The Yale Globalist - Homophobia in Hungary

Homophobia in Hungary

Monday, 11 May 2009 | Alice Walton

Hungarian police, in full riot gear, protect paraders along Andrássy út, Budapest’s major boulevard. (Flickr)

On July 5, 2008, 1,500 Budapest residents took to the streets. They held signs and led chants, but the colorful costumes, floats, and performances that characterize gay pride parades in the United States and Western Europe were missing. Instead, the celebrants in Budapest waved banners from within a fenced-off corridor lining Andrássy út, Budapest’s major boulevard. Over 2,000 police officers marched single-file within these confines as a second barrier between onlookers and the parade.

“They were decked out in full riot gear,” Yuri Shadunsky, a sophomore at Yale who watched the parade from a third-story apartment balcony on Andrássy, said about the police.

Shadunsky had been warned in advance about Budapest’s gay pride demonstration by e-mail alerts from the U.S. embassy advising American citizens to stay away from the area. For months, right- wing organizations had been urging followers to protest the event. “We will not permit aberrant foreigners of this or that color to force their alien and sick world on Hungary,” declared György Budaházy and László Toroczkai, the leaders of the nationalist Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement, in a joint communiqué. “We hereby publicly declare that we, ourselves, will defend the Hungarian capital. Every Hungarian patriot is needed!” Other right-wing organizations and websites followed suit, creating online countdowns to call upon their constituents to protest.

The expected violence struck the parade as protesters penetrated the barriers, launching rocks, eggs, bottles, and Molotov cocktails over the fences at supporters. Twenty-five people, including 17 police officers, were injured in the fights that took place at the start of the parade, and 45 protesters were arrested.

The scene was not unprecedented in Hungary, where right-wing activists are gaining ground as political groups blame the Hungarian Socialist Party, currently in power and seen as a holdover from the Soviet era, for economic woes. In the confusing jumble of the post- communist political spectrum, parties on the right generally support the conservative Soviet-era social policies, while the leftist parties, like the Hungarian Socialist Party, support a more liberal social agenda coupled with laissez-faire economic policies. In the currently weak Hungarian economy, socially conservative parties offer a different approach to fiscal policy, coupled with often militant rhetoric against minority groups.

The Rising Right

The violent right-wing activists who attacked last summer’s parade cannot simply be dismissed as fanatics. Political parties themselves urged violence at the pride parade.

The Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary) Party is one right- wing party seeking to gain support by fighting socially liberal policy — in this case, through militant action against minorities. The day before the July 5 parade, Jobbik issued a statement urging protests, quoting the graphic biblical verse Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” Jobbik does not currently hold a seat in parliament, but a poll conducted in April by Marketing Centrum, a Hungarian research firm, predicts the party will win the requisite five percent vote to gain a seat.

In 2007 Gábor Vona, the president of the party, founded the Hungarian Guard, a group of armed civilians donning uniforms reminiscent of those worn by the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Fascist party of the 1940s, and Nazi sympathizers. Although the Hungarian Guard claims it protects Hungarian traditions by pacifying conflicts between the Hungarian and Roma populations, an October 2007 article in Searchlight Magazine, a British publication that reports on racism and fascism in Europe, claimed that chants of “Homosexuals to the Danube, Jews straight afterward” were heard at the group’s 2007 initiation in Budapest. The chant refers to the German occupation of Budapest from 1944 to 1945, when the Arrow Cross Party lined up and shot Jewish citizens into the Danube, the river that winds its way between the Buda and Pest sides of the city.

While the violent reactions to Budapest’s gay pride parades have drawn international attention to Hungary’s gay population, homosexuality itself has only recently become a topic for the public forum in Hungary. “You have to understand that homosexuality was pretty much a taboo subject throughout the former Soviet Union and its satellite countries,” said Nathan Johnson, an American journalist at the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe who has lived in Budapest for the past 14 years. His wife Eva, a Hungarian woman who grew up in a small village, was unfamiliar with the idea of homosexuality until she moved to Budapest for college, he explained. “The topic of homosexuality really makes men here uncomfortable — but so does the thought of ironing their own clothes or doing any cooking or washing up in the kitchen,” he said.

A New Concept for Hungary

“Homosexuality is a new item on the political and cultural agenda,” said Ivan Szelenyi, a professor of sociology at Yale who emigrated from Hungary in 1975. He explained that no prominent Hungarian had come out of the closet before the 1990s; alternative sexual orientation was simply not a public issue. With the idea of homosexuality so private, Hungary had no reason for legislation until recently.

In December, Hungary’s Constitutional Court ruled that civil registration of same-sex couples was unconstitutional because it would allow partnerships that encroached upon the definition of traditional marriage. This reversed a 2007 parliamentary ruling, which passed with 185 votes in favor and 154 against, that would have allowed civil unions.

Blaise Kantor, a Hungarian-Canadian and former assistant lecturer in English and political science at the University of Budapest, said that this court ruling was “one of the most backwards decisions in recent European civil rights history.” He continued: “They said that the essential purpose of marriage is procreation, and therefore same-sex couples should not be granted the same benefits and legal status as opposite-sex couples.” He added wryly, “This is too bad for infertile women and sterile men who cannot make children because, logically, under the latest definition of marriage, their relationship does not count as a legal marriage.”

A Cosmopolitan Current

Yet in spite of occasional violent attacks and an unwelcoming political climate, Johnson believes Budapest is a better environment for gays than most of Eastern Europe. Budapest’s cosmopolitan atmosphere attracts gay expatriates, who have opened doors for the native gay community. The burgeoning academic community, too, by supporting the academic study of human rights, has made Budapest a more comfortable place for gays than many other parts of the country or of Eastern Europe. “A homosexual in this part of Europe could do far worse than to live and work in Budapest,” Johnson said. “Outside of Budapest, it must be a very lonely existence.” The problem, Kantor added, is regional: “Eastern Europe is plagued by a culture of intolerance and resurgent nationalism that manifests itself in the resurrection of old political symbols of militant anti-Semitism and anarchic radicalism.”

It is difficult to say what awaits Hungary’s gay community. While Budapest is becoming an ever more cosmopolitan city, the Hungarian political scene is swinging swiftly to the right. Fidesz, Hungary’s central-right party that claims to promote family values, is predicted to win a two-thirds majority in the upcoming elections, according to the April Marketing Centrum poll.

Optimists for gay acceptance think the cause is simply suffering from a late start. With homosexuality now a public political issue, they believe that acceptance will likely increase as Hungary and Eastern Europe look to Western Europe as a cultural example. But the violent reactions to July’s pride parade and recent political polls signal that the political climate is veering away from acceptance of homosexuality. For the moment, as social acceptance and political trends take opposite trajectories, gay rights advocates remain caught in the crossfire.

Alice Walton is a History and International Studies double major in Pierson College. She spent her summer in Budapest.

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites