A Brief History of Hungarian Queer Politics in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Hungary's current government, led since 2010 by Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party, has in recent years become a subject of profound concern on both local and global scales for both its increasing authoritarian nationalism and its distinctly homophobic politics. The Orbán government's 2011 rewriting of the Hungarian Constitution not only redefined marriage as an explicitly heterosexual institution, “the conjugal union of a man and a woman”, but declared the family both a unit grounded solely in hetero marriage and “the basis for survival of the nation”. In May of 2020 the government further modified the Constitution to clarify that “marriage” meant “The mother is a woman, the father is a man”, at the same time making it illegal for trans and intersex people to change their assigned birth gender. In December 2020, Parliament passed legislation banning adoption by same-sex couples and severely curtailing adoption by single parents (previously a way that same-sex couples could adopt and parent). The following June the Parliament passed, 157 to 1, a new law entitled “On stricter action against paedophile offenders and amending certain laws to protect children”, modelled on Russia's notorious 2013 “anti-gay propaganda” law, which banned the representation in advertising, educational materials or any media content accessible to people under 18 of any information considered by the government to promote “deviation from gender identity, gender reassignment and homosexuality”. This law was recently expanded to include all ages. At the same time Fidesz has since 2010 developed a system of pronatalist State policies symbolically and financially rewarding heterosexual reproduction, while Orbán has denounced European civil society funding for feminist, queer, and human rights organizations as undermining the Hungarian Nation. This politics has explicitly and consistently framed differences in sexuality – and gender – as at once unnatural and un-Hungarian: something not part of the nation's past, present, or future. The actual picture, however, is both more complicated and more interesting: in fact, lesbians, gays, and other queer people possess deep roots in Hungarian society, and profound and complex connections to its most fundamental meanings and moments.