Kitty Bruce This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. Lindsay Planer's As The Disc Spins Volume1 No 8 :: 11/19/04 ::

   www.musictap.net/AsTheDiscSpin - [Cached]

   Published on: 11/19/2004   Last Visited: 7/16/2006

   Additional kudos for the deluxe hardbound book, housing all six volumes and accompanied by 80 pages with unpublished photos, memorabilia and essays from Kitty Bruce, writer Paul Krassner, Lenny-authority Marvin Worth and producer Hal Willner.

2. 2. TheAmericanProwler Article

   www.spectator.org/article.asp? - [Cached]

   Published on: 6/16/2003   Last Visited: 6/17/2003

   His daughter, Kitty Bruce, was quoted in an Associated Press story as saying that "I truly believe my father's soul can rest in peace with this," but is she quite sure that he wouldn't rather rest in peace as a martyr to the middle American "repression" he helped to end?
   
   It's true that he himself believed that the taboos he violated were not only the consequence but the cause of violence and hatred. Thus in one of his routines he tried to sanitize the word "nigger" by repeating it over and over again. He thought that if people stopped treating the word as a terrible taboo, they would also find it much more difficult to learn racial hatred. Therefore, presumably, he would welcome a pardon on the grounds that it could only come in the relatively healthy condition of a society shedding its taboos -- at least the taboos he is best known for breaking.
   ...
   To exonerate Bruce on a charge of using filthy language in public is like taking the sin out of sex -- which we're also trying to do. The whole point of Bruce's act is that it was, as they say nowadays, "transgressive." It broke the rules precisely because they were the rules. If you abolish the rules, take the illegality and with it the frisson of misbehavior away from his act, there is simply no point to it.
   
   Bruce himself recognized this. The whole point of his act was to use the dirty words not for their own sake but so as to get himself noticed -- and arrested. He would also have seen the humor, I think, in the writer for The Times of London who deplored the Labour government's decision to legalize homosexual sex in public lavatories by saying that "I'm not a puritan…But no one can persuade me that the urge to have sex in a public lavatory is hard-wired into anyone's DNA. Cottaging was the unfortunate outcome of the twisted morality of the past." But don't you see, he would have said, it was "the twisted morality of the past" that gave the practice its special thrill -- and is therefore the reason that homosexuals want to continue with it.
   ...
   If Bruce were alive today, he might also have noticed not only (as Nat Hentoff points out) that we have in the form of campus speech codes and the like a whole new set of taboos, but that breaking, or re-breaking, the old ones, once the pioneers like him were done with them, has become a commercial enterprise.

3. 3. JamesBowman.net

   www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetai - [Cached]

   Published on: 6/11/2003   Last Visited: 5/4/2004

   His daughter, Kitty Bruce, was quoted in an Associated Press story as saying that "I truly believe my father"s soul can rest in peace with this," but is she quite sure that he wouldn't rather rest in peace as a martyr to the middle American "repression" he helped to end?
   
   It's true that he himself believed that the taboos he violated were not only the consequence but the cause of violence and hatred. Thus in one of his routines he tried to sanitize the word "nigger" by repeating it over and over again. He thought that if people stopped treating the word as a terrible taboo, they would also find it much more difficult to learn racial hatred. Therefore, presumably, he would welcome a pardon on the grounds that it could only come in the relatively healthy condition of a society shedding its taboos - at least the taboos he is best known for breaking.
   ...
   To exonerate Bruce on a charge of using filthy language in public is like taking the sin out of sex - which we're also trying to do. The whole point of Bruce's act is that it was, as they say nowadays, "transgressive." It broke the rules precisely because they were the rules. If you abolish the rules, take the illegality and with it the frisson of misbehavior away from his act, there is simply no point to it.
   
   Bruce himself recognized this. The whole point of his act was to use the dirty words not for their own sake but so as to get himself noticed - and arrested. He would also have seen the humor, I think, in the writer for The Times of London who deplored the Labour government's decision to legalize homosexual sex in public lavatories by saying that "I'm not a puritan. . .But no one can persuade me that the urge to have sex in a public lavatory is hard-wired into anyone's DNA. Cottaging was the unfortunate outcome of the twisted morality of the past." But don't you see, he would have said, it was "the twisted morality of the past" that gave the practice its special thrill - and is therefore the reason that homosexuals want to continue with it.
   ...
   If Bruce were alive today, he might also have noticed not only (as Nat Hentoff points out) that we have in the form of campus speech codes and the like a whole new set of taboos, but that breaking, or re-breaking, the old ones, once the pioneers like him were done with them, has become a commercial enterprise.