Jill Johnston

Jill Johnston, 1985. Credit: Jack Manning/The New York Times/Redux.

Episode Notes

Sparks flew when radical lesbian feminist Jill Johnston sat down for an interview with Studs Terkel in 1973. Jill had just published a controversial manifesto called Lesbian Nation, which advocated that women break with men entirely. It was provocative stuff—even for the usually unflappable Studs.

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To learn more about Jill Johnston, read her New York Times obituary here and explore this website dedicated to her life and published works.   

Johnston wrote for the Village Voice for 15 years. She became known for her experimental writing style—punctuation and indentation optional—which reflected her affinity for the avant-garde cultural scene she covered. You can read some of her pieces here, here, and here. In two columns written in 1970 and 1971, Johnston came out as a lesbian; find out more about the first column here and read the second column, titled “Lois Lane Is a Lesbian,” here.

On April 30, 1971, Johnston participated in a legendary panel on women’s liberation, held at New York City’s Town Hall.  The event was billed as a battle of the sexes, in which the female panelists (who also included Germaine Greer and Diana Trilling) were to square off against moderator Norman Mailer, who had just published his controversial essay “The Prisoner of Sex.” The panel was the subject of the documentary Town Bloody Hall by Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, which you can watch here. Johnston’s raucous segment begins at 21:30 and ends with Johnston and two friends engaging in a memorable bit of proto-performance art when they start hugging and rolling around on stage.

In 1973, Johnston published Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution, a collection of essays from her Village Voice column. It was a seminal lesbian separatist work that argued for a complete break with men and male-dominated capitalist institutions. Hear Johnston discuss the book in this 1975 interview (click the link at the bottom to stream), read her 1973 interview with Lesbian Tide here, and check out this 2007 interview about the book’s legacy.  

Johnston discusses lesbian feminism here, starting at 39:49. To learn more about the subject, listen to lesbian feminist theorist Charlotte Bunch here. And check out this conversation (courtesy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives) between Johnston and Radicalesbian Martha Shelley about the pleasures and politics of being a lesbian on Shelley’s radio program, aptly titled Lesbian Nation. (Martha Shelley is featured in this Making Gay History episode.)

Johnston’s work had a profound impact on many of her lesbian contemporaries; read tributes by journalists Michele Kort and Victoria A. Brownworth here and here. But opposition to Johnston’s views came from many corners, including trans activists and more mainstream feminists like Betty Friedan, who once pronounced Johnston “the biggest enemy of the movement.” 

In 1993, Johnston married her longtime partner Ingrid Nyeboe in Denmark; read about the ceremony and see photos here. They married again in Connecticut in 2009, a year before Johnston’s death in September 2010.

Johnston ephemera: Watch 16mm clips of one of Johnston’s gatherings for lesbians here, courtesy of the Phyllis Birkby Papers at Smith College. And play this lesbian crossword puzzle on page 14, whose first clue reads “Jill Johnston’s book.”