Alix Dobkin’s Commie start

BLACK, WHITE AND RED The young folksinger was tracked by the FBI.

Since 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.

Why did you choose to focus the memoir on the early part of your life?
It’s so important to who I am, the legacy I carry of my family. My parents married and joined the Party in 1934. It was a pivotal year. That was when the progressive movement was about as strong as it’s ever gotten in this country. So ’34 seemed like the place to start, just to set it up with my family background. My intention was to write a political, social, cultural history of the three decades that are gone, gone, gone.

To aid you in your writing, you used your old FBI dossier—begun when you were just 13. How aware were you then of being watched?
I knew it; everyone knew it. But they couldn’t hurt us. I was totally unafraid. My parents said, “If the FBI comes to the door, you never speak to them. You say, ‘I have nothing to say to you. Period.’"

You came out in your thirties, after being married to a man. How did your liberal-minded parents react?
The only concern that my mother expressed was that I would be a scapegoat. And she never came to [one of my] women-only concerts. She objected. You know, the whole old generation of left-wing—discrimination was discrimination, period.

How did your women-only policy begin?
In the very beginning, we did mixed concerts. But then one day, we were performing at Brooklyn College. We had gone through three quarters of the concert, and there were maybe five guys in the audience. And my stomach turned. I thought, This is not good. These men do not belong here. So I stopped and I said, “Look, I’d really appreciate it if the men would leave. This really isn’t about you guys.” I tried to be nice about it. So they left! So after that moment, we started doing women-only.

What was the vibe of those shows?
There is such bad press about early feminists. But we laughed and laughed. I mean, we had great times! We were tough; nobody could mess with us. We had our language; we had our own deal. And we made it—we constructed it. That’s the thing.

What surprises you today about lesbians: how far we’ve come or how far we’ve yet to go?
Both. I mean, it’s amazing what’s happened here, in terms of our visibility and certain kinds of safety. Because as secretive as we had to be about being Communists, it was even more dangerous to be a lesbian or a gay man, because your families would fucking turn you in. You were not safe anywhere.

You’ve written a bit about transgenderism—most notably in your 2000 essay “The Emperor’s New Gender.” Is it true it’s gotten you in trouble with transmen?
God, yes. I’ve been called transphobic many times and received hate mail. I’ve been staying out of the controversy limelight. All I was doing was what’s called polemics, but people don’t understand anymore what that is. It’s like, Hello! Here’s my opinion! You have one? Great. Let’s hear it.

You are a grandmother of three. What has having two grandsons taught you about separatism?
I was never mean to little boys. Really, some separatists were! I never could stand them. But here’s one opinion that life changed for me: I used to think that no matter how feminist or conscious or progressive you were, you couldn’t fight the world out there that was going to turn them into little male chauvinist pigs. But after seeing how a couple of boys who were raised by my dear separatist friends turned out, I see it does make a difference. And I couldn’t be crazier about [my grandchildren]. They are just the light of my life.

Dobkin reads from My Red Blood Thu 29 at Barnes & Noble and Tue 3 at The Center.

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