Tennessee’s governor loves Dolly—but not the LGBTQ people she stood up for

Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee has declared his support for renaming Nashville’s airport for Dolly Parton, days after the beloved singer’s death.

“It is fitting that Nashville International Airport would bear the name of our state’s favorite daughter and greet travelers with the enduring legacy of Dolly’s music, generosity, faith, and kindness,” Lee wrote in a press release.

It’s a nice gesture. But it is also bitterly ironic coming from the man who signed America’s first ban on public drag shows in 2023. Lee’s record on LGBTQ+ rights is abysmal. He defended the right of faith-based adoption agencies to refuse adoption to same-sex parents, renamed Pride month “Nuclear Family Pride Month,” and has outlawed gender-affirming medical care for minors. Parton expressed a deep fondness for drag performers, and for LGBTQ+ people, while Lee called drag “sexualized entertainment in front of children” and tried to ban it from public spaces—thereby attempting to put his state’s hardworking Dolly Parton impersonators out of business.

Lee’s record of anti-trans rhetoric and action—signing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, prohibiting colleges and homeless shelters from recognizing a person’s gender identity, and forcing doctors to hand information about their trans patients over to the state—stands in sharp contrast to that of Parton herself, a staunch advocate for LGBT people.

“She reminded us of who had our back,” Brian Sullivan, a leader of the Tennessee Equality Project, recently told the New York Times. “She wasn’t a pushover, and she certainly wasn’t when it came to us.”

With her hyperfeminine makeup, and penchant for dressing, as she put it, as a “cartoon character that I created” when she performed, Parton was, arguably, America’s most well-known drag performer: “It’s a good thing that I was born a woman or I’d have been a drag queen,” she once quipped. (On another famous occasion, Parton entered a Dolly Parton drag contest and was thoroughly amused to lose.)

Tennessee’s “drag ban,” the Adult Entertainment Act, prohibits “adult-oriented performances lacking serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for a reasonable 17-year-old.” It’s a definition that weaponizes vagueness, rather than disallowing the practice of drag as such.

Instead, the law classifies drag as an innately “adult-oriented” or sexual act, and according to the ACLU of Tennessee, creates “an environment of fear and confusion, which too often results in self-censorship.” As Tennessee drag king Jordan Allen, a trans man, said in 2023, the law could theoretically be used to classify trans people existing in public as “adult-oriented” or inappropriate for children, too.

“I know trans men and women who are servers at restaurants and they go up to a table to serve,” Allen told PBS at the time. “If they go up to a table to serve a table and there’s a child there—there’s a possibility that they can literally be charged with a crime for doing their job and serving the table.” The bill, Governor Lee said, “protects children from obscene, sexualized entertainment.”

In 2023, Parton mailed a glittery, rhinestoned guitar to Texas drag queen Brigitte Bandit—while Bandit was suing Texas over a drag show ban in that state. “I wanted Brigitte to know that she is not screaming into the void and that we see her work,” Parton said through her company Parton Productions at the time.

The day Parton died, a Reagan-appointed Texas judge struck down that state’s drag ban for the second time, finding it unconstitutional. Brigitte Bandit was victorious. And US District Judge David Hittner referenced Parton several times in his ruling, as he argued that the ban was overly broad.

“A Dolly Parton impersonator who uses a breast plate while dancing and making gestures or an Elvis impersonator who uses a packer while shaking and shimmying their hips” could be subject to criminal penalties under the law “while still being constitutionally protected performances,” Hittner wrote.

In Parton’s home state of Tennessee, people like Lee who remember Parton with affection are still pushing the LGBT community she loved out of public life. Lee’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The governor’s proposal to rename the airport after Parton will be discussed by the Nashville Airport Authority in September—but lifting the state’s drag ban would be a better way to honor Parton’s memory.