Dolly Parton just honored her gay fans by performing a special “Drag Queen” rendition of one of her classic songs.
The country music legend appeared on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” Friday to promote her new Netflix series Heartstrings, an anthology of stories based on her music. While interviewing Parton, Meyers confessed that his 3-year-old son Ashe loves her classic song “Jolene,” prompting the singer to do an impromptu performance of the 1973 song.
After singing the song’s chorus once true-to-form, she decided to switch the lyrics up. “This is for my gay crowd,” she yelled before singing, “Drag queen, drag queen, drag queen, drag queen/please don’t take him just because you can.” Watch it go down around the 2:45 mark below.
Parton has repeatedly said in the past that she “would have been a drag queen” if she wasn’t “born a girl.” “I’m so over-exaggerated and I have so many fans that [are part of] the gay community,” she said in a 2018 interview. “I’ve always had these drag queens dress like me. And I even lost a Dolly Parton lookalike contest.”
Elsewhere in the “Late Night” interview, Parton explained the origin story behind “Jolene.” “When my husband and I first got married, there was this beautiful girl who worked at the bank,” she told Meyers. “She had everything I didn’t, like long legs. She was tall and beautiful, and he would just spend a lot of time down there… And I thought, ‘I know we ain’t got that kind of money!’” Seth then asked, “What would you do today if you ran into another Jolene-type with your husband?” To which Parton responded, “Oh, I’d just hide his Viagra.”
Parton has been a longtime LGBTQ+ ally, and Heartstrings is yet another example of her love for the queer community. One episode, based on her song “Two Doors Down,” focuses on a gay couple (played by Andy Mientus and Michael Willett) who have to confront family secrets that start to unravel at a New Year’s Eve wedding. During the series screening at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, some audience members walked out of the theater once it was revealed that the two main characters were romantic partners with each other.
Despite the potential controversy, Parton felt it was crucial to include a queer storyline in her show. “It’s important that I touched on everything that all families go through,” Parton explained in an interview with NewNowNext. “Everyone has gays in their family… I tried to give all the different angles in the stories. Just like we have an interracial marriage because people deal with that all the time.”
Speaking of the “Two Doors Down” episode, Mientus told NewNowNext: “It just really speaks to Dolly’s embrace of our community… In a way, that will tell audiences that you can have a queer story and have it be a holiday episode. Not something edgy or sad, that their kids shouldn’t be seeing, but a story that can be as heartwarming as any of the other featured in this eight-episode season.”
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