New Directions in Queer Music Scholarship (LGBTQ Study Group)

"Jill Johnston's Closet Criticism"
Kerry O'Brien (Cornish College of the Arts)

"This is your local reporter always 'looking elsewhere'-for the nonthing of the thing-for whatever isn't settled, labeled, canned, caulked, cherished, claimed, and consumed," wrote Village Voice critic Jill Johnston in 1967. Known for her idiosyncratic writing style––infused with run-on streams of consciousness, non-sequiturs, and confessional passages––Johnston wrote less about concerts and more about her everyday life. As a critic, she rejected the notion that criticism was a secondary art form, subservient to an artist or an artwork. Instead, she aimed to write "closet criticism," a type of writing that centered her own subject position and drew attention to the quotidian or closeted parts of experience, typically off limits in journalism. Johnston herself was not closeted. By the early 1970s, she was best known as a lesbian separatist and author of Lesbian Nation (1973). For Johnston, the personal was not just political. Personal experience had aesthetic significance that she deemed newsworthy. This paper examines Johnston's arts criticism and focuses on two main events: first, her reporting on composer Pauline Oliveros's lesbian wedding, notable as a political event and as a daylong intermedia event; second, Johnston's appearance on a women's liberation panel, where she read from her weekly column. In both instances, Johnston posited lesbian feminism as a kind of radical commitment to the self, a stance that informed both her style of arts criticism and the history of intermedia that she chronicled.