i know this sounds like an exaggeration, but as a queer southern kid, dolly parton would have been the only reason i could be convinced to believe in jesus again. she was our princess diana. she was the best of us.

if you don't know east tennessee like i do, it's hard to fathom how we failed and continue to fail our own. large swaths of the population left to rot in illiteracy and addiction with a lack of access to hospitals and infrastructure and education and jobs and a way to get out. to say 'dolly parton is from a small town' is an under-exaggeration to the extreme.

but dolly parton didn't just get out in the way that so many of us dream of doing-- leaving behind the worst places, watching the dust settle in the rear view. instead, she took the place that built her into her arms. she gave millions of free books to children who hungered to learn. she funded a cancer centre in a region without one. she built a foundation that gave monthly stipends to people in the smokies affected by unprecedented wildfires in 2016 which effectively rebuilt the region. she basically built pigeon forge, gave the city an economic stability it never had prior.

and i could enumerate everything she's done elsewhere and otherwise, because it is a list that deserves enumeration, but i need to sit with what she did for the south in a minute and i need everyone here to do the same with me.

so many of us were given up on and continue to be given up on. i see people all the time write off the south as this hellscape wherein every person is an illiterate bigot monster incapable of change, growth, or compassion. it is easy to then justify the mistreatment of these people, these grotesque representations of everything wrong with our society-- it is easy to abandon them.

dolly parton refused to. she could have taken the money, the fame, the luxury and run-- she never did.

and she never backed down when it came to her love. she stood up for the lgbt community long before it was ever popular or even safe to do so as a celebrity. she celebrated drag artists as inspirations. she thoroughly believed we were all god's children. when she spoke of jesus, it was never to invoke his judgement-- it was always to invoke his love.

and that's a wound rural kids have, too, beyond the physical systems of oppression. we are failed by our own who have internalised the narrative that we cannot be saved on earth and thereby have to put stock into a heavenly system that heavily punishes its own, just as we have been punished by our own. jesus' love was taught and weaponised but never practiced, never realised, always a bandaid and never a stitch.

dolly parton spoke of salvation as something we were obligated to give each other, of forgiveness as a deliberate and continual act of explicit love that we were capable of every day. the only thing we ever had was each other, and we could abandon each other as we had been abandoned, or we could love each other as we were never loved. and she chose the latter.

it has been so easy for me, for so many, to leave our country kid past behind the second we could. to mask our accents, to choose the next largest town or city over to claim as our hometown. to dream of worlds larger than the holler, where everyone loves us and no one hurts us ever again, because that could never happen at home.

dolly parton said it will happen here. it did not for so long, and i am so sorry, but it will happen here. i was made here, too, and i love you. i will always love you.