Admission Accomplished : The Lesbian Nation Years, 1970-75 (High Risk Books) [Paperback]

Jill Johnston (Author)

Book Description

Series: High Risk Books | Publication Date: April 1, 1998

These essays, many of which appeared in the author's books "Lesbian Nation" and "Gullibles Travels", break with convention and tackle social issues still relevant today: coming out and "outing" public icons; gay marriage and monogamy; solidarity and betrayal between gay men and lesbians, and between straight feminists and lesbians; the men's movement; and misogyny.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As a contributor to the Village Voice in the 1970's, Jill Johnston was the first writer to come out as a lesbian in the mass media. Her 1973 book, Lesbian Nation, was a bible for militant feminists. This collection gathers more than seventy of the wildly inventive rants, reviews and diatribes Johnston wrote during that explosive era. What comes through in these writings is Johnston's fierce and iconoclastic intelligence. Her signature style of long, run-on, rarely indented paragraphs and the uncapitalized "i" suggest the frenzy of change that took place during the 1970's Women's Movement. Johnston was working to find an appropriate shape to express the ideas inherent in radical lesbianism. These essays play with notions of pop iconography in "Lois Lane is a Lesbian", new family structures in "Lesbian Mothers Ltd.," and undoing male artistic privilege in "Zelda, Zelda, Zelda." "The Wedding" includes a description of the lesbian marriage of contemporary classical composer Pauline Oliveros. In all of these essays, Johnston claims Gertrude Stein as her intellectual and stylistic forerunner. Hopefully, this collection will spark a reevaluation and appreciation of an important lesbian theorist and writer. --Rebecca Brown

From Library Journal

This collection of Johnston writings reminds us how far American society has come with respect to gender and sexuality and how far it has to go. The 56 essays in this book reintroduce us to an original thinker who shares her mixed bag of goodies?a melange of literary criticism; articulate descriptions of coming out, gay marriage, misogyny, philogyny, and parenting; and the playful use of language. She is forthright about her language, making no apologies for its fire or its irreverence. As she states in her introduction, she became a "belated mother" to her two children in 1980, after realizing that families were being re-created, the nuclear family as we have known it was not the only alternative, and she was not a failure as a mother and as a woman. Readers will note how far-reaching Johnston's perspective was; her "radical" espousals have become part and parcel of today's rhetoric and laid the groundwork for other writers coming out in a mass-media context. Recommended for all academic libraries and especially those with large lesbian/gay and feminist collections.?Laura J. Bender, Univ. of Arizona
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail (April 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852424508
• ISBN-13: 978-1852424503
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,786,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage Jill Johnston!, March 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Admission Accomplished : The Lesbian Nation Years, 1970-75 (High Risk Books) (Paperback)

One cannot thank Serpent's Tail enough for making this most significant, vital and hugely entertaining collection of writings by Jill Johnston available. Hers was a voice of assurance, rage, inspiration and intelligence that gave an entire generation the incentive to declare and be proud of our lesbian identity. More than any other writer from this era, Johnston was a trail-blazer, a lone voice in the early Stonewall period, before Lesbian chic and Queer theory. Revisiting these weekly columns, published in the Village Voice during the early to mid-seventies, one is dazed by her clarity and wisdom, her empowering and insightful observations, the sheer speed and force of her writing, and the breadth of her experience and knowledge. It is reassuring to find that the impact and tremendous shifts experienced by us who partook in the second wave of the (real) women's movement are as stupendous as we recall. I recommend that all the "straight" feminists writing about us in their queer theories immerse themselves in The Comingest Womanifesto, sample Dyke Nationalism & Heterosexutility, or The March of the Real Women. Vintage Jill Johnston!

In Johnston's current incarnation as critic and (auto)biographer, we must be grateful that the forces that rule have not been able to shut down this enormously talented, creatively inventive and brilliant author. Her integrity and passions are alive, and her writing has retained its seething vigor despite being properly punctuated and paragraphed.

Admission Accomplished should be required reading on any Women's Studies and/or Queer Studies syllabus. On a clear day, you might be lucky enough to read Jill Johnston.

-Caroline Bell, New York City