Out Feminist Writer Jill Johnston Dies
Jill Johnston, a Village Voice dance critic, free-form cultural columnist and author of the seminal feminist book Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution, has died at age 81.
An Associated Press story reported that Johnson died Sept. 18 following a stroke. She is survived by her wife, Ingrid Nyeboe. The couple lived in Connecticut, where marriage equality has been legal since 2008. The two had married in Denmark in 1993, but married once more in Connecticut last year.
A Sept. 21 obituary in the New York Times recalled that Johnston had been noted for her "avant-garde" writing style. Of her cultural beat with the Village Voice, Johnston later wrote, "I had a forum obviously set up for covering or perpetrating all manner of outrage," the New York Times article recalled.
Johnston's 1973 book Lesbian Nation called for feminists to separate themselves from male-driven social norms and from men themselves. In an interview, Johnston told the Gay and Lesbian Book Review that "a lesbian separatist position seemed the commonsensical position, especially since, conveniently, I was an L-person," the obituary reported. Two years before the publication of Lesbian Nation, Johnston proclaimed in a public address at Town Hall in Manhattan that "[A]ll women are lesbians." Johnston and two female friends illustrated this by embracing and then dropping to the floor together as a flustered Norman Mailer stood by.
According to the New York Times and to a Wikipedia article, Johnston was born in England but moved with her mother to the United States in infancy. Though in her youth Johnston long believed that her mother and father had divorced, she later learned that she had been born out of wedlock.
Johnston's website boasts numerous accolades for Johnston's career and writings. "It is quite possible that Jill Johnston is one of the most important, radical, and innovative writers of her time," a quote attributed to Gregory Battcock states. A snippet from The New York Review of Books praises Johnston's striking literary style, saying, "Johnston comes on like a flood, vivacious, mile-a-minute, with an uncontrollable eloquence."
"Someday, whenever the tangled histories of the interdisciplinary sixties art scene, of new journalism and experimental female/feminist autobiographical writing, or of lesbians and the avant-garde, get written, Jill Johnston's life and work will receive key billing," reads a quote attributed to Liz Kotz.
