LGBT ACTIVISM HUNGARY By Maria Kristófy & Dorottya Rédai
The story of a book for children A great success for Labrisz was the publishing of the fairy tale collection for children called Fairyland is for Everyone in 2020. The book includes 17 rewritten stories, mostly based on classic folk and fairy tales, featuring characters that are gender-diverse and from ethnic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds rarely represented in children’s stories. The stories touch on themes ranging from disability to poverty and domestic violence to child adoption. With several contributions by LGBTQ authors, this is the very first children’s book about LGBTQ people in the Hungarian language. The book aims to sensitise children to discrimination, social exclusion, diversity and acceptance with an intersectional approach and address children of minority and disadvantaged backgrounds. After its release in September, the book immediately became the target of homophobic attacks by politicians, including the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, other leading Fidesz politicians and a far-right party leader who shredded the book publicly, reminiscent of the Nazi book burning in the 1930s. As a consequence, the originally planned 1,500 copies sold out within two weeks and an additional run of 15,000 copies was published shortly after. This second batch sold out in two weeks and to date over 27,000 copies have been sold. Based on an anonymous complaint, the Consumer Protection Authority, a governmental body, ruled that Labrisz was committing an unfair commercial practice by not warning consumers that “patterns of behaviour deviating from traditional gender roles” appear in the stories. A petition and campaign organised by ultra-conservative campaign group CitizenGO - demanding the book’s removal from bookstores - has gained tens of thousands of signatures. Bookstore assistants were attacked by extremists for selling the book. A public reading of the tales by actors was disrupted by far- right activists and the police didn’t intervene. Governmental media have fuelled hatred against the book, Labrisz and LGBT+ people in general for months. However, the book has galvanized significant public support from parents, teachers and booksellers across Hungary. Celebrities spoke out in support of it and LGBT+ issues, and the tales are available on YouTube, read by popular actors. It has also generated international interest from media and publishers. In the next year or two the book will be published in English, Dutch, Swedish and Polish, and possibly in other European languages. Fairyland is for Everyone has become a bestseller and a symbol of protest against oppressive, exclusionary politics and hate speech against minorities, and it has made Labrisz more visible than ever.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in spring 2020, the government has taken advantage of the emergency situation, authorized themselves in the Parliament to rule by decrees, and some restrictive laws have been introduced without proper parliamentary and public debate. This includes revoking of the right for trans and intersex people to officially change their name and gender; removing the right for single people to adopt (which was the only way how LGBTQ people could adopt); declaring in the Constitution that “the mother is a woman and the father is a man” and that children are entitled to have their biological sex-based identity protected and to receive education based on national identity and Christian culture. Besides legislation, there has been an increasingly hostile political discourse targeting LGBTQ people for the past 2-3 years. Government politicians have incited hatred by comparing LGBTQ people to pedophiles and suggesting that LGBTQ people are a threat to children. The autonomy of the Equal Treatment Authority has been terminated, where queer people and people belonging to other disadvantaged groups could report cases of discrimination How we handle this situation The Covid-19 pandemic has made it very hard to sustain our community, therefore we have had to learn new ways of socializing and keeping in touch with our community. We think that the biggest successes of the past few years are that LGBTQ people and issues have become part of the public discourse, and despite the government’s anti-gender and homophobic propaganda, more and more people understand and accept us. It is more common for the young generation to accept queerness and there are more possibilities and programs for LGBTQ people. THE STRENGTHENING OF HATRED AGAINST OUR COMMUNITY HAS ALSO STRENGTHENED THE ALLIANCE AND COLLABORATION OF LGBTQ AND LEGAL ADVOCACY ORGANISATIONS” “
Short LGBT+ history of Hungary
Our umbrella organization, the Hungarian LGBT Alliance is a member of ILGA, and Labrisz is a Board Member of the EuroCentralAsian Lesbian* Community (EL*C). We are connected with several lesbian organizations from post-Soviet Central-Eastern Europe. We don’t have regular collaborations but we occasionally participate in joint projects. The Slovene group Lesbian Feminist University and the Serbian Labris Association often come to visit and offer programs at LIFT Festival.
In the late 1990’s LGBT organizations were founded in Hungary. It soon became clear that lesbian women had special interests and needs; therefore Labrisz Lesbian Association was founded in 1999. Labrisz is run by 10-15 volunteers and welcomes lesbian, bisexual and trans women. The main aims of Labrisz are community building, strengthening the self-acceptance and visibility of lesbian, bisexual and trans women, and creating a dialogue with society through our activities. We also seek to facilitate the discovery, cultivation and promotion of lesbian culture. Our activities include organizing community and cultural events: we have a monthly film club, a game evening, and a club evening. We take part in organizing the annual LGBT History Month, offer programs for the Budapest Pride Festival and organise our annual LIFT Festival (Lesbian Identity Festival) - a 3-day community and cultural event that we hope to be able to stage again this autumn, if the pandemic situation allows. Labrisz has published books, including Secret Years (herstory interview collection), Is it Still a Taboo (handbook to assist teachers working with LGBT+ topics in schools) and the latest, the fairy tale collection Fairyland is for Everyone. We have produced films, including short films, the herstory documentary Secret Years and currently we are working on The Second Golden Age, a romantic-educational series for elder lesbians about how to handle internet and social media safely and with confidence. We are building a herstory digital archive with Orla Egan’s help, and running an education program for secondary schools, called “Getting to Know LGBT People” in cooperation with Szimpozion Association. Since 1997 we have had Budapest Pride every year, which offers a cultural festival, many community events and a Pride March. There are more and more events, both in Budapest and in the countryside, and a few years ago the Pride Festival was extended to last a whole month.
The current political situation in Hungary
Since 2010, when the current political regime made of the two right-wing parties Fidesz and the Christian Democrats came into power, a major element of their increasingly autocratic politics is to divide society and increase hatred against certain people and social groups (refugees, George Soros, Roma citizens, and most recently against LGBT people). They banned gender studies master programs at universities, and forced Central European University to leave Budapest. Democratic checks and balances are dysfunctional. Freedom of the press is more and more limited, mainstream media (newspapers – also locals, TV-channels) is owned by government members and their close allies. Courts and public institutions (including educational institutions) have lost their autonomy. In the Constitutional Court there are only judges appointed by Fidesz. The economy is dominated by corruption, clientelism and the outsourcing of public (including EU) money into private companies’ pockets. In the last ten years over 500,000 highly educated and professionally trained citizens left Hungary seeking a better life, including more and more queer people.
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