig, a joke, a song, an open door at a theme park in the Smoky Mountains. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do for a scared, judged kid is just be loudly, unapologetically glad they exist.
So here's what I'd ask today. Play her music loud. Send this to a friend who needs reminding that love was always the right answer. Wear something with a little too much sparkle to pick your kid up from school this week. And the next time you have a choice between loving someone quietly or loving them out loud, choose loud. That's the tribute she'd actually want.
The challenges our families are facing haven't gotten smaller since this morning. But we lost one of the loudest, warmest voices telling scared parents that love was the right answer all along. The least we can do now is keep saying it as clearly as she did.
With love and a little more glitter than usual,
Liz Executive Director, Mama Dragons
