Arguing in the Kitchen with Jill Johnston
Jill Johnston’s 1974 book, Gullibles Travels, was the travel guide by which I navigated my lesbian youth, its wild tales of psychedelic yet political queer debauchery providing the necessary female counterpoint to the boy-heavy tales of bar hopping told by the gay men in the makeshift family to which I fled from my biological family of origin. They taught me how to be fabulously gay. So different from the boys at the disco and also from the tradition-bound dykes at the local bars, Johnston offered me a model of truly transgressive lesbian identity.
So imagine my surprise, more than 20 years later, to find myself standing in my kitchen arguing with Jill Johnston about gay marriage. It happened like this: I noticed that a new lesbian webzine was using the name of Johnston’s most influential book (the 1973 Lesbian Nation) without any mention of the history of that phrase. I offered to write a profile of Johnston for the site and they countered by asking me to interview her too. And thus I found myself standing up in the kitchen, tethered to the tape recorder hooked to the telephone on the wall, struggling to stay cool as the anti-monogamist hero of my youth asserted gay marriage to be the issue, declaring those who (like me) worry about the inherently patriarchal nature of marriage to be “crazy” and “prejudiced.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. In her heyday, Johnston was rather noted for the arrogance with which she asserted her positions. Her extremity was part of her charm even as it was aggravating. And, I’ve noted in the course of years of activism in different movements, those who charge forward with truly new ideas in the face of strong cultural opposition do tend to share a certain hard-headedness.
All of which is to say, I’ve just posted my 1999 profile of Jill Johnston, along with the unexpurgated transcript of the edited interview with Jill Johnston that accompanied it in my new text archive. Have a look! The profile may disabuse you of some stereotypes you might hold about lesbian feminists of the 60s and 70s. (Hint: There’s a lot more sex than you might expect.) And, once we got done arguing about gay marriage, Jill Johnston and I did get talking about some interesting ideas about how mother-daughter dynamics play out politically in relation to lesbianism.
