The Dolly Parton Look-Alike Contest That Led to an Invasion
- Dec 9, 2024
- 9 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
In August 1978, the residents of Cherry Grove threw a costume contest that looked, on the surface, like nothing more than a silly, sun-baked afternoon of wigs and rhinestones. Eighteen people signed up to impersonate Dolly Parton for the annual Cherry Grove Fair, and the surviving photos are as gloriously over the top as you'd hope. But one of those eighteen contestants had already, two years earlier, been at the center of a moment that changed Fire Island for good. The Dolly Parton look-alike contest wasn't just a party. It was a small, campy footnote to a much bigger story about a community learning exactly how loud it was allowed to be.
AT A GLANCE
The event: A Dolly Parton look-alike contest at the annual Cherry Grove Fair, Fire Island
Date: August 1978
Contestants: 18, including one cisgender woman
Location: Around the Monster, Cherry Grove's landmark nightclub
Key connection: Contestant Teri Warren's 1976 exclusion from a Fire Island Pines bar helped spark the Invasion of the Pines, a July 4th tradition still running 50 years later
A Beach Town Built as a Refuge
Cherry Grove had been a haven for gay men and lesbians since the 1930s, when actors, writers and other theater people from Manhattan started renting the isolated, roadless strip of Fire Island as a place to be openly themselves in a way the mainland simply didn't allow. It followed a pattern that had already played out once in New York, decades earlier, when Eve Adams ran an openly lesbian salon out of Greenwich Village before the authorities shut it down. Historian Esther Newton later called it America's first gay and lesbian town in her book on the community, and the title fits.
After a 1938 hurricane flattened much of the island, residents salvaged an old barn, floated it across the Great South Bay, and turned it into the Cherry Grove Community Theatre by the late 1940s, still one of the oldest LGBTQ theaters in the country. By the 1970s, the Grove had a well-earned reputation as looser, artier and more bohemian than its glossier neighbor a mile down the beach, Fire Island Pines, which catered to a wealthier, more buttoned-up gay clientele.
The Monster, and a Fair Worth Dressing Up For
The contest itself grew up around the Monster, a Cherry Grove institution that started small. Joe Scialo bought the property in 1969 and opened it as a modest restaurant with a handful of tables, named for a carved wooden sea serpent salvaged from a Coney Island carousel. Over the next decade it grew into a full nightclub and the unofficial living room of the Grove, complete with 4 p.m. tea dances where people walked straight off the beach in swimsuits to dance, and a run of celebrity regulars that reportedly included Bette Midler and Tennessee Williams. By 1978, staging a Dolly Parton look-alike contest as part of the community's annual summer fair right around the Monster wasn't a stretch. It was exactly the kind of thing the Grove did best.
Eighteen Contestants, One Very Big Wig
The contest drew eighteen entrants, including one woman competing straight-faced against a field of drag performers, and judging apparently came down to costume accuracy, character commitment and comedic delivery, the same criteria you'd expect from any small-town talent show, just with a great deal more sequins. Contestants showed up in everything from carefully handmade rhinestone gowns to rented platform heels and towering blonde wigs, and the Fire Island Pines Historical Society, which preserved the surviving photographs, describes it simply as an event that brought the community "together for fun and laughter" during what it calls a simpler time. Dolly Parton herself, whatever she made of it, was by then already firmly established as the kind of single-name gay icon who sat alongside Cher, Bette and Barbra, someone whose exaggerated glamour was practically begging to be performed.
The Contestant Who'd Already Made History
One name among the eighteen carried more weight than a costume contest usually calls for. Teri Warren was a drag artist and trans woman, well known and well liked in Cherry Grove, and two summers earlier, in 1976, she'd been turned away from the Blue Whale, a restaurant and tea dance spot over in Fire Island Pines. The Pines had a different culture than the Grove: it drew a more conservative, more affluent gay clientele, and owner John Whyte, himself gay, kept a strict door policy against anyone in visible drag. That caution traced back to the previous decade, when police vice raids on gay bars had led to arrests, public exposure and ruined careers, the same kind of danger visible in photos of gay men rounded up and detained at a Mexico City police station around the same era, and some Pines business owners had simply decided flamboyance wasn't worth the risk. Panzi has been direct about what the incident actually was, calling it discrimination against the transgender community, and saying plainly that it's what started the Invasion.
Nine Queens, a Water Taxi and a Blessing of the Harbor
Warren's friends back in the Grove didn't let it go. The following July 4th, 1976, happened to be the American bicentennial, and a group of Cherry Grove regulars gathered to watch the tall ships sail into New York Harbor on television. Talk turned to what had happened to Warren, and somebody suggested they stage their own flotilla. Panzi, born Thom Hansen and already Cherry Grove's reigning Homecoming Queen, led eight or so fellow Grove regulars, among them Max Killingworth, Gene Taylor, Chuck Young, Jack Flood, Amelia Migillaccio, Lyn Hutton and Nick Sinisi, in chartering a water taxi from a local outfit called Randy and Sally's. They dressed in full drag, sailed over to the Pines, and arrived in the middle of the Blue Whale's packed tea dance to announce, with a straight face, that the queen had come to bless the harbor. Whyte's staff eventually walked them over to the Botel, where an impromptu blessing ceremony was performed on the spot before the group sailed home.
"The first Invasion began when someone in drag was refused service. Now, fifty years later, we are back where we began."
It should have been a one-off prank. Instead, as Panzi later put it, the group became the talk of the Grove for the rest of that season, and the following summer people wanted to do it again. The Fire Island Pines Property Owners' Association reportedly threatened legal action to stop it. It didn't work. The Invasion of the Pines grew bigger every year through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, eventually drawing hundreds of costumed participants and thousands of spectators lining the Pines harbor every July 4th, and John Whyte himself, the same man whose door policy had started it all, eventually invited Panzi over for reconciliation drinks once it was clear the tradition wasn't going anywhere. In 2025, on the Invasion's fiftieth anniversary, Panzi was crowned Cherry Grove's Homecoming Queen again, exactly fifty years after she'd first held the title.
Fifty Years Later, Maybe the Last One
The Invasion kept going every July 4th after that, and in 2025 it marked its 50th anniversary with a scale nobody in that original water taxi could have imagined. The party sprawled across the Pines' Waterfront venues, opened with a nod to the Bicentennial theme of the original crossing, all frothy gowns and powdered wigs, and closed with RuPaul's Drag Race stars Alaska, Jan Sport and Scarlet Envy on stage, plus a pool party headlined by Violet Chachki. One of the nine original 1976 invaders, Bob Levine, better known by his drag name Rose, was still around to see it, performing live and receiving a specially made "Miss 50th Invasion" sash. Tryst Hospitality's CEO Tristan Schukraft put the arc plainly: the Invasion started as a protest, and fifty years later it's become the most fabulous Fourth of July celebration on the island. Panzi herself was more clear-eyed about it. She's said openly that younger crowds show up loving the party without knowing why it exists, and she's made peace with that, since the point was never to run a history class, just to have fun and let each generation make the tradition its own. There's also a real chance 2025 was the last one. Panzi has floated retiring from organizing it unless someone steps up to carry the torch, which would make that half-century mark a genuinely fitting place to stop.
What the Look-Alike Contest Really Meant
Seen next to that history, the 1978 Dolly Parton contest looks a little different. This wasn't a community discovering camp for the first time. It was a community two years removed from watching one of its own members get turned away at a neighbor's door, now confident enough to throw an unapologetically loud, unapologetically silly costume party in broad daylight, with a straight woman happily entering alongside the drag queens. The contest and the Invasion weren't separate events so much as two expressions of the same thing: a place that had decided, one summer at a time, exactly how visible it was going to be.
A Different Kind of Ending for Dolly Herself
There's a genuinely funny postscript here, though it belongs to a completely different contest, in a completely different decade. Dolly Parton has told, more than once, including in her memoir Dream More, the story of secretly entering a Dolly Parton look-alike contest at a gay bar on Santa Monica Boulevard near West Hollywood, years after the Cherry Grove event and unconnected to it. She deliberately overdid her own signature look, wig, makeup, beauty mark and all, and nobody recognized her. She placed near the bottom of the field, beaten by contestants, some of them drag queens, who out-Dollied the real Dolly. "It's terrible when you lose a Dolly Parton look-alike contest," she's said since, with the kind of good humor that probably explains why gay audiences adopted her so completely in the first place.
Camp Culture, Cut Short by Crisis
The joy in those 1978 photographs carries a harder edge in hindsight. Within a few years, the AIDS crisis tore through communities exactly like Cherry Grove, and residents there spent much of the 1980s caring for friends and neighbors who were dying, often with little support from the outside world. Lesbians and gay men in the Grove nursed the sick together, and as gay men in the community died, lesbians increasingly bought up the homes they left behind, a demographic shift that helped keep Cherry Grove intact as a queer community even as it changed who made it up. The eighteen people who dressed up as Dolly Parton for an afternoon in 1978 were living through what, in retrospect, was a narrow and precious window: a community finally loud and visible enough to throw itself a party like that, just before it had to spend the next decade fighting for its life in a very different way.
A contest that started as a joke about wigs and rhinestones ended up standing right next to one of the more genuinely important moments in Fire Island's history, and neither would mean quite as much without the other.
This account draws on the Fire Island Pines Historical Society's archival records and photographs, Fire Island News and The Queer Review's reporting on the Invasion of the Pines including its 2025 50th anniversary, and Dolly Parton's own retelling of her separate, unrelated look-alike contest story. See the numbered sources below.
Quick Questions About the Dolly Parton Look-Alike Contest
Where was the 1978 Dolly Parton look-alike contest held?
It took place at Cherry Grove's annual community fair on Fire Island, in the area around the Monster, the Grove's best known nightclub at the time.
Who won the 1978 Dolly Parton look-alike contest?
The surviving photographs and the Fire Island Pines Historical Society's own records don't name a winner, only that eighteen contestants took part, including drag performer Teri Warren.
What is the Invasion of the Pines?
It's an annual July 4th tradition in which drag queens from Cherry Grove sail by ferry to the neighboring Fire Island Pines, a custom that began in 1976 after a Pines bar owner refused service to a drag performer from the Grove.
Is the Invasion of the Pines still happening today?
It marked a huge 50th anniversary celebration in 2025, drawing hundreds of costumed participants, RuPaul's Drag Race stars and thousands of spectators, though original organizer Panzi has said she may step back from running it unless new leadership takes over.
Sources
8. The Invasion of the Pines: Cherry Grove's Beloved 4th of July Tradition, New-York Historical Society
