Alix Dobkin is an American folk singer-songwriter, memoirist, and lesbian feminist activist. In 1979, she was the first American lesbian feminist musician to do a European concert tour.
Personal life
Alix Dobkin was born in New York City into a Jewish Communist family, and raised in Philadelphia and Kansas City. In 1965 she married Sam Hood who ran the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village. They moved to Miami and opened The Gaslight South folk club, 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. Her 2009 memoir, My Red Blood, was published by Alyson Books. Dobkin lives in New York's Hudson Valley where she dotes on her two grandsons and granddaughter.
Alix Dobkin began her career by performing on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene in 1962. She played with greats like Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie. Since 1973, she has 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 women's music. Dobkin has a small and devoted audience, has been called a "women'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 Lavender Jane Loves Women album, and began playing phrases from the song "View From Gay Head" on the air. In 1977, she became an associate of the American nonprofit publishing organization Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press. Dobkin is a member of the OLOC Steering Committee.
Activism
Dobkin has been a highly vocal proponent of female-only spaces and protections for lesbian women. In one letter to the National Center for Lesbian Rights, she asserted, "For over twenty years men have declared themselves 'women,' manipulated their bodies and then demanded the feminist seal of approval from survivors of girlhood.... are not 'oppressive' but refer to those of us who have a girlhood & a clitoris, & no one else." Her controversial critiques of postmodernism, sadomasochism, the transgender rights movement and other movements appeared in several of her written columns, such as "Minstrel Blood." Her article "The Emperor's New Gender" appeared in the feminist journal off our backs in 2000.
