Johnston, Jill

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JOHNSTON, Jill

JOHNSTON, Jill (b. 17 May 1929), essayist and art critic.

Jill Johnston, the daughter of Cyril Frederick Johnston and Olive Margaret Crowe Johnston, began life in London, England. Raised to believe that her father was an English aristocrat who had died in her early childhood, Johnston discovered during college that he actually had been a bell maker who died much later and that her parents had never married. In Mother Bound, the first volume of Johnston's two-volume Autobiography in Search of a Father, she explores the psychological turmoil of growing up under the cloud of a massive deception and without a father. Hospitalized twice for schizophrenia, Johnston has attributed some of her troubles with mental illness to the difficulties of such a childhood.

Johnston's early history showed no signs of the radicalism that she would later espouse. She attended an exclusive girl's boarding school and then graduated from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in 1951. In 1958 she married Richard Lanham. The couple had two children, a son and a daughter, but divorced in 1964. With Johnston's approval, Lanham retained custody of their children. After she came out as a lesbian, Johnston's ability to parent her offspring was further complicated. Angered by Johnston's openness about her sexuality, Lanham tried to block her from contact with the children. Ambivalent about motherhood, the lesbian feminist Johnston would later call for a family form based on communities of women.

Before her marriage to Lanham, Johnston worked first as a dancer and then, in 1957, became an art and dance critic, a career that eventually provided her with enormous public visibility. Two years later, in 1959, Johnston joined the then-underground New York newspaper, the Village Voice, as its "Dance Journal" columnist. The newspaper, much more radical than its later incarnation, reported on the New York City avant-garde. Johnston would write for the Voice until 1978, covering dance, painting, sculpture, multimedia, and other "happenings." She also served as a critic and columnist for the New York City–based publications Art News (1959–1965) and Art in America (1983–1987).

In 1965 Johnston began incorporating personal anecdotes into her criticism. The use of the autobiographical form enabled her to connect the personal to the political and artistic. This highly subjective approach, which represented a radical departure from existing norms and from standard conceptions about the role and function of art criticism, shocked the art establishment.

By the early 1970s Johnston had adopted a neo-Dadaist style of writing that would become her trademark. She broke the rules of syntax and used free association to create an open-ended form of expression that allowed a reader to freely enter or exit her world. Like Gertrude Stein, the lesbian writer whom she regarded as her intellectual and stylistic forerunner, Johnston deliberately violated literary conventions. Her essays would often run on for pages without capitalization or paragraphs, and in their attempts to interpret, describe, and analyze in such a format, they came to symbolize the tumultuous social changes of their time.

Whereas Stein remained quiet about her sexuality, Johnston very publicly tied the innovations of her writing style to her identity as a lesbian. Johnston came out personally around 1969. She came out publicly in the 4 March 1971 Village Voice essay "Lois Lane Is a Lesbian," a piece that is reprinted in her 1973 collection, Lesbian Nation. The book, the title of which soon became part of the lexicon, includes a diverse assortment of essays: a lesbian wedding ceremony is discussed in "The Wedding," new family structures in "Lesbian Mothers Ltd.," and the undoing of male artistic privilege in "Zelda, Zelda, Zelda."

Lesbian Nation also asserted the centrality of lesbianism to the feminist revolution. Famously arguing that all women are lesbians and that a feminist revolution is not possible without a lesbian one, Johnston participated in the ferocious struggles within the women's liberation movement of the early 1970s. She advised women to retreat from men and build a lesbian nation at the grass-roots level.

Johnston became more moderate with age. She dropped the antifamily, antimonogamy leitmotif of her earlier work and distanced herself from her earlier radicalism. In 1980 she began living with Ingrid Nyeboe, a Danish citizen. Taking advantage of a 1989 act passed by the Danish Parliament that granted lesbians and gay men the right to marry, Johnston and Nyeboe married in Odense, Denmark, on 26 June 1993. Johnston now lives in Massachusetts as part of a family that includes her son, daughter, and grandchildren.