Jill Johnston
| Jill Johnston | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 17, 1929 London |
| Died | September 18, 2010 (aged 81) |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Author, cultural critic |
| Known for | Lesbian feminist activism |
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. She was also a leader of the lesbian separatist movement of the 1970s. Johnston also wrote under the pen name F. J. Crowe.
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.[1] 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.[2]
After attending college in Massachusetts and Minnesota, Johnston received an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
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 Brooke Lanham.[3]
In 1993, in Denmark, she married Ingrid Nyeboe. The couple married again, in Connecticut, in 2009.[4]
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 (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.
...
Wikipedia