Jill Johnston

Jill Johnston (born May 17, 1929) is a feminist author who wrote the seminal "Lesbian Nation" in 1973.

For many years beginning in 1959 and during the 1960s Jill Johnston was the dance critic for the Village Voice, the popular weekly downtown newspaper for New York City. She was friendly with many performers, performance artists, composers, poets and artists in New York City especially during the 1960s and 1970s. During the late 1960s Deborah Jowitt joined the paper and wrote a regular dance column, while Jill Johnston's dance column became a kind of weekly diary, chronicling her adventures in the New York Art World.

Johnston was a member of a 1971 New York City panel produced by Shirley Broughton as part of the "Theater for Ideas" series. The event was a vigorous debate on feminism with Norman Mailer, author; Germaine Greer, author; Diana Trilling, literary critic; and Jacqueline Ceballos, National Organization for Women president. The event was a showdown of intellect and personality. While Johnston read a poem culminating in on-stage lesbian sex (simulated and fully dressed) followed by a quick exit, Greer and Mailer continued to exchange verbal blows with each other and the audience for the rest of the 3 1/2 hour event.

As this incident illustrates, Johnston's self-described "east west flower child beat hip psychedelic paradise now love peace do your own thing approach to the revolution" often confounded her feminist allies as much as it did the conservative foes of gay and lesbian liberation. As recorded in "Lesbian Nation", Johnston often was at the center of controversies within the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Johnston's career as a dance critic was hampered by the controversy that attended the publication of Lesbian Nation and the publicity engendered by her dramatic style of lesbian feminist activism. She remained with the Village Voice until 1981 and has subsequently written freelance art and literary criticism. Along with the political memoirs, Lesbian Nation and Gullibles Travels, Johnston has published an anthology of dance criticism entitled "Marmalade Me" as well as the autobiographical "Mother Bound" and "Paper Daughter".

Described by one critic as "part Gertrude Stein, part e.e. cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown for good measure," Johnston's freeform, fluid writing style of the 1970s matched the colorful nature of the tales she recounts in "Lesbian Nation" and "Gullibles Travels". Her more recent work as a literary and art critic for Art in America and the "New York Times Review of Books" is more standard in tone and content. Early writing not collected in other volumes can be found in "Admission Accomplished" while the critical biography "Jasper Johns" represents an example of her later style.

Bibliography

* "Marmalade Me" (1971; revised 1998) - an anthology of short pieces on dance reprinted from "Village Voice"
* "Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution" (1973)
* "Gullibles Travels" (1974)
* "Mother Bound" (1983) - autobiographical
* "Paper Daughter" (1985) - autobiographical
* "Secret Lives in Art" (1994) - selected essays on literature, visual and performing arts
* "Jasper Johns" (1996) - critical biography of the artist
* "Admission Accomplished: the Lesbian Nation years (1970-75)" (1998) - anthology of earlier writing
* "At Sea On Land: Extreme Politics" (2005) Travel and with political commentary (againts governmental policies since 9/11.
* "England's Child: The Carillon and the Casting of Big Bells" (2008) A biography of the author’s father, Cyril F. Johnston. a foremost English bellfounder (Carillons) in the earlier half of the 20th century.

External links

* [http://www.jilljohnston.com/ Official website]
* [http://www.panmodern.com/rayjohnson/ray_panel.html Panel discussion on Correspondence Artist Ray Johnson featuring Jill Johnston]
* [http://texts.pattricejones.info/archives/6 Jill Johnston: (Con)Founding Mother of the Lesbian Nation (1999 profile published in LesbiaNation)]
* [http://texts.pattricejones.info/archives/7 1999 Interview with Jill Johnston conducted by pattrice jones]

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