Jill Johnston has died at the age of 81, a writer one critic called “part Gertrude Stein, part E.E. Cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown for good measure,” and who really knew how to rattle the boys'-club of writers (including Norman Mailer) not only with her words, but with repeated kisses. Her obituary by William Grimes appears in today's New York Times, and is excerpted here.

Johnston (was) 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.