Also.Also.Also: Dolly Parton Invites You to Be Exactly Who You Are for the Holigays

Still here, still queer, still filling in for Carmen — but don’t worry! She’ll be back to celebrate the holigays with you before you know it! Probably with some whole new baking recipes! In the meantime, I prepared for you one (1) piping hot Also.Also.Also.


Queer as in F*ck You

+ Dolly Parton’s Magic Mountain Christmas premieres tonight on NBC. It’s a movie about making a TV Christmas special, all filmed inside Dollywoood. In addition to performing with her queer godchild, Miley Cyrus, Dolly’s also releasing a new song to go along with some of her classics. It’s called Be That: “Whoever you are be that; whatever you do, do that; because anything else is just an act; so whoever you are be that.”

“There’s a lot of songs that have a meaning, have inspiration, and get all the different types of people involved in singing it,” Dolly told Parade. “But then we did a lot of great old classic songs and a lot of things that I had written that are meaningful that I look into the camera and talk to the audience telling them how I feel about certain things and my heart. We had the singalong with the children, which is always fun, so there’s something in the show for everybody. Hopefully, you’ll go away feeling better after you’ve seen it than you did before you started.”

+ This gay Montana moose was celebrated on a pie. (No really click through.)

+ GBBO queer star Ruby Tandoh wrote about the food of Anne Lister’s Halifax.

+ Elena Rosa is a Los Angeles-based artist who wants to use the Metaverse to create a fully-inclusive and immersive lesbian bar. This is so forkin cool: “I wanted to celebrate and honor lesbian bar history. I think that these bars, especially pre-Stonewall, were bars that really allowed women to frame feminism and ideas of desire and ways of being in the world. So, I wanted to honor that history and also honor the trailblazers, all the people that crossed the street to go into the bar when it wasn’t okay to do that.”

+ Homeland Security warns about domestic extremists praising Colorado Springs suspect.

+ The first designated LGBTQ+ historic landmark in Brooklyn is here and it’s the Lesbian Herstory Archives!

+ On Slate’s Outward podcast: How to read a NYT story about trans kids.

+ How Nan Goldin used ACT UP tactics to fight a new epidemic.

Saw This, Thought of You

+ The 2023 WNBA schedule is here. We’re getting FORTY GAMES.

+ This isn’t news or anything, but I read this on Twitter earlier this week and I cannot stop thinking about it. I spent my entire therapy session this week talking about it. This coder programmed ten years of her childhood journals into an AI chatbot so she could talk to her childhood self.

+ What will writers do without Twitter?

+ The 20 best memes of 2022.

+ What it takes to make a kinder, gentler video game.

Political Snacks

+ These recently elected trans lawmakers say anti-LGBTQ bills inspired them to run.

+ Russia is about to ban being gay in public.

+ Oh wow what a surprise: FTX billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried funneled dark money to Republicans. “All my Republican donations were dark,” he said, referring to political donations that are not publicly disclosed. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the fuck out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”

+ Tokyo same-sex marriage ruling ‘a step forward’, say campaigners.

+ Singapore repeals gay sex ban but sets new rules to block marriage equality.

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1718 articles for us.

3 Comments

  1. Hi Heather, I was reading your article about Dolly’s Christmas Show and was wondering if you know where the Song “Be That” Can be found? If you see this thank you so much for a reply.

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