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JILL JOHNSTON

JILL JOHNSTON

JILL JOHNSTON
Critic, Poet, Writer

POET and CRITIC

May 17, 1929 – September 18, 2010

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A Tribute by Susan Salinger

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’re shaken to the core, the world spins, and you miraculously land upright. You know at that moment that how you see, feel, and organize your world, the narrative that frames your sense of life, has changed. Crashing into Boston Harbor on a DC 10 can do that (laughed and wanted to have sex immediately afterwards).  Hearing the poet / critic Jill Johnston recite in Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s 1979 documentary Town Bloody Hall was another such moment (laughed and also wanted to have sex afterwards). Some experiences deliver knowledge that is deeply erotic.

Jill Johnston was the longstanding cultural critic for The Village Voice and author of Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution, Marmalade Me, The Dis-Integration of a Critic, and Admission Accomplished. Pattrice Jones called her prose style, “part Gertrude Stein, part E.E. Cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown in for good measure.”(1) In the 70’s, Betty Friedan proclaimed that the gay and feminist movements had nothing to do with each other. And when Friedan took to the microphone at a Long Island fundraiser, calling Jill the biggest enemy of the movement, Jill calmly dove into the pool and swam a few laps topless before she got out and stumbled into the flowerbeds.

Jill was another DC 10 crashing into the harbor. Both careened me into a deep, unexplored space that left me in an indescribable state. I felt a radical shift in my perception and expression of the world as I watched her recite at the podium in the Town Bloody Hall documentary, and I just wanted to have sex with her. Who wouldn’t. I suspect even Norman Mailer with all his dismissive smirkyness wanted to. Jill Johnston was smart, irreverent, sexy in a rough ocean kind of way, and hilarious. She swept you up with her look of a trickster and a kid who can’t believe she got away with it, and took you to the edge of language and belief systems.  Yes, “the erotic is the nursemaid of our deepest knowledge” (2) … and some experiences deliver knowledge that is deeply erotic.

You can stream Town Bloody Hall on youtube.com or on the Criterion Collection. The movie is great but if you can’t wait to see her, you can pop in at 22:24 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGYmyou0sKM

1) Pattrice Jones, LesbiaNation, 1999.

2) Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power, 1978.

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BETTE GORDON

BETTE GORDON
MM SERRA

MM SERRA