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Jill Johnston (1929 - )
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 Admission
Accomplished : The Lesbian Nation Years, 1970-75 (High Risk Books)
by
Jill Johnston
As a
contributor to the Village Voice in the 1970's, Jill
Johnston was the first writer to come out as a lesbian in the mass
media. Her 1973 book, Lesbian Nation, was a bible for
militant feminists. This collection gathers more than seventy of
the wildly inventive rants, reviews and diatribes Johnston wrote
during that explosive era. What comes through in these writings is
Johnston's fierce and iconoclastic intelligence. Her signature
style of long, run-on, rarely indented paragraphs and the
uncapitalized "i" suggest the frenzy of change that took
place during the 1970's Women's Movement. Johnston was working to
find an appropriate shape to express the ideas inherent in radical
lesbianism. These essays play with notions of pop iconography in
"Lois Lane is a Lesbian", new family structures in
"Lesbian Mothers Ltd.," and undoing male artistic
privilege in "Zelda, Zelda, Zelda." "The
Wedding" includes a description of the lesbian marriage of
contemporary classical composer Pauline Oliveros. In all of these
essays, Johnston claims Gertrude Stein as her intellectual and
stylistic forerunner. Hopefully, this collection will spark a
reevaluation and appreciation of an important lesbian theorist and
writer. --Rebecca Brown
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By: Kate Bedford and Ara Wilson
Excerpt:
In this excellent index, Jill Johntston's Lesbian
Nation is listed as a key publication for the year 1973.
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by Rebecca Brown
From TheStranger.com
Excerpt:
The first woman to come out as a lesbian in the
mainstream media was Jill Johnston, art critic for the Village
Voice. She did so in 1970, one year after the Stonewall riots.
In 1973, Johnston was able to place Lesbian Nation with a
mainstream publisher. This book included essays with titles like
"The Making of a Lesbian Chauvinist," "Dyke
Nationalism and Heterosexuality," and my personal favorite,
"Lois Lane is a Lesbian." Recently, Johnston has said
this about her writing from the 1970s: "My whole mission...
was to mongrelize the language, deform and debase every
convention, create a freak of culture, engender a misbegotten blot
on the authorial landscape. In addition to lower-casing and
deparagraphizing, thieving quotes, standardizing the non sequitur,
decontextualizing narrative and glorifying the neologism, I
enjoyed writing unpunctuated and run-on sentences, and habitually
twisting grammatical norms and common usage." The novelty of
her style, Johnston went on to say, was meant to represent the
"birth of an historically unprecedented lesbian/feminist
identity." As Gertrude Stein had done before her, Johnston
reinvented American literary form and language. But while Stein
had done so in the 1930s and 1940s without making public
statements about her lesbianism, Johnston very publicly tied the
innovations of her writing style to her identity as a lesbian...
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By Jill Johnston
Excerpt:
In May 1989 the Danish Parliament granted
lesbians and gay men the right to civil marriage -- the result of
a 40-year campaign by gay-rights advocates. I was eligible to take
advantage of this new law because my partner, Ingrid Nyeboe, is a
Danish citizen. Since 1980 we have lived together in the United
States, creating a family that includes my son, daughter, and
grandchildren. On June 26, 1993, Ingrid and I were joined legally
in Odense, a city on the island of Fyn...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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