The same obscene epithet triggered both Lenny Bruce’s and the Bear editors’ busts

Evidence

Inevitably, Burroughs was twinned with another hipster First Amendment martyr, Lenny Bruce. Coincidentally, two days before the authorities knocked on LeRoi Jones’s door, Bruce experienced his first obscenity bust, arrested between shows at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco for, among other things, using the word “cocksucker” in his act. Jones and Burroughs employ the same epithet in their Floating Bear pieces. Burroughs even attributes it to Roosevelt, who he describes as “so convulsed with hate for the human species as it is, that he wished to degrade it beyond recognition. ‘I’ll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate,’ he would say, looking off into space as if seeking new frontiers of depravity.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 347

Categorization

• SHARE: The coincidence of the same word triggering both the Lenny Bruce bust and the LeRoi Jones case within two days is a detail a comics/counterculture historian would relish.