Jill Johnston, a longtime cultural critic for The Village Voice whose daring, experimental prose style mirrored the avant-garde art she covered and whose book “Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution”spearheaded the lesbian separatist movement of the early 1970s, died in Hartford on Saturday. She was 81 and lived in Sharon, Conn.” New York Times

I read Jill’s Village Voice column religiously in the 1970s. She was an outlaw and she captured my heart and mind. She once described her style of writing as “east west flower child beat hip psychedelic paradise now love peace do your own thing approach to the revolution.” Her book ‘Lesbian Nation’ (1973) had a huge influence on me and the way I approached the word, the world and women. Like Bukowski and Lester Bangs, Jill’s prose was energetic, alive and provocative. As a young man, reading her essays on the feminist movement, sexual politics and lesbianism wasn’t an act of penance for being male, they were exhilarating, a punk rock call to arms that transcended the subject of sexual identity and became a universal “fuck you” to stale attitudes and broken down systems of thought. Johnston was my hero. The dyke of my dreams.

This video clip is from D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus documentary Town Bloody Hall.

At a debate on feminism at Town Hall in Manhattan in 1971, with Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos of the National Organization for Women sharing the platform with Norman Mailer, the moderator, and with a good number of the New York intelligentsia in attendance, Jill Johnston caused one of the great scandals of the period. After reciting a feminist-lesbian poetic manifesto and announcing that “all women are lesbians except those that don’t know it yet,” Ms. Johnston was joined onstage by two women. The three, all friends, began kissing and hugging ardently, upright at first but soon rolling on the floor. Mailer, appalled, begged the women to stop. “Come on, Jill, be a lady,” he sputtered. The filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker captured the event in the documentary “Town Bloody Hall,” released in 1979. Mary V. Dearborn, in her biography of Mailer, called the evening “surely one of the most singular intellectual events of the time, and a landmark in the emergence of feminism as a major force.”

Jill Johnston was a revolutionary with a take no prisoners approach and an enormous sense of humor. I will miss you, my sister.