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Excerpts of Alix:by Karen Hellyer (aka: Peon Queen)
Date: July 26, 1996 |
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Excerpts of Alix:by Karen Hellyer (aka: Peon Queen)
Date: July 26, 1996 |
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PQ:How would you introduce yourself to this whole new generation of
lesbian listeners who don't know who you are?
AD:Some people find it hard to believe, but so many people don't know who
I am, which I guess is okay, but whether or not lesbians know it, you
youngsters are in my line, you are of my tradition. I am an out lesbian,
and have been for well over twenty years. I came out in 1972 and was
thirty-two, the mother of a young, one and a half year old little girl. I
came out before there was such a thing as womyn's music, or lesbian
music. Now, to set the record straight, so to speak, Maxine Feldman had
put out a record, a 45, produced by Robin Tyler, who some of you young
women may not know, but she's another one you should find out about, a
comic, has been around a long time. She produced Maxine Feldman, I think
around 1971, making the first lesbian record that ever was produced in
the world. It was "Angry Athus" and "Amazon" I think was on the other
side. There was also a feminist record called "Virgo Rising", which was
not lesbian, but it was feminist, produced I believe in early 1972. Then,
there was a talent show recorded in New York city. 1,000 albums were
pressed in the Fall of 1973 and it was called "A Few Loving Women". It
was a collection of over a dozen lesbian artists, singer/songwriters,
performers who were around New York city at that time. Margaret
Sloan-Hunter was probably the only one anyone would remember or recognize
who was on that album. She sang a song which Theresa Trull later
recorded. That was in the early Fall. In the late Fall, Kay Gardner and
I, along with Marilyn Ries, who was an engineer, met in a 4-track little
studio in N.Y.C. and produced the first internationally-distributed
lesbian, all-women-produced album know as "Lavender Jane Loves Women."
This was the first well-known lesbian album ever in the world. And that
has been a hard act to follow.
PQ:How many copies were pressed?
AD:Oh, God I hate that question. I have no idea, I guess 50,000, I don't
know.
PQ:They are hard to find these days, though.
AD:Well, the albums, I have some in my garage. You can buy the cassette.
They're still being distributed by Ladyslipper Music.
PQ:Can you talk about any obstacles you faced? I mean, not only were you
producing your first album, but as an out lesbian, that had to be a
double-whammy trying to get into the public hands.
AD:I think it's hard to realize these days what the atmosphere and the
energy in New York City was like in 1973. In the early seventies, Karen,
I can't even begin to describe how exciting it was. When you talk about
obstacles maybe I'm just looking back with hindsight and romanticizing
the whole era, but to me there were no obstacles. There was such a wave
of feminism. EVERYBODY was coming out. Lesbianism and feminism had
connected in a way that had never connected before. The impact on women
throughout the East Coast certainly in NYC and the areas around NYC, was
just tremendous. It seemed like women were coming out in the thousands.
In colleges whole dorms were coming out. It was remarkabls So much
energy and excitement about Lesbianism. It was quite a time, a very
exciting time. When Kay and I got together and started making
arrangements for the songs I had started writing from a Lesbian point of
view, there was a huge market. There was an audience of hundreds and
hundreds of women throughout New York, and many more thousands throughout
the country, because it wasn't just happening in New York, although that
was the center. It was happening all over the country. So it was an idea
whose time had come. I was in the right place at the right time, and I
had the right product. It was very easy to raise the money. In 1973, it
cost us $3,300 to make 1,000 albums. That's with a group who were the
investors and the performers pasting jackets onto the blank covers and
printing our own inserts, which we did for the first thousand copies, and
then we got them printed at a lesbian print shop, which is still
operating in New York. We had them distributed, and this is when the
network of women's bookstores was quite small. There were a few lesbian
and feminist newspapers, for example Off Our Backs was around, and they
put us on the cover. There was a huge amount of excitement for Lavender
Jane because it was the first album with music on it that spoke about,
to, and from, lesbian perspectives. That project was so exciting, there
was tremendous energy behind it, and I just rode the wave. I remember the
feeling of writing these songs and thinking I can't believe nobody else
is writing about this. Whatever I wrote was original. Whatever I wrote
was the first time anybody had written it. That's so heady, that is heady
stuff. And even today you can write from a very lesbian perspective and
hardly anybody still writes, 23 years later, it's still not being done
the way I thought. On the other hand, the influence of what we did back
then is so profound. It's had an influence that we couldn't begin to
imagine, but in more subtle ways, more deeper ways, more fundamental ways
than we thought would happen. You can never predict how things are going
to come out, where the work is going to go, and what the effect is going
to be, but we certainly had a lot of energy and enthusiasm behind this
work. To me, making a lesbian album in 1973 had only advantages.
PQ:Right, it hadn't been done before, there was this audience starving
for it.
AD:Exactly, women are still starving for it. We get a little bit and it's
passed off as the real thing, and it isn't. It's just a fraction. Yes,
there's big changes and we do have alternatives we didn't have back then.
I don't want to diminish anybody's accomplishments, but there is so much
more to be done. The problem today is there's a perception it's been
done. It hasn't all been done by a long-shot. There are women who think,
well, what else is there to do? There's nothing else to do, so how do we
distinguish ourselves? We get pierced, we get tattoos, we walk around
looking like this or that. Well, there's plenty more to do which is way
deeper than that in terms of being honest about our lives. There are
singers and songwriters who are doing that, certainly who are being
honest. But to have the political analysis, to me is often missing today.
It's a very individualistic, isolated kind of point of view, which is
part of the times. It makes sense in the context of the world we live in,
but I don't want anyone to be fooled into thinking it's all been done and
there's no place for new, really radical, interesting, exciting thought
and work to be done. It's waiting to be done
PQ:Well, who comes close?
AD:In terms of songwriting and lyrics? I think Ani Difranco, probably
comes pretty close... because she's a wonderful writer...
PQ:And she really has an audience. The same young lesbians who don't know
you are really into her.
AD:That's right. Exactly. But, she doesn't have a political analysis. She
has no connection, as far as I can tell, with other women. It's like
she's alone, she's alone making these observations, she's alone in her
insights. I think the next step has to be finding a community, a way to
relate to other people. Now, we had consciousness-raisin. That's where
the women's movement came from. All those youngsters who don't know about
me probably never heard of consciousness-raising. That's what made the
women's movement in this country, were groups of women who got together.
That's how I came out. We got together and talked about our lives, which
formed the basis of our politics. Because we were in touch with
eachother, we found out the threads that connected us. So, there are all
these brilliant individuals, and Ani certainly is not the only one. There
are others, there's wonderful talent. I would like to see more of a sense
of community, a sense of shared vision, shared goals, and shared ideas...
community keeps coming up, that's the word that keeps coming up in my
vision and hope for the future.
PQ:It seems like a lot of the womyn's music festivals are an ideal place
for this kind of community to grow. You see a lot of the same performers
and names coming up at different festivals.
AD:Yes, that and softball has kept the lesbian community alive for a
couple of decades in this country. That is a community, you know, a
community of sports. But it still doesn't have the national scope and
consciousness that the festivals have created. Music doesn't play as big
a role in community anywhere else in the world that I've been, for
lesbians, that it does in the U.S. It's a very particular kind of
cultural-specific movement here. There are people there who've been
around. It's very important to maintain our traditions and for the
younger lesbians to know they're not alone, they didn't invent it, they
have a line, they have a whole tradition to refer to, to be a part of,
and to belong. It's so important to belong to something, and it's there.
PQ:I don't know if they're necessarily looking for it.
AD:It's because they don't know they need it. And, we do need it. At my
concerts, women come to them and say "Oh yeah, I remember now, this is
what it felt like, that's why it was so wonderful," and it's easy to
forget. Young women come there who have never been to a
conscious-lesbian. They can go to k.d. lang, they can go to Melissa, the
Indigo Girls, they can go to any number of lesbian performers who don't
have a political analysis, who don't recognize lesbian community as being
something special. And they can come away thinking they're just like
everybody else. Well we're not like everybody else. We have a role. It's
a wonderful privilege that we have. They're not aware of the privilege,
and we don't know it unless we're with others of us. Young women will
come to my concerts and be blown away because they had no idea that this
existed. If you tell it to them and explain it, they're like what? Huh?
It's like anything worthwhile, you can't explain it. You have to live it.
So, women who don't feel they need it, I think it's because they haven't
experienced it. The ones who did experience it back in the 70's or maybe
the 80's have been involved in their own families, their own settling
down, getting into their own little social circle and not going out
anymore. I don't go out the way I used to go out, and a lot of people
don't. But still, you forget what it was like, and you go back to an
event and think "oh my god, yes, this is it! I feel so good, so positive,
so enthusiastic!" And that's what I'm trying to reinstitute, with some
other people, here in the bay area.
PQ:Can you talk a little more about your role as a founding-mother of
womyn's music. Is it a role that has cultivated over the years?
AD:I was born with it, Karen. I was named after my uncle, who died in the
Spanish-Civil War three years before I was born. He died in 1937, I was
born in 1940 to communist parents. I was raised as a political activist.
They quit the party in 1954 after Stalin's criminal acts were revealed by
Kreschev, and it was a big shock because they were deceived by the party.
They forbid me to join after they left, but I joined when I was sixteen.
I was a member of the communist party in the 1950's when you could go to
jail for that, it was very dangerous. I had been on the political edge
all my life. This is my role. This is what I was born into, raised into,
and it's just part of my blood, that and music. So being a
singer/songwriter, writing about my experiences as a radical lesbian, as
an outsider, is as natural to me as breathing. It's who I am....
PQ:Any albums or recordings in the works?
AD:No, I haven't really had the time or focus to write any new songs in
the last few years. What I'm thinking of doing is to put Lavender Jane,
Living With Lesbians, XX Alix, and These Women Never Been Better onto
CD. That would be the next project.
PQ:As separate, together, or a collection?
AD:I was thinking the first two together and the next two. I think that
would make the most sense, but as far as new material, I haven't
written. I've added material that other people have written, but none of
my own. I imagine I'll start writing again when time becomes available.
PQ:What's on your gay agenda?
AD:Well, I wanna make the world safe for women and children. When the
world is safe for women, it'll be safe for everybody. And I mean safe
from violence, not safe from surprise, growth, change... from violence as
a way of life. That, and to let every woman know that she can be a
lesbian. I don't believe every woman is a lesbian or should be a
lesbian. But every woman can love herself, and that to me is what
lesbianism is all about. Feminism is each woman is her own final
authority, and lesbianism is each woman loves the woman in herself.
