(after Dolly Parton)
Dear Dolly,
For your Playboy cover shoot in 1978, you kneel in a tight black body suit hoisting those famous boobs, with a pink bowtie and black bunny ears, a pom-pom of pink tacked on your ass. Yet the pose is smiley, friendly—no half-lidded bedroom eyes or duck lips. Even the kneel lacks suggestion, more like staging for a high school yearbook pic or an enthusiastic LinkedIn profile. It’s a downright funny image in the context of Playboy, a tongue firmly planted in your apple-jack cheek.
Growing up, you were for me a unique sort of sex symbol, deep in that 80’s crossover-pop phase, starring in high profile films with Burt Reynolds and crooning duets with Kenny Rogers. You wore outfits designed for drag queens and you encrusted your bust with rhinestones, beat your face with Tammy Faye paint and halfway-to-heaven hair. You were a joke: the most popular one in elementary school was what do you call Dolly Parton in the bathtub? Islands in the Stream. You had sex appeal as a buxom blonde, but also a light-hearted soufflé humor—men paired their boners for you with an aw-shucks drop of the head and a mouth full of cornbread.
One particularly slutty summer in Hollywood, I was boning a barista with a magnificently round ass whom I met at a BBQ. We were on his pull-out couch getting down to some lovely business, when he began spitting through his gritted teeth—with an all-too-familiar porn-shoot pose—“you like that ass? Fuck my ass,” as if I wasn’t already liking and/or fucking it. I guess at one point I giggled, and in the middle of that sweaty instant he pulled back and asked, “what are you doing?” with a scrunch to his face that made him look like a turkey vulture. “Oh!” I laughed, “You know. Sex is funny.” He wasn’t having it. “Sex isn’t supposed to be funny,” he said, “It’s rude to laugh.” He ordered me to leave. I was flummoxed. On my way out of his apartment, I grabbed the left foot of his Christian Louboutins and chucked it into the Silver Lake reservoir.
Let’s talk some theory, Dolly. Foucault argues that sexuality should be understood as constructed through the exercise of normalizing power. Power is not what repressed sexuality but power has created its construct. It’s turned sex—something that we just do—into sexuality, something we examine scientifically, and therefore around which we create a discourse. Sexuality becomes a subject of science, and therefore can be authorized, surveilled, and normalized, to keep us all in line.
My early images of gay sexuality were hustlers, drug addicts and AIDS, men with voracious craving, lots of gritted teeth, all barely lit in clandestine tones, alleyways, leather, asphalt. This was the common depiction in the very few indie queer films that made it to the theatres: The Living End, Swoon, Bent, Poison, The Doom Generation. Don’t get me wrong, Dolly, I loved those films, consumed them with the hunger of a baby-artist-queer in the 90’s. I recognized this depiction of sexuality—at least somewhat—as an effort to differentiate from the nationalized heteronormative construct of sex. I appreciated this renegade queer form; however, it never suited me. My peers often replicated that cinematic behavior in their own sex lives—a simulacrum of sexuality, indeed one that exuberantly reflected the marginal nature of our love at the time, but one that to me felt joyless—whether it appealed to them or not.
I wanted something else. I wanted to giggle.
Dolly, you have admitted that sex is your weakness, you love it so much. And even though you’ve been with Carl Dean since you were seventeen, you have admitted to affairs of the heart with other men that have taken you to the bedframe and back. I imagine many are shocked at your admission of this, that your honey-country demeanor also has an expansive perspective on love, and you mention it with no more than a winking face, as if it’s perfectly artless within the scope of your worldview.
Back in Hollywood, perhaps that same slutty summer, I went on a date with this super cute Star Wars nerd. He rocked R2D2 socks on our hike through Runyon Canyon. He enthusiastically recited the film premieres, themed conferences, LARP-ing events he’d attended. He even claimed to speak fluent Wookie, and could understand Jabba the Hut without subtitles. I found his passion—his outward devotion for such fiction—charming. So, later that afternoon, as a gesture of respect while eating his ass, I began humming the “The Imperial March” between his butt-cheeks. So clever, right? He wasn’t having it. “You’re weird,” he said.
Dolly, science has shaped our Western sexualities—that of identification, of labeling, that most powerful of colonial gestures—and because our alternative models as queer people were porn stars, covert and sin cinema, we aped it to carve a space for ourselves. We adopted bold images of strength and virility outside the heteronormative as a subversive discourse: the leather and dungarees, the latex and dungeon sling—and we all know Foucault loved that shit. Go queers! I live for it. But it’s not any more an authentic sexuality than mine. Both are an amusement park of our being, like Dollywood is to your own hometown nostalgia.
I don’t prefer dark associations to sex. I’m not into leather, or BDSM, or anonymity. Some homos will say to me, “you must have shame” because I don’t indulge in these queer markers, but it’s just a preference. I like to laugh during sex, I like it light. I mean, sticking a penis in someone’s mouth or in their butt?—that shit is funny! People from my community, particularly gay white cis men, want to define—or rather defame—my sexuality, regard it as if it was a subject of science: I’m vanilla, I don’t like dirty talk because I desire to be normative, I’m sweet and funny during sex because I’m afraid. Of what? I ask. My queerness? No one ever gives me an answer.
See, when you were asked to pose for Playboy, you insisted to do it on your own terms. You said you wanted it to be a joke. But the editors argued that the cover model needed to be sexy. And you insisted that sexy could be many things, that it was more on brand for you to evoke humor on that glossy cover and still inspire subscribers to swoon.
When I was living as a metal artist in Asheville, North Carolina for a short time in my early twenties, I collaborated with some Radical Faeries, a loose gaggle of furry folx who dressed in bright fabrics and glitter with names like Butterfly and Starchaser. I admired their style, the akimbo sway with which they moved their bodies. They invited me to one of their Faerie gatherings at a compound in Short Mountain, Tennessee, not too far from Dollywood. The gaggle ran around naked, climbed trees, erupted into psychedelic-fueled dance-offs, and had sex everywhere. I was thrilled by the sweetness of all the lovin’. I felt I had found something closer to my own brand. One of the Faeries, Salamander, so named because they obsessively drew and tattooed the creatures as gifts, said to me over a bowl of sawdust-tasting quinoa, “Queer joy is the radical act, Miah. Find yours and you will be liberated.”
I don’t want to fuck to a soundtrack of Rammstein and Nine Inch Nails, nor mimic Hothouse Video porn scenes. I honor and respect this form of sexuality as its own joy, a vital subversion to the heteronormative, but why should my peers shame me for not embracing it? Are they trying to keep me in line, also? Can we not see the irony here? Can’t my preferred sexuality embody the same subversion? Mine is just as much a radical act as anyone wearing a leather harness and parading at the Folsom Street Fair, because they both can be expressed without shame.
Foucault argues that discourse on sexuality frees us from the repressive conventions of morality. You and I are doing that, Dolly. Ours is merely staged with brighter colors, a lighter tone. I want to celebrate the sugar of life in my body, to relish in its playful sensuality, to laugh and tongue and giggle and cum—just like all of us queers—but not have to lower my lids or assume a gravelly voice that utters directives like, “take it, you dirty pig” or—as nod to my own sexual history—“I’m going to rip your choobie, nerf-herder!”
Just let me giggle, y’all! It’s fucking hot!
Maybe that’s what I saw in you, Dolly, as a young kid, that drew me in. Maybe at first it was the fact that you were from East Tennessee, like my own family. Or maybe it was the jubilance. Maybe I saw more in you a discourse I wanted to present to the world, to free myself from those repressive conventions. I wanted to do it on my own terms. Because even then I could see you had power—in your dimpled and winking face, your studded cowgirl Stetson, your own brand of joy.
Mine is in my laughter.
