27/08/2026
This week we've lost two people who spent their professional lives telling us that we were worth loving.
Dolly Parton, for over fifty years, lived by the ethos of "everyone should be allowed to be who they are and love who they love". In 2005, she wrote "Travelin' Thru" for Transamerica, a film about a trans woman's journey. When she started to receive death threats she held firm, and didn't retract a single word. She kept singing it. A country music star from rural Tennessee, telling the world that trans fans were her fans decades before it was safe to do so. Her whole life was built on a simple yet sadly rebellious notion: Nobody needs your judgement. Everyone needs your kindness.
Tim Curry gave us Frank-N-Furter, a groundbreaking and boundary pushing character. It meant that in 1975, a generation of people who had never once seen themselves on a screen had their world blown open by his performance. Fifty years of midnight screenings turned into fifty years of q***r people finding each other in the dark of a cinema and realising for once they weren't alone. He played gender like a costume rather than a cage, and in doing so he gave millions of us permission to stop dreaming about who we might be and just go out there and be it.
Neither of them was openly LGBTQIA+, and that's rather the point. They were proof of how much it matters when someone with nothing to gain stands beside you anyway; loudly, publicly, and without flinching when it starts to get tough.
So we ask that you honour their memory not with candles or platitudes. We ask that you honour them by being kind to someone this week, especially someone that the world is currently being unkind to. Defend people who aren't in the room with you. Love people exactly as they are, out loud, where others can hear you.
Rest well Dolly, and rest well Tim. We'll take it from here. 🌈
