Jill Johnston: Liberating the Boy Within Her
by Elizabeth Zimmer
OCTOBER 4, 2010 TAGS:
When the sorority of culture mavens got word of Jill Johnston’s death in Sharon, Conn., we were shocked. We couldn’t believe she was 81. She’d always been our lodestar and somehow our contemporary.
Forty years or so ago, I was a bewildered young wife living in Halifax and teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. My primary link with New York, from which I’d recently emigrated, was my subscription to The Village Voice, where I read Johnston, who had been writing there since 1959.
In the beginning she wrote about dance from the inside, as a performer (she’d trained with modern doyenne Doris Humphrey and then fallen under the spell of Merce Cunningham, John Cage and their avant-garde, anything-goes colleagues) as well as an observer, letting us in on the early paroxysms of the post-modern revolution. But as the ’60s heated up, she became the town crier for another revolution, one of few women with a regular platform in the print media at the time. In 1965 she gave up dance criticism and let her stream of evolving consciousness run free.
Johnston got it, the whole “women’s liberation” thing, at least a decade before the average American woman awoke to the cataclysmic issues involved. Married in 1958 and the mother of two children, she separated from her husband six years later. Struggling to maintain a home for her son and daughter on the pittance she earned as a journalist, she finally let them go live with her ex-husband and his next wife.
She came out as a lesbian in 1971 (apparently the first woman to announce her sexual orientation in the mass media), declaring that “All women are lesbians except those who don’t know it yet.” She “flipped out” more than once in an era when doing so was considered by some, like R.D. Laing, to be yet another form of liberation. She was, for a while, a lesbian separatist, refusing to sleep in the same house with men, but the passing years softened that stance.
Johnston was a blogger before the term (or the Internet) existed; she was unpaid for years at the fledgling Voice. Her earth-shaking Lesbian Nation, a 1973 collection of her columns, is out of print; the two copies available on Amazon are selling for $169.75. Her eight other books range from compilations of her experimental, practically Joycean journalism to art criticism, memoir, and a biography of her father.
Mother Bound, which Knopf published in 1983, explores Johnson’s harrowing relationship with her single working mother, who left young Jill with her grandmother while she spent weekdays as the nurse at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Soon after, Jill was sent to boarding school. Mother Bound, perhaps even more than Lesbian Nation, also serves as a microscope trained on the city’s turbulent downtown art scene in the early ’60s, where Johnston careened from bed to bed, often inebriated to mask a natural reticence, looking for a love that didn’t oppress or exploit her. At this point she “was not ‘out’ in my head, I myself disapproved of what I was doing.” She came to believe that claiming to be a feminist while living with a man was, in a real sense, collaborating with the enemy.
“The assumption of male superiority was so profound that it utterly escaped notice; to notice it was a breach of conduct…. I became someone who did not know her place, and having no knowledge of my place, I became an instant anarchist.” She created uproars in various public arenas largely because she could, upstaging Norman Mailer at a notorious public forum in 1971.
From earliest adolescence, Johnston realized that she was “a boy,” but the repressive nature of her family life and the buttoned-up social structures of the era made it impossible for her even to formulate her sexual conundrum, let alone act on it. “No amount of love and pleasure was likely to withstand the pressure to think straight,” she wrote. In the mid-’60s she set up housekeeping with a much younger, conventionally beautiful female dancer. “Having left school and turned into a dancer, then into a wife and mother and finally into a floozie, I was now ready to be a boy again.” The relationship crumbled and so did her sanity.
Applying various Freudian, not to mention mythological, templates to her own situation, she extruded prose that at some periods was opaque and self-involved. But luminous insights gleam from every other paragraph, perceptions that fueled a revolution in sexual politics. “Agencies of change are the subject of a vast world literature,” she wrote in Mother Bound, “to which I add my own story.”
Late in her life Johnston began publishing a regular column on the web, reprinted at www.danceinsider.com, which broke the news on Sept. 18 of her death. She also wrote a couple of wonderful books about art, politics, and carillon bells, available at www.jilljohnston.com. She formed a stable, 30-year relationship with Ingrid Nyeboe, whom she married twice and described as her “helper and collaborator.” Nyeboe, a Dane, maintains the useful, eloquent website, where tributes to Johnston continue to accumulate.
Elizabeth Zimmer writes about the arts for print and digital media around the world.
Forty years or so ago, I was a bewildered young wife living in Halifax and teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. My primary link with New York, from which I’d recently emigrated, was my subscription to The Village Voice, where I read Johnston, who had been writing there since 1959. In the beginning she wrote about dance from the inside, as a performer (she’d trained with modern doyenne Doris Humphrey and then fallen under the spell of Merce Cunningham, John Cage and their avant-garde, anything-goes colleagues) as well as an observer, letting us in on the early paroxysms of the post-modern revolution. But as the ’60s heated up, she became the town crier for another revolution, one of few women with a regular platform in the print media at the time. In 1965 she gave up dance criticism and let her stream of evolving consciousness run free.
Johnston got it, the whole “women’s liberation” thing, at least a decade before the average American woman awoke to the cataclysmic issues involved. Married in 1958 and the mother of two children, she separated from her husband six years later. Struggling to maintain a home for her son and daughter on the pittance she earned as a journalist, she finally let them go live with her ex-husband and his next wife.
She came out as a lesbian in 1971 (apparently the first woman to announce her sexual orientation in the mass media), declaring that “All women are lesbians except those who don’t know it yet.” She “flipped out” more than once in an era when doing so was considered by some, like R.D. Laing, to be yet another form of liberation. She was, for a while, a lesbian separatist, refusing to sleep in the same house with men, but the passing years softened that stance.
Johnston was a blogger before the term (or the Internet) existed; she was unpaid for years at the fledgling Voice. Her earth-shaking Lesbian Nation, a 1973 collection of her columns, is out of print; the two copies available on Amazon are selling for $169.75. Her eight other books range from compilations of her experimental, practically Joycean journalism to art criticism, memoir, and a biography of her father.
Mother Bound, which Knopf published in 1983, explores Johnson’s harrowing relationship with her single working mother, who left young Jill with her grandmother while she spent weekdays as the nurse at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Soon after, Jill was sent to boarding school. Mother Bound, perhaps even more than Lesbian Nation, also serves as a microscope trained on the city’s turbulent downtown art scene in the early ’60s, where Johnston careened from bed to bed, often inebriated to mask a natural reticence, looking for a love that didn’t oppress or exploit her. At this point she “was not ‘out’ in my head, I myself disapproved of what I was doing.” She came to believe that claiming to be a feminist while living with a man was, in a real sense, collaborating with the enemy.
“The assumption of male superiority was so profound that it utterly escaped notice; to notice it was a breach of conduct…. I became someone who did not know her place, and having no knowledge of my place, I became an instant anarchist.” She created uproars in various public arenas largely because she could, upstaging Norman Mailer at a notorious public forum in 1971.
From earliest adolescence, Johnston realized that she was “a boy,” but the repressive nature of her family life and the buttoned-up social structures of the era made it impossible for her even to formulate her sexual conundrum, let alone act on it. “No amount of love and pleasure was likely to withstand the pressure to think straight,” she wrote. In the mid-’60s she set up housekeeping with a much younger, conventionally beautiful female dancer. “Having left school and turned into a dancer, then into a wife and mother and finally into a floozie, I was now ready to be a boy again.” The relationship crumbled and so did her sanity. Applying various Freudian, not to mention mythological, templates to her own situation, she extruded prose that at some periods was opaque and self-involved. But luminous insights gleam from every other paragraph, perceptions that fueled a revolution in sexual politics. “Agencies of change are the subject of a vast world literature,” she wrote in Mother Bound, “to which I add my own story.”
Late in her life Johnston began publishing a regular column on the web, reprinted at www.danceinsider.com, which broke the news on Sept. 18 of her death. She also wrote a couple of wonderful books about art, politics, and carillon bells, available at www.jilljohnston.com. She formed a stable, 30-year relationship with Ingrid Nyeboe, whom she married twice and described as her “helper and collaborator.” Nyeboe, a Dane, maintains the useful, eloquent website, where tributes to Johnston continue to accumulate.
Elizabeth Zimmer writes about the arts for print and digital media around the world.
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