08/26/2026
Dolly Parton had a very specific, exaggerated look, one she jokingly called her "town tramp" style, big hair, bold makeup, and an unmistakable silhouette. So when she heard about a Dolly Parton lookalike contest happening at a gay bar in Los Angeles, she couldn't resist entering it herself.
She never told anyone who she really was.
According to her own retelling in her 2012 memoir, Dream More, and in several interviews since, Parton decided to lean even further into her look for the occasion. She teased her hair bigger, made her beauty mark more prominent, and exaggerated her makeup beyond her usual style, reasoning that going bigger would help her blend in.
It didn't quite work out that way.
The contest was packed with drag queens who had spent weeks perfecting their Dolly costumes and performances. When Parton's turn came, she simply walked across the stage as herself, and the crowd assumed she was just another contestant, one of many "little short gay guys" doing an impression, as she put it.
She ended up receiving the least applause of anyone in the entire contest.
"All of these other beautiful drag queens had worked for months and weeks getting their clothes and all that, and they were dressed like me," Parton recalled in a 2012 interview. "So I just got in the line and I just walked across, and they just thought I was some little short gay guy. And I got the least applause but I was just dying laughing inside."
Parton had told the story for over a decade. She often joked afterward that it's a good thing she was actually a woman, or she might have made a fairly unremarkable drag queen herself.
