'All the nations came from that': On the Queer Legacy of Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation

In 2015 poet Eileen Myles was asked: “Young, queer poets coming up today have an Eileen Myles to look up to. Who’d you have?” Myles replied: “There was Jill Johnston. So many of us came to New York because of Jill; we read her column in The Village Voice. The book she wrote was called Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution, and Queer Nation came from that. All the nations came from that.” In Lesbian Nation, published in 1973, Johnston assembles language for living a lesbian life—casting national belonging and selfhood as dynamic, fractured, fragile, and defiantly queer. On the first page, Johnston instructs: “This book should be read like an interlocking web of personal experience and history and events of the world forming a picture of an evolving political revolutionary consciousness of one who was female who emerged from straight middle unconscious postwar amerika.” Taking Myles’s claim very seriously, my paper traces the queer legacy of Lesbian Nation as it impacted artists, poets, and activists through the 1980s and into the early 1990s. My ambition is to assemble a queer genealogy that centers lesbian feminism. As Sarah Ahmed asserts in her 2017 book Living a Feminist Life: “Lesbians are not a step on a path that leads in a queer direction. [...] By holding on to the figure of the lesbian as full of potential, we are not giving up on queer; rather, we are refusing to assume that being queer means giving up on lesbian feminism.”