Feminist author Jill Johnston Dies at 81

Feminist author, columnist for the Village Voice, author of multiple books including Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution and one of the first out lesbians in the mainstream media passed away this last weekend.

The Vancouver Observer writes about her playfully in a lovely obituary,

Thespian lemonist, dance cricket, and irrepressible funster, Jill Johnston seemed to be everywhere in the 1970s—in the Village Voice, on the Dick Cavett Show, in Time magazine. And then she wasn’t. And then she appeared again in a conversation with the sound poet Anne Witten in 1985 on an island off the coast of Maine.

Feisty, irreverent, difficult, incomprehensible, surreal, as one critic put it, she was “part Gertrude Stein, part E. E. Cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown for good measure.”

It’s midnight the day after her death, and I still can’t find an obituary anywhere but on her own website, where her lover, Ingrid, writes: “May her liberated spirit guide us on our paths.”

You can read more about her life here.