GLR July-August 2025

dare not speak its name. At various times, “urning,” “uranian,” and “invert” were used as terms of self-identification. By the 1920s, the clinical term “homosexual” became the most com mon, and polite, way to identify a person who experienced same-sex desire. Goldhill makes a convincing case that the values of “tol erance, acceptance, generosity, and serious critique” that members of this community learned at Cambridge instilled in them aspirations to better the world. Those who rose to high positions in public life had roles in the founding of social wel fare programs in England and the formation of the League of Nations. The experience of living outside social norms gave those who made careers in literature, music, art, and theater the vision to imagine “a world otherwise”—different from the oppressive one that they knew. They helped usher out the cul tural propriety of the Victorian era and introduce modernity to England. The chapter “The Burial of Homosexuality” has the most resonance for our lives today. By “burial,” Goldhill means sev

eral things. One is the repression that descended on gay men and women after World War II, something that happened in the United States as well as England. People who could be fairly open about their sexuality before the war were forced back into the closet in the 1950s, when the accusation of homosexuality could ruin a career and end a life, as in the case of gay cryptol ogist and computer pioneer Alan Turing after he left the pro tective walls of Cambridge. Another burial was the fate of the word “homosexual,” which was gradually replaced by a more fluid language that em braces the word “queer” and the many permutations of “LGBT+.” The men at King’s College in the late 1880s had to invent their own words to name the desire they felt for other men. We now have words that describe a whole range of sexual attractions and gender identities, but in schools and workplaces we are increasingly forbidden to use these words. QueerCam bridge demonstrates how language and identity are intertwined in queer history. The erasure of words is tantamount to the era sure of people.

Treacherous Intersections

O N THE EVENING of January 17, 1969, FBI agents murdered John Huggins, Ericka J. Hug gins’ partner and the father of her three-week-old daughter Mai. Soon thereafter, police came to their Los Angeles home to arrest 21-year-old Ericka and her Black Panther Party friends who had gath ered there to grieve. As she descended the porch steps with her daughter wrapped in a

now 77, has continued to practice yoga and meditation throughout her life. Phillips’ ac count of love and support among women contributes an unusual dimension to extant Panther historiography. Organized in six parts, Black Panther Woman contains many revelations. Besides describing Huggins’s family background, the first part details her rejection of her mother’s Old Testament Christianity and

A NNE C HARLES

BLACK PANTHER WOMAN ThePoli ti cal and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins by Mary Frances Phillips NYU Press. 291 pages, $35.

heavy coat, an officer pointed his gun directly at Mai, saying: “The baby might have a gun.” After the group was taken into custody, Ericka’s trusted friends were able to pick up Mai at the 77th Street police precinct. Eight hours later, some of the same friends posted bail for the rest of the group. This searing episode is only one of many described in Mary Frances Phillips’ Black Panther Woman , a biography of Ericka Huggins, described by her friend Angela Davis as “one of the strongest Black women in America.” Coming on the heels of Huggins’ and Stephen Shames’ important 2022 book Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party, Phillips continues to break new ground in Black Panther history, which has usually focused on men. This disruption is especially valuable given that in the 1970s two-thirds of the Black Panthers were female. As the first biography of Huggins, who identifies as queer, Phillips’ book interrupts the conventionally heterosexual narra tive of the Panthers’ history. Another welcome departure from traditional Panther schol arship is Phillips’ focus on her subject’s spiritual practice, a transformational tool that Huggins developed in solitary con finement and later shared with other female prisoners. Huggins, Anne Charles lives in Montpelier, VT. With her partner and a friend, she co-hosts the cable-access show All Things LGBTQ. 34

the early self-protective thought practices she developed to cope with her father’s physically abusive behavior. Another chapter traces Huggins’ political development, activated by her atten dance, at age fifteen and against her parents’ wishes, at the 1963 March on Washington, and continues through her joining the Black Panther Party and the violent murder of John Huggins and a comrade in the organization. Five months after her first arrest, Huggins and five other Panther women were arrested on fabricated charges and re manded to the Niantic Correctional Institutional (formerly the Connecticut State Farm and Reformatory for Women). The three chapters covering Huggins’ eighteen-month incarceration form the center of the book, replete with stories of horrible abuse and the female prisoners’ heroic resistance. One such story involves a prisoner named Linda, whose all night screams of heroin withdrawal rocked the cellblock. Hug gins recalls that she and fellow prisoners repeatedly called for help, to no avail. When Linda was found dead the following morning, prisoners learned she had died from inflammation caused by an infection. In response, prisoners developed a sur reptitious network of outreach to detoxifying women using strategies like smuggling candy and cigarettes to them and lying on the floor with them to talk them through withdrawal. The network that Huggins and a non-Panther prisoner formed

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