Ellen Willis, one of The Revealer‘s favorite journalists, died today of lung cancer, at age 65. It would not be right to call Willis a religion writer — one of her classic essays for The Nation was titled “Freedom from Religion” — but she was a woman who saw more clearly than almost any other writer of her generation the sharp edges of sex and gender politics within the various faith narratives of American culture, religious, ideological, and pop. Willis’ own vision for a community liberated rather than bound by sexual identity was both inspiring and fully cognizant of the battles that must be fought to attain that worldly promised land. I remember coming across a collection of her early Village Voice and New Yorker writing, Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock and Roll, in a library while taking a break from some research on religious fundamentalism. I read Willis’ work well into the night. I felt like I had discovered scripture. Not the “Thou shalt not!” kind, but the love and fury of Song of Songs.

In the 1980s, Willis created a literary alter ego to confront the sexual psychosis of the Reagan years: “Ruby Tuesday,” who asserted, writes Liza Featherstone in a tribute in The Nation, “deviant desires in a culture that pretends we all want the same things…. Like her character Ruby Tuesday, who ends up seducing reporters who come to interview her, Willis was boldly optimistic about the transformative powers of desire, and the threateningly political implications of happiness. ‘The power of the ecstatic moment,’ she writes, ‘This is what freedom is like, this is what love could be, this is what happens when the boundaries are gone — is precisely the power to reimagine the world, to reclaim a human identity that’s neither victim nor oppressor.”

–Jeff Sharlet