Jill Johnston, whose book Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution “spearheaded the lesbian separatist movement of the early 1970s,” has died at the age of 81 after suffering a stroke.

Johnston was also known for her experimental writing style in her job as a longtime cultural critic for The Village Voice. As William Grimes details in a New York Times obituary, she began one 1964 column with the following:

Fluxus flapdoodle. Fluxus concert 1964. Donald Duck meets the Flying Tigers. Why should anyone notice the shape of a watch at the moment of looking at the time?

As Grimes contextualizes it,

Ms. Johnston started out as a dance critic, but in the pages of The Voice, which hired her in 1959, she embraced the avant-garde as a whole, including happenings and multimedia events.

I had a forum obviously set up for covering or perpetrating all manner of outrage, she wrote in a biographical statement on her Web site, jilljohnston.com.

In the early 1970s she began championing the cause of lesbian feminism, arguing in Lesbian Nation (1973) for a complete break with men and with male-dominated capitalist institutions. She defined female relations with the opposite sex as a form of collaboration.

She was also involved in one of the most notable events of the feminist movement:

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, she 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.

In later years, Johnson wrote regularly for Art in America and the New York Times Book Review, and said she had come to regard Lesbian Nation as “a period piece.” Nonetheless, according to Grimes she “held fast to her version of feminism.” As she herself put it, “The centrality of the lesbian position to feminist revolution, wildly unrealistic or downright mad, as it still seems to most women everywhere continues to ring true and right.”

The most famous scene in Town Bloody Hall