Jill Johnston 1929-2010

At left: From Jill's website.





I started getting a buncha hits on Jill Johnston, whom I have mentioned only twice on this blog. I didn't realize she had passed, on September 18th.

Quite honestly? I was not a fan of her feminism, but her writing was wonderfully loopy and totally terrific, like merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels. She temperamentally seemed to be in direct opposition to the often-rigid, dogmatic 70s lesbian-separatism she championed. She did not become well-known until writing LESBIAN NATION: THE FEMINIST SOLUTION and decreeing that all women were lesbians, they just didn't know it yet.

And so, zany Jill, friend of Andy Warhol, Yoko and the Yippies, became a poster-girl for lesbian separatism, which was bloody weird.

The New York Times obit:

Ms. Johnston started out as a dance critic, but in the pages of The Voice, which hired her in 1959, she embraced the avant-garde as a whole, including happenings and multimedia events.

“I had a forum obviously set up for covering or perpetrating all manner of outrage,” she wrote in a biographical statement on her Web site, jilljohnston.com.

In the early 1970s she began championing the cause of lesbian feminism, arguing in “Lesbian Nation” (1973) for a complete break with men and with male-dominated capitalist institutions. She defined female relations with the opposite sex as a form of collaboration.

“Once I understood the feminist doctrines, a lesbian separatist position seemed the commonsensical position, especially since, conveniently, I was an L-person,” she told The Gay and Lesbian Review in 2006. “Women wanted to remove their support from men, the ‘enemy’ in a movement for reform, power and self-determination.”

At a debate on feminism at Town Hall in Manhattan in 1971, with Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos of the National Organization for Women sharing the platform with Norman Mailer, the moderator, and with a good number of the New York intelligentsia in attendance, she caused one of the great scandals of the period.

After reciting a feminist-lesbian poetic manifesto and announcing that “all women are lesbians except those that don’t know it yet,” Ms. Johnston was joined onstage by two women. The three, all friends, began kissing and hugging ardently, upright at first but soon rolling on the floor.

Mailer, appalled, begged the women to stop. “Come on, Jill, be a lady,” he sputtered.

The filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker captured the event in the documentary “Town Bloody Hall,” released in 1979. Mary V. Dearborn, in her biography of Mailer, called the evening “surely one of the most singular intellectual events of the time, and a landmark in the emergence of feminism as a major force.”

Now, was that a fabulous Yippie action or wasn't it?


Photo of Jill Johnston from culturevulture.net


Johnston also wrote a famous article in Ms magazine, basically trashing gay men and proclaiming drag was "mockery"--unfortunately, she was the one who started that whole meme. This was when I parted company with her, Yippie roots or no, because it seemed to me, drag was subversive and pro-feminist.

Johnston later became obsessed with locating her father, which I found rather bizarre for a separatist. In fact, let me be clear: it pissed me off. Someone who rants and raves about men for a decade, gets all gooey over DAD?!? You gotta be kidding me.

And she never seemed to see any inconsistency in that. Thus, I lost respect for her as a feminist, but never as a writer.

NYT again:

Ms. Johnston continued to write on the arts but took a strong political line with a marked psychoanalytic slant evident in “Jasper Johns: Privileged Information” (1996), which explored the artist’s works as a series of evasions and subterfuges rooted in conflict about his homosexuality, and in the two volumes of her memoirs: “Mother Bound” (1983) and “Paper Daughter” (1985), both of them subtitled “Autobiography in Search of a Father.”

Jill Johnston was born on May 17, 1929, in London and taken to the United States as an infant by her mother, Olive Crowe, after her father abandoned them both. She was reared by a grandmother in Little Neck, on Long Island.

Throughout her childhood she believed that her parents had divorced, but in 1950, when The New York Times ran a short obituary about her father, an English bell maker named Cyril F. Johnston, she learned the truth.

Her mother informed her that she and Johnston had never married. A lifelong fascination with this absent figure, whose company, Gillett & Johnston, supplied bells and carillons to churches and cathedrals all over the world, motivated her to write “England’s Child: The Carillon and the Casting of Big Bells” (2008), a biography of her father and a history of bell making.

Note to Jill: fascination with papa is not feminist. And why are you allowed to get all sentimental about daddy, but *I* am not supposed to like drag or sleeping with men? Hmph.

But there is still the art and the ego that obviously made the art possible:

She developed a singular prose style — what the writer Pattrice Jones, writing in the Web magazine LesbiaNation.com in 1999, called “part Gertrude Stein, part E.E. Cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown for good measure.”

One 1964 column began: “Fluxus flapdoodle. Fluxus concert 1964. Donald Duck meets the Flying Tigers. Why should anyone notice the shape of a watch at the moment of looking at the time?”

Ms. Johnston would soon shed this style and her amorphous politics, which she described in “Lesbian Nation” as her “east west flower child beat hip psychedelic paradise now love peace do your own thing approach to the revolution.”

In 1969, members of the Gay Liberation Front, correctly intuiting that the unidentified companion on her weekly adventures, chronicled in The Voice, was a woman, invited her to a meeting. Her political conversion began, and “Lesbian Nation” was published in 1973.

One of the best things I ever read about fame, was Johnston's account of her friendship with Yoko and John, and how Yoko couldn't go anywhere without John and vice versa. Jill wrote (paraphrasing) that if one was mega-famous, you could only be entirely yourself with people you loved and trusted, and then, you needed them around you all the time to remind you of who you really are.

I think of this concept often, whenever I think of the lack of privacy of the very famous. As a kid, I had wanted to be famous (like so many people) and after reading that passage as a teenager, changed my mind. It brought fame up close and personal to me, and I decided I didn't want any part of it.

Jill demystified and debunked FAME for me, and I owe her for that. That is why I am writing this.

Jill is survived by her spouse Ingrid Nyeboe, 2 children and 4 grandchildren.

Rest in Peace, Jill.

Norman Mailer 1923-2007

My first thought on hearing of the death of Norman Mailer, was that we might finally get a DVD release of the legendary Town Bloody Hall documentary. This event was initially advertised as a "debate about feminism" that turned into a free-for-all; Norman famously tells Jill Johnston to "act like a lady" as she deliberately gropes another woman (a sort of Yippie-lesbian public action) onstage. In every photo I have seen of the event, Germaine Greer always seems to be laughing her ass off (see link), and I always wondered: Did she and Norman have sex before or after the event? Was their affair the result of the event, or was the event the result of their affair? Inquiring minds want to know, and maybe we'll finally get some details, and a fun DVD, too.

And you know, that is the best summation of the life of Norman Mailer: There he was, in the middle of everything, always. The 60s belonged to Norman Mailer, author of countless books, essays and articles covering the rapid-fire changes of the decade. He was the scribe of the times, the man on the scene. (The only other writer who even comes close is Tom Wolfe, and it is amusing that they hated each other and took public jabs at each other, often.)

Everyone wanted to know what Norman thought of everything, even my mother. Nixon? Civil Rights? Vietnam? Men on the Moon? Feminism? What does Norman say? And he held forth, always, never at a loss for words. He gave more interviews than Pete Townshend. And he was always provocative, egotistical, verbose, insane, fascinating. Long before the word "edgy" entered the lexicon, Norman embodied it. He was an unapologetic misogynist, who stabbed one of his wives (Adele Morales) at a party, and yet, women lined up to get his autograph, and famous feminists wanted to debate him (and sleep with him). He fought in World War II (subject of his book The Naked and the Dead), ran for mayor of New York City, got arrested at antiwar demonstrations, won Pulitzers, testified to keep John Lennon in the country, conducted a nasty public feud with Gore Vidal, and even got an ex-convict-writer (Jack Henry Abbott) out of prison on parole, who then promptly killed someone. And so much more.

Bruce Bawer relates that when The Deer Park (1955), was published, Mailer sent a copy to Hemingway along with the following letter:

TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY
-- because finally after all these years
I am deeply curious to know
what you think of this.

-- but if you do not answer, or if you
answer with the kind of crap you
use to answer unprofessional writers,
sycophants, brown-nosers, etc., then
fuck you, and I will never attempt
to communicate with you again.

The package came back marked Address Unknown.

Mailer never attempted to communicate with Hemingway again.

He wrote like he was somewhere inside your head already, in the "New Journalism" style that Joan Didion and the aforementioned Tom Wolfe and Gore Vidal also helped make famous. In Armies of the Night, he explained in one sentence why the corn-fed kids from the heartland were in rebellion and marching on the Pentagon. Yes, it was the war in Vietnam, but it was more than that, too: "They hated the authority because the authority had lied," he memorably wrote. As a young girl, I remember reading the words and feeling chills. Yes, I thought, that's it.

In his truly amazing work, The Executioner's Song, he succeeded in bringing to life the reality of two young lovers on the fringes of society, Gary Gilmore and Nicole Baker, and takes you right into the heart of poverty, murder and death row. Surprisingly, the famous misogynist does not slight Nicole (a welfare mother married three times by age 19), and at one point delivered another great line about one of Nicole's exes interrogating her, "just enough to get her screaming."

Even as late as 1999, he was still expressing himself in his imitable fashion, and showing a talent for reading between the lines. From The Time of Our Time:

Hillary is wonderful. She not only defends, she attacks. She speaks of a right-wing conspiracy to destroy her husband. It satisfies our deep need in America to find a new conspiracy every year.

What powerful instincts are in Hillary. The first lady's features, when studied, are remarkable. On the brow and mouth of very few women is written so vast and huge a desire for power. Of course, she is loyal to her Bill, loyal certainly by her good side, but even more loyal out of darker and more powerful urges. For if she remains loyal to him she will yet become a legend in America, and that is necessary to satisfy what may be her true aim--to become the first woman elected president of the United States.

And in 2003, he wrote about the Iraq War also, as he had written about that other war that seems so similar (and unending) so long ago:

The armed forces had become the paradigmatic equal of a great young athlete looking to test his true size. Could it be that there was a bozo out in the boondocks who was made to order, and his name was Iraq? Iraq had a tough rep, but not much was left to him inside. A dream opponent. A desert war is designed for an air force whose state-of-the-art is comparable in perfection to a top-flight fashion model on a runway. Yes, we would liberate the Iraqis.

So we went ahead against all obstacles—of which the UN was the first. Wantonly, shamelessly, proudly, exuberantly, at least one half of our prodigiously divided America could hardly wait for the new war. We understood that our television was going to be terrific. And it was. Sanitized but terrific—which is, after all, exactly what network and good cable television are supposed to be.

Oh, my, yes--I cannot tell a lie: I will miss him.

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Listening to: The Beatles - I'm Only Sleeping
via FoxyTunes