Dolly

Just that one word and you knew who I meant.

She had a heart so big it encompassed every human being every living thing on this planet.

Dolly Parton’s chauffeur and assistant of 30+ years was a trans man she supported and loved

Parton repeatedly thanked Jason Pirro — whose employment was widely celebrated by trans newsletters — throughout her career.

The Advocate

Mathew Rodriguez - them

Aug 27, 2026

As the world is still reeling from the news of the death of legendary Queen of Country Music Dolly Parton on Tuesday, many of her LGBTQ+ fans have resurfaced evidence of her long and enduring support of the LGBTQ+ community.

That support included a job and a lasting friendship with a transgender chauffeur, Jason Pirro, who previously spoke with the press about Parton, saying that the singer “knows all about me and is a very nice lady.”

Twenty Minutes, a transgender newsletter that circulated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, wrote about then 44-year-old Pirro in its August 1990 issue, pulled from a story in which the tabloid Star spoke to Pirro about his relationship with Parton.

[…]

The Twenty Minutes issue highlighting the Star article remains widely accessible through the Digital Transgender Archives, an online hub of materials meant to preserve trans history. That newsletter itself is housed in the Sexual Minorities Archives in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which also holds the research materials of late trans author and activist Leslie Feinberg

With her, it wasn’t something that was “in”; it was a way of life. When asked to write a song for the movie Transamerica, she not only wrote it, but she sang it—and it earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song! It also received Golden Globe and Grammy nominations and won Best Original Song from the Phoenix Film Critics Society. “Travelin’ Thru” is a song from her heart, written for the trans community.

[As I was listening to this while I am writing this and I had to pause… I was crying too hard! Why can’t everyone share this sentiments as this. Why does there have to be hate?]

The Los Angeles Times wrote in “Appreciation: Dolly Parton was special to the LGBTQ+ community. She showed us our country loves us” that:

In a brief online elegy for Dolly Parton, with whom she’d worked on the women-empowering film “9 to 5,” actor and famed liberal activist Jane Fonda made it a point to note that Parton cared about her queer fans.

“To her gay and trans fans, I want you to know that she loved you,” Fonda wrote. “You know that without me telling you.”

Indeed, we do.

Dolly meant something special to the LGBTQ+ community, in part because she represented an America where we are accepted — not just in big blue cities, but in one-room cabins in East Tennessee and in every rural, American-flag-flying corner of this big country.

She also spoke up for us, LGBTQ+ Nation wrote…

Country music star Dolly Parton expressed support for LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender people, when asked about the recent ban on gender-affirming care for minors in her home state of Tennessee. She also discussed working with several queer musicians on her soon-to-be-released album, Rockstar.

“I just want everybody to be treated good,” Parton said when asked about the ban in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I try not to get into the politics of everything. I try to get into the human element of it. I have some of everybody in my own immediate family and in my circle of employees. I’ve got transgender people. I’ve got gays. I’ve got lesbians. I’ve got drunks. I’ve got drug addicts — all within my own family. I know and love them all, and I do not judge.”

While LGBTQ+ community members resent being compared to drug addicts, Parton intended the comparison as an example of people who are often rejected by society. She noted that she grew up in a church where “so many things were a sin” and where congregants criticized her as being “trash” and a “whore” for “being young and dressing the way I did and being the way that I was.”

“I know [trans people] and love them all, and I do not judge,” she continued. “And I just see how broken-hearted they get over certain things and I know how real they are. I know how important [gender-affirming care] is to them. That’s who they are. They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton, you know, the way people know me. If there’s something to be judged, that is God’s business. But we are all God’s children and how we are is who we are.”

Her love for us was real. She will be dearly missed.

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