‘Find out who you are, and do it on purpose’: unabashedly herself, Dolly Parton was an icon to LGBTQ fans

The useful part

Instead, I hitch-hiked to Dollywood, Dolly Parton's theme park in Tennessee. Even at 19, I suspected that the answers to life's most pressing questions could be found at the feet of the Dolly Lama. I completed the last leg of my journey with a florist who was running deliveries up the mountain.

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• One of his customers was a former school friend of Dolly's, and I took the opportunity to breathlessly enquire whether her classmates had always known that Parton would become a huge star.
• This shining example of self-belief powered me through my early career in magazine writing, until I struck gold four years later when I was flown to Nashville to interview Dolly about her most recent album.
• Entering her private rehearsal space, my head was 100% buzzing static and 0% functioning brain.
• My sense of impostor syndrome was undimmed when Dolly appeared wearing what looked like three stacked wigs and a pair of fishnet cutoff legg...