Alix Dobkin

Infobox musical artist |
Name = Alix Dobkin
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Background = solo_singer
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Born = August 16, 1940

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Instrument = singing, guitar
Genre = folk
Occupation = Singer-songwriter
Years_active = 1973-present
Label = Women's Wax Works (Ladyslipper)
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Alix Dobkin (born August 16, 1940) is an American folk singer/songwriter.

Biography

Alix Dobkin was born in New York City and raised in Philadelphia and Kansas City. She was raised in a Communist Jewish household, graduated from Germantown High School in 1958, and the Tyler School of Fine Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1962. She began performing the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene in 1962 and three years later married Sam Hood who ran the world famous Gaslight Cafe. They moved to Miami to and opened The Gaslight South Cafe and moved back to New York City 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; something very uncommon for a public personality to do at the time.

She has since released a number of albums and a songbook and has toured throughout the US, Canada, England, Schotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand promoting Lesbian culture and community through Womyn's music. Dobkin has been a highly vocal defender of women-only space Her controversial analysis of post-modernism, sado-masochism, trangenderism, and other hot topics 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 but welcomed fame in the Eighties when comedians like David Letterman and Howard Stern tracked down her landmark "Lavender Jane Loves Women" album, and began playing phrases from "View From Gay Head" on the air.

Dobkin is a member of the OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change) Steering Committee, and her memoirs will be published in the summer of 2010 by Alyson Books. She loves living in New York's Hudson Valley where she dotes on her two grandsons.

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)

Bibliography

*"Alix Dobkin's Adventures In Women's Music"
*"(Not Just A Songbook)" (1978)

External links

* [http://www.ladyslipper.org/rel/v2_home.php?storenr=53&deptnr=279 Webpage with FAQ]
* [http://www.queermusicheritage.com/may2002.html 2002 Interview]