Jason Pirro drove for and assisted Dolly Parton for more than 30 years, a working relationship that outlasted the 1990 tabloid story that tried to expose him.
That July, the supermarket tabloid Star ran a “sex change shocker” about a trans man in Dolly’s limo, using the deadnaming, exploitative language of the era. Pirro’s own words in the piece were unbothered: “Dolly has been good to me… Dolly knows all about me.”
Trans community publications quickly reclaimed the story. The XX Club, a Hartford support group, ran it in the August 1990 issue of its newsletter Twenty Minutes, and Lou Sullivan’s pioneering FTM Newsletter preserved similar material as rare proof of a major star’s acceptance at a time of almost no trans visibility. Sullivan died of AIDS-related complications in 1991.
Parton kept Pirro close long after. She thanked him by name in the liner notes of her 2016 album “Pure & Simple” and credited him in her 2023 book “Behind the Seams.”
In her 1994 memoir she wrote that if she hadn’t been a woman she’d have been a drag queen, and that everything she knew “about sex-change operations” she learned from her good friend Jason.
Parton died Tuesday, Aug. 25, at 80. In the days since, queer and trans fans have circulated Pirro’s story again as one more piece of a legacy she spent decades living out loud.