Want to honor Dolly Parton? Love LGBTQ+ people like she did

This story originally appeared on Out.Dolly Parton was too good for what America has become, which is a strange thing to say about a woman who spent her career insisting that she was no better than anybody else.Dolly was a force-of-nature talent and one of the shrewdest self-inventions in America. She understood celebrity, capitalism, and branding before half the men currently lecturing us about American greatness had their first business card, but somehow never absorbed the idea that success required becoming an asshole. She grew up dirt poor in the Tennessee mountains and turned herself into an international icon while looking like, in her own immortal estimation, the town tramp. And through all of it, she remained almost defiantly joyful, generous, and loving, as though becoming one of the most famous women on Earth had only given her more people to welcome into the joke.Dolly grew up one of 12 children in a one-room cabin without electricity or running water. Her father could neither read nor write, something that bothered him throughout his life, so in 1995 she started sending free books to children in her home county. That little project became the Imagination Library, which now mails millions of books every month to children around the world. There was no complicated ideology behind it. Her father couldn't read, she knew what poverty looked like, children needed books, and she had enough money and power to do something about it. This is an almost embarrassingly old-fashioned concep of American success in 2026, when billionaires cosplay as persecuted revolutionaries while the Republican Party tries to figure out which books are making fourth graders gay.Dolly’s love for the LGBTQ+ community was not some late-career adjustment made after corporate America discovered Pride Month; it ran through decades of her public life, including years when standing beside gay and transgender people could actually cost a country star something. As early as 1991, she was sing