Introduction
Alix Dobkin (born August 16, 1940) is an American folk singer-songwriter.
Biography
Alix Dobkin was born in New York City into a Jewish Communist family, and raised in Philadelphia and Kansas City. She graduated from Germantown High School in 1958 and the Tyler School of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1962. She began performing on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene in 1962 and three years later married Sam Hood who ran the Gaslight Cafe. They moved to Miami and opened The Gaslight South Cafe, but moved back to New York in 1968. Their daughter Adrian was born two years later, and the following year the marriage broke up. A few months later, Dobkin came out as a lesbian, which was uncommon for a public personality to do at the time.
She has since released a number of albums as well as a songbook and has toured throughout the US, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand promoting lesbian culture and community through womyn's music. Dobkin has been a highly vocal proponent of women-only space through her consistent exclusion of males. In one letter to the National Center for Lesbian Rights, she explained, "For over twenty years men have declared themselves 'women,' manipulated their bodies and then demanded the feminist seal of approval from survivors of girlhood.... [My lyrics] are not 'oppressive' but refer to those of us who have a girlhood & a clitoris, & no one else." Her controversial criticisms of postmodernism, sadomasochism, transgenderism and other issues, including her piece "The Emperor's New Gender", have appeared in several of her written columns, "Minstrel Blood."
Dobkin has a small and devoted audience, has been called a "womyn's music legend" by Spin Magazine, "pithy" by The Village Voice, "Biting...inventive... imaginative" by New Age Journal, "uncompromising" in the New York Times Magazine, and "a troublemaker" by the FBI. She gained some unexpected fame in the 1980s when comedians such as David Letterman and Howard Stern tracked down her landmark Lavender Jane Loves Women album, and began playing phrases from the song "View From Gay Head" on the air.
Dobkin is a member of the OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change) Steering Committee, and her memoirs were published in October 2009 by Alyson Books. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley where she dotes on her two grandsons and granddaughter.
Discography
Albums
- Lavender Jane Loves Women (1973)
- Living with Lesbians (1975)
- Xx Alix (1980)
- These Women (1986)
- Yahoo Australia! Live from Sydney (1990)
- Love & Politics (compilation, 1992)
- Living with Lavender Jane (CD re-release of first two albums, 1998)