Jill
Johnston (May 17, 1929 – September 18, 2010) was an American feminist
author and cultural critic who wrote Lesbian Nation in 1973 and was a
longtime writer for The Village Voice. In 1993, in Denmark, she married
Ingrid Nyboe. The couple married again, in Connecticut, in 2009She was
also a leader of the lesbian separatist movement of the 1970s.  Johnston
also wrote under the pen name F. J. Crowe.

This
is the seventy-sixth post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

Biography
Born
as Jill Crowe in London, England in 1929, the only child of Olive
Marjorie Crowe (born 1901), an American nurse, and Cyril F. Johnston
(1884-1950), a British bellfounder and clockmaker whose family firm,
Gillett & Johnston, created the carillon of Riverside Church in New
York City. Her parents, who never married, separated when their daughter
was an infant, and Johnston's mother took her to Little Neck, Long
Island, New York, where she was raised.

After attending college in Massachusetts and Minnesota, Johnston received an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina.
In
1958 Johnston married Richard John Lanham, whom she divorced in 1964.
They had two children, a son, Richard Renault Lanham, and a daughter,
Winifred Brook Lanham.

Career
For many years beginning in 1959
and during the 1960s, Johnston was the dance critic for The Village
Voice, the 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 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 3½ 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 subsequently wrote freelance art and
literary criticism. Along with the political memoirs, Lesbian Nation and
Gullible's Travels, Johnston published an anthology of dance criticism
entitled Marmalade Me as well as the autobiographies 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 recounted in her books Lesbian Nation
and Gullibles Travels. Her later 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)
Gullible's 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 against 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.