Alix Dobkin

Like our last subject, Lavender Country, today's subject also holds a record: She released the world’s very first out and proud, by-lesbians-for-lesbians album, Lavender Jane Loves Women. Twenty years before k.d. lang came out of the closet, there was Alix Dobkin.

The New York-born daughter of Jewish Communist party members, Alix Dobkin (born August 16, 1940) grew up in a musical home aligned with the radical left where she rubbed elbows with Paul Robeson and was watched over by the FBI. The young Dobkin listened to the Red Army Choir, the Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Almanac Singers, and by 1962, aged 22, she was a professional folk singer playing the Greenwich Village scene and the attendant festival circuit alongside artists such as Dave Van Ronk, Jim and Jean, Hamilton Camp and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

In 1965 she married Sam Hood who ran the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village. 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.

"I’m addicted to uniqueness and originality. I knew my coming out would be important and significant", says Dobkin during a telephone interview with Out in 2010 from her Woodstock, N.Y., residence. "It was a message. It was going to let lesbians all over the world know they are not alone."

But there was far more to Dobkin, and by the very early 1970s this was a woman with a business card that read: "International Lesbian Folk Singer". Dobkin was, and remains, a particularly positive brand of badass. In 1973, with the brilliant Kay Gardner, she produced the groundbreaking album, Lavender Jane Loves Women. The opening track is the empowering The Woman In Your Life (Is You):

This is Her Precious Love:

Talking Lesbian is one of the more political songs in the album:

Perhaps the most well-known song of hers is the album's closing track, View From Gay Head ("It’s a pleasure to be a lesbian, a lesbian in no-man’s land").

Two years later, in 1975, there came Dobkin’s follow-up, Living With Lesbians. These are both endlessly open-hearted folk-pop records built around Dobkin’s acoustic guitar, with Gardner’s glorious flute and Pat Moschetta – AKA Patches Attom – on bass. As Dobkin said, the songs face "the concerns and perspectives of women who love women" and the picture she paints is a beautifully bucolic one driven by DIY lesbian superiority and separatism. These were Super Feminists who had their own label (Women’s Wax Works) and used only female sound engineers, photographers, and studio musicians but weren’t afraid of a love ballad. The album's opening song is the beautiful Living With Lesbians:

I couldn't find any other songs from this album on youtube, but I have found this live cover of Amazon ABC by Maeve Marsden:

In 1980 she released the album, XX Alix. The only song from this album that I could find on youtube is Just Like A Woman - and even that is geo-blocked for me. Perhaps it will play for some of you, so here's the link:

In 1986 she released her last original studio album, called These Women Never Been Better. From this album, here's Some Boys:

The song Lesbian Code first appeared in the live album Yahoo Australia! (1990) and then in the collection Love & Politics: A 30 Year Saga (1992):

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 landmark Lavender Jane Loves Women album, and began playing phrases from the song View From Gay Head on the air.

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.

Dobkin’s songwriting career is ancient history to her. She enjoys making small-scale tours around the county to perform her old songs but says she will not record any new material. "I haven’t written a song in about 20 years," Dobkin says. "I lost interest. I’ve written my songs. I don’t really miss it. I guess my memoir sucked up all the creativity."