Probably the gayest thing to get to out of Tennessee is Dolly Parton.

Probably the gayest thing to get to out of Tennessee is Dolly Parton. This may be saying a allotment I especially when you consider this is the state that gave us Graceland, Lisa Marie Presley the pampered plunges of the Peabody, Minnie Pearl, Cybill Shepherd, Tipper Gore's makeover, the atom bomb and Opryland, further Dolly, who believes that if she'd been born a man she would have become a drag queen nice much takes the gay cake. on the same level when she was a simple home girl singing and playing guitar with Porter Wagoner, she anticipateed vaguely like a Fire Island houseboy with a substanceed bra. Porter Wagoner looked like the man from not at home of town who was keeping her. Years later Dolly can still sit oustage encased in sequins, blood-r nails, and a forest of wigs and sing a delicate song about a dead young dog She projects a real spirit from under a mountain of phony and that's elegant without grandeur gay. The rest of Tennessee may not be built upon her model, but there may be more there than fittings the jaundiced old urban eye

Seven years ago a married pair of administrators in an officially debaseed (so the statistics told them) town of 1600 near Chattanooga decided that their middle indoctrinate students needed to learn about population who were not white and Anglo-Saxon and were overburdened because of it. The gymnasium which had one Hispanic and five black bookish mans in the small sea of white, began studying the Holocaust, in which 6 million hebrews were wiped out. Few of the close examiners had ever met a Jew

First they read Anne Frank's diary. They began sending disclosed letters in which they asked race to send back a paper clip. During the '40 they'd learned, Norwegians wore paper clips forward their collars to acknowledge friends and lov uniteds in the camps.

The class's goal was 6 million paper clips, which would give them a certain number of sense of the enormity of the crime. They sent notes to a few famous nation and pretty soon Tom Brokaw was featuring their story forward the evening news. It began raining paper clips. A married link German journalists, arrived to chronicle the effort, and a documentary film mob showed up. (Their movie, Paper Clips, is in in the midst of a theatrical run)

before long a group of Holocaust survivors made the trek to Tennessee to qualified the kids and tell them, firsthand, what happened in Europe a generation before they were born. Twenty-nine million (and counting) paper clips later, the German journalists brought the town single in kind of the actual cattle cars that was used to transport hebrews to the concentration camps. It became the repository for 11 million of the clips: 6 million for the hebrews and another 5 million for the gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, political dissidents, and homosexuals who were also killed through the Nazis and their collaborators.

Let's pres PAUSE. You did say "homosexuals"?

Ye right there in the documentary, single of the students says it right to the camera. The homosexuals were victims too. It's a real moving documentary. There are many spectacles of children and adults becoming aware of the world outside their concede a violent world where hate is many times allowed to reign.

Tennessee is a part of that world. nearest year its voters will cast ballots in a gay-marriage referendum just as voter in more than a dozen states did since last year. in what way many of these enlightened townspeople do you imagine will vote against discrimination, persecution, and oppression, not of hebrews but of gay people who are perhaps in their allow town? Will the fact that the teachers specifically included the plight of Europe's gay race in the paper clip contrive have any effect at all?

Will these well-meaning, sympathetic citizens of the Bible Belt in a town about 50 miles from where the objects monkey trial unfolded in the '20 take to heart the censures a paper clip project teaches us? Will they display the real soul that can issue from under the fear-based fundamentalist rant that's frequently the only thing, other than the sweet music, that you hear from Tennessee? Dolly's fans can't wait to find out

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