Alix Dobkin's Commie start
The folksinger has released a new memoir.
By Beth Greenfield
http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/gay/79907/alix-dobkin-interviewSince releasing her 1973 album, Lavender Jane Loves Women, Alix Dobkin has remained a pioneer in the feminist-lesbian world of women's music, recording six more albums, playing festivals around the globe with her bandmates and publishing a songbook, Alix Dobkin's Adventures in Women's Music (More Than Just a Songbook), packed with her radical, poignant and funny lyrics ("Lesbian, lesbian, any woman can be a lesbian!").
In more recent years, Dobkin, 69, turned to writing essays, namely through her column, "Minstrel Blood," in the LGBT paper Windy City Times. Now the native Manhattanite and current Woodstock resident has released a memoir—but instead of focusing on her years as a dyke separatist, she tells the much earlier story of her family's Communism and of her teenage start as a folkie. This week she reads from My Red Blood: A Memoir of Growing Up Communist, Coming Onto the Greenwich Village Folk Scene and Coming Out in the Feminist Movement. First, she spoke with TONY.
