another eye opens

Somehow I only just today learned of the death September 18 of Jill Johnston, the famously independent (cranky) lesbian feminist historian and art critic. I guess I was up at Easton Mountain and didn’t see her obituary in the New York Times. She was one of my earliest culture heroes. As a precocious queer teenager living on an Air Force base and going to high school in rural New Jersey in 1971-72, I somehow managed to get my hands on the Village Voice where I encountered her columns, which blew my budding-writer mind in several ways. She was openly and outrageously gay. She wrote about whatever she wanted to, including dance, art, and literature. She modeled herself on Gertrude Stein, a frequent reference. And she took a tremendous amount of freedom for herself as a writer, eschewing punctuation, capital letters, and paragraph breaks. Many people hated her column and thought it represented the worst kind of self-indulgent ’70s countercultural journalism. I couldn’t wait to read it. To this day, somewhere in my archive of clipping files, I still have a folder of Jill Johnston columns from those years at the Voice, including one headlined “you can’t choreograph a penis.” She published a collection of her columns called Marmalade Me, her best-known book is probably Lesbian Nation, and several other books, some of which I read (Gullibles Travels, Jasper Johns) and others I didn’t (Mother Bound). I didn’t keep up with her after a while, but she will always be in my pantheon of great writers and early influences.