JILL JOHNSTON, born on this date, (d: 9/18/2010) was a British-born American feminist author and cultural critic. She is most famous for her radical lesbian feminism book, Lesbian Nation 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 Jill Crowe in London, the only child of Olive Marjorie Crowe, an American nurse, and Cyril F. Johnston, an English bellfounder and clockmaker whose family firm, Gillett & Johnston, created the carillon of Riverside Church in New York City. Her aunt was inventor Nora Johnston. After her father abandoned them, her mother took Jill to Little Neck, Queens, New York, where she was raised by a grandmother.

In the mid-1950s, Johnston moved to New York City to study dance under Jose Limón, but turned to writing after she broke her foot. Beginning in 1959, Johnston served as 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 associated with the Judson Dance Theater, and championed postmodern movements like Fluxus and artists like Yvonne Rainier, Robert Morris, Merce Cunningham, and Lucinda Childs. During the late 1960s, Deborah Jowitt joined the paper and wrote a regular dance column for the Voice, while Johnston’s dance column became a kind of weekly diary, chronicling her adventures in the New York art world. She became involved with gay and feminist activism in 1969, when Lois Hart and Suzanne Bevier encouraged her to contribute to Come Out!, the newsletter for the Gay Liberation Front.

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; Jacqueline Ceballos, National Organization for Women president, and Johnston herself. The event was also billed as an intellectual “Battle of the Sexes” – effectively promoting Mailer’s then-just-published, feminism-critical book The Prisoner of Sex (1971). When the time came for her to make her introductory remarks, Johnston read a poem, after which two feminist friends came onstage and the three simulated (fully dressed) three-way lesbian sex (indulging in a bit of feminist Guerilla theatre, which she admitted she had learned from the Yippies) and quickly exited. Despite this colorful interruption, Greer and Mailer continued to exchange verbal blows with each other (and the audience) for the remainder of the 3½ hour event. This event was widely written about (since so many writers were in attendance, including Susan Sontag and Cynthia Ozick) and filmed by the now-legendary documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, eventually becoming the cult-documentary titled Town Bloody Hall.

Johnston was also one of the first countercultural and lesbian writers at Ms. magazine, eventually coming to the conclusion that the magazine was too mainstream, ultimately presenting feminism as palatable, family-friendly and safe. On another occasion, Johnston grew bored at a poolside press conference given by feminist Betty Friedan, and so decided to strip off her top and take a swim.

Described by one critic as “part Gertrude Stein, part e.e. cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown for good measure,” Johnston’s freeform, fluid writing style of the 1970s matched the colorful nature of the tales recounted in her books Lesbian Nation and Gullibles Travels. Her later work as a literary and art critic for Art in America and the New York Times Review of Books is more standard in tone and content. Early writing not collected in other volumes can be found in Admission Accomplished while the critical biography Jasper Johns represents an example of her later style.

Johnston is the subject of one of Andy Warhol’s portrait films, Jill, a 4½-minute silent movie shot in black and white (1963). She also performed in John Cage’s Music Walk in 1962, and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Jill Johnston Dancing.

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. In 1993, she married Ingrid Nyeboe in Denmark in a Fluxus performance featuring Geoffrey Hendricks. The couple married again, in Connecticut, in 2009.

In September 2010, Johnston suffered a stroke in Hartford, Connecticut. She died eight days later, on September 18, 2010, at the age of 81.