The Brooklyn Rail

By most accounts, including her own, Jill Johnston contained multitudes. While “dance critic” and “lesbian feminist” are titles used to reflect the two main thrusts in her work, Johnston did not inhabit a binary world.

In a new book out October 29, 2024 from Duke University Press, Jill Johnston in Motion, author Clare Croft sets the task of braiding together these many, and shifting, identities through Johnston’s associative, witty, embodied, and highly idiosyncratic writing. Along the way, Croft develops “lesbian adjacencies” that locate Johnston in her radical time, scrutinizing the “intensity of whiteness” in her milieu and putting her in conversation with other queer writers and intellectuals. “Interruptions” appear between each chapter, honoring Johnston’s playful, disruptive nature with such anecdotes as her dancing on a rooftop in a Warhol film and snippets of letters from her dedicated readership.

Jill Johnston in Motion began in these very pages, in a 2017 essay that explored the complex choreography of Johnston’s writing as she publicly came out in “elliptical circuits” through several 1970s Village Voice columns. But the project soon morphed to include a companion book, The Essential Jill Johnston Reader.

“A lot of her writing was out of print,” said Croft. “I thought I was just going to write a book about her, but it became increasingly clear to me that there was just too much beautiful writing that people didn’t have easy access to.” So Croft organized selections from different phases of Johnston’s writing life side-by-side for the first time.

Croft and I spoke by Zoom last month about Johnston’s bifurcated legacy; reading her alongside lesbian and queer contemporaries like Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde; and working creatively with patriarchal, heteronormative archives.

Candice Thompson (Rail): There were two sides of Jill Johnston—or maybe thirty?—but the dance critic and the lesbian feminist activist have been viewed as discreet from each other. Reading your book, I couldn’t help but wonder if this separation was part of the reason she never appeared on a single syllabus in my graduate studies, which covered many of the things she is best at: criticism and the creative use of the “I” perspective. What do you think has been missing by not viewing them together?

Clare Croft: This book really began when I was sitting in the University of Michigan library early in my time on faculty here. It was 2010 and I saw the notices that Jill Johnston had died. I started reading her obituaries and I was shocked to learn from them that she was a lesbian feminist. I had no idea. And much like you, I’ve been to school a lot, most of it in some combination of dance history and performance studies—and a lot of gender studies. I was excited to see that there was this important figure, both in dance and in lesbian feminism, but also just really surprised I had no idea—I mean, I had a PhD at that point. Immediately I began reading the work that I hadn’t encountered, starting with Lesbian Nation (1973). It made me wonder: if I was an out lesbian who worked in dance studies and didn’t know this whole other part of Johnston’s life, how did that happen?

One reason for that is that she herself very publicly in the late sixties said, “I’m leaving dance” and moved on. On some level, she kind of bifurcated her life. But Johnston comes from two worlds that are often not given a lot of intellectual space and attention: dance studies and lesbian history. I think this kind of double marginalization of both her identities and the topics she cared about produced the reasons she’s been pushed to the side.

Also in gender studies, we don’t have many examinations of women who came into political consciousness through both radical feminism and gay liberation, and Johnston’s voice is at that intersection. The early seventies movements were so much more radical than some of our politics are now that I think they become kind of unfathomable. To really lean into and reconsider the radicalness of late sixties and early seventies political and artistic movements is the invitation Jill Johnston makes to her readers.

Rail: I find it unfathomable that most of it happened in a newspaper.

Croft: Yeah, it’s amazing to think. She is offering us a pathway to a lesbian feminist and queer future, and to note that the roadmap for that radical aesthetic and political agenda showed up in a newspaper in the late sixties and early seventies is just unbelievably exciting to me.

It’s important to understand her as related to, but not of, the New Journalism movement, which was associated with a kind of masculine excess, from Tom Wolfe to Hunter S. Thompson. And you see that excessive—in a really good way—prose from Johnston that’s constantly overflowing and playing with elements of art in journalism. There is almost an ethnographic sensibility where she’s completely embedded in the scene she’s writing about. A lot of those male New Journalists who become much more famous always maintain a voyeuristic sensibility, and to some degree, treat the people around them as freaks. But Jill writes beautifully about being a “freak” herself, and the value of the kind of freak she found, whether they were in a postmodern downtown art scene or a radical feminist, gay liberation movement.

Rail: In the book you also locate her alongside lesbian contemporaries in sections referred to as “lesbian adjacencies.”

Croft: The term was inspired by Annamarie Jagose, writing about representations of lesbians in fiction and her proposal that they are often presented as adjacent to either gay men or straight women. As a lesbian myself, that rang true, so I think that was the kernel of this concept. I wondered, were there exceptions to that? Might Jill be an exception? I started to think about the places where she was adjacent to other lesbians. Sontag was an early comparison for me; I tried, frankly, to figure out why Sontag is so incredibly famous and Jill Johnston is little known in comparison.

Rail: And then there is the term: lesbian. When you compare Johnston and Sontag, the term is a category Sontag wants to avoid while Johnston seems to find freedom, even humor, in it.

Croft: With Johnston there’s always more than one way to think about things, this kind of multitude of possibility. I use the words “spinning” and “swirling” a lot when I talk about what it’s like to read her writing, because, with some exceptions, she never really lands, and you’d kind of be missing the point to try to boil her down to something. She’s neither interested in following the dominant norm nor merely opposing it. This spectrum of possibilities is tied to how her political consciousness emerges through watching dance. Dance, somewhat like poetry, is an art form where there’s never just one meaning. And probably it’s better at asking questions than it is making a statement. I think Jill takes that on as a kind of political stance that offers a tremendous freedom.

She is a kinesthetic writer, and that’s where this old binary of dancing and writing so completely falls apart, because her writing is really present to motion, and perhaps even catalyzes motion inside of you as you’re reading. Sontag fits more into a critical objectivity, and even as that idea has been debunked by feminist and Black and queer thinkers, we still find ourselves often drifting back to some notion of objectivity, and desire for it, that Johnston was just hands down uninterested in.

Lorde and Johnston are also very different writers, but Lorde’s Zami in particular, as a biomythography, and Johnston’s many experiments with autobiography are super interesting reads together. I do think there was something in dance—I call it “poetic porosity” in the book—that Lorde was drawn to, and I saw that as an interesting overlap in their approaches to writing.

Rail: These comparisons also provided space to explore how little race figured into Johnston’s writing and perspective. I’m curious at what point in your process you felt you had to address that near total whiteness?

Croft: I think from the very outset, there was the question of whiteness as it relates to the story we’ve come to know of postmodern dance, especially in Judson. Watching Trajal Harrell’s Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (2009–17)—where he imagined what would have happened if the Harlem vogue scene and the Judson scene had had some relationship with people moving between them—was a big moment in my own thinking, well before I had any notion that I was doing this project. I really appreciated the provocation that he made in that work. And then certainly the ways in which—and lots of people have written about this in both Black and queer studies—there’s been a persistent attachment between the word lesbian and whiteness. Those were things I thought a lot about in my own life as a white lesbian.

Then, reading Johnston’s many autobiographies, I saw just how incredibly white her world was, which had to do with gentrification and “urban renewal projects” that were happening in the neighborhood she lived in, in lower Manhattan. They were neighborhoods that were not just white but getting whiter in her adult lifetime. Also, she writes about recognizing that she was part of scenes where people were drawing on Black culture without incorporating Black people, which is a classic definition of racial appropriation, and certainly one that’s still with us today. One of the cool things about doing this work was that I read twenty years of Village Voice issues, not just Jill’s columns in them, and saw the discussion of race evolve in the publication. There was real coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, but not always a self-conscious discussion of how race was unfolding in the Village itself.

Rail: Thinking about such gaps makes me want to ask about your imaginative, speculative approach to the archives and the presence and absence of lesbians in them?

Croft: As a dance historian who does archival work as part of all my scholarship, “how do you look for dance in the archive?” is always an interesting question. As time passes, it becomes easier and easier as we have more video. But the long-standing challenge is expressed well in Stacy Wolf’s article “Desire in evidence,” which I write about in the introduction. Wolf is in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts theater collection, and asks, where are the lesbians? Everything here is saying they aren’t here, yet I know they are.

I work in archives and do a lot of oral history work, though oral histories wound up not being as big a part of this book project. But when you do oral histories, you write field notes, the stuff that might not be captured on the recording but is there. And at some point, I started doing that with archival visits as well, writing about the experience of being in the archive. I started it partially just to try to remember the tiny thoughts that might turn out to be useful later. But I just had all these wild experiences that I was writing about in these field notes, whether it be having the security guard try to throw me out of the women’s bathroom at the dance collection, or a hilarious scene I describe at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The stories were just too good to let go of—maybe that’s my journalist background.

I hope this is different for young people now, but it didn’t seem to me, for a lot of the years I was training and studying, that being a lesbian in the dance world was a very big thing. And maybe if I’d been living in downtown New York in the eighties, I would have thought differently of that. But reckoning with Jill Johnston over the years has meant getting to learn about a history that allows me to be who I am. Her imaginative storytelling, and her writing style, invite you to fill in these gaps.