Budapest Pride, 2008
Police vans on Andrássy
On 5 July, the thirteenth annual Gay Dignity march (Meleg Méltóság Menet, or melegfelvonulás) took place in Budapest. On the same day in London, around half a million people celebrated Gay Pride; even Boris Johnson wore a pink cowboy hat on the procession. In Budapest, around one thousand people marched in between metal barriers, accompanied by twice as many police, and surrounded by several hundred ‘counter-demonstrators’, and a similar number of journalists and photographers. The march was attacked by various radical right-wing groups and individuals, and protected by the police.
Last year’s Pride events represented something of a turning point in Hungarian LGBT history. The festival was opened by Gábor Szetey, then Secretary of State for Personnel, who came out. Two days later, however, participants in the parade were subjected to acts of organised violence, and received inadequate (if any) protection from the police. Szetey was the first, and to date, the only openly gay member of government. In an interview published in Magyar Narancs, he said:
If the question is whether all of this would still have happened had I not come out, then my answer would be yes. The counter-demonstration was organized, we knew weeks beforehand that something was being planned. It is possible that my speech intensified the extremists’ passions, which makes me feel bad, but sadly we must be clear that since 19 September [2006], we have been living in a different country than [the one] before. If we pay close attention, the Árpád flags, the faces and the symbols were the same on Saturday as they were [during the riots]. This is an extreme-right group which is not large, but is vocal and provocative.
One year on, Szetey is no longer an MP, the radical right is still in carnival mood, and it is still unclear whether throwing eggs at people is a protected form of free speech under Hungarian law. As soon as permission for the 2008 march was finally granted (the Budapest Chief of Police had originally banned it on 11 June on the grounds that disruption to traffic would be too great), the drums started beating in the virtual realm of the radical right. Bearing in mind the events of the previous year, press coverage of various ‘calls to arms’ to defend the Hungarian capital, and the firebombing of a gay club on 2 July, participants in the 2008 melegfelvonulás, whether gay or counter-counter demonstrators, took part in the knowledge that the threat of physical danger was very real. The march was marshalled between sets of temporary metal fencing, separated from would-be lynchers by further fencing, and escorted by numerous riot police and vans from start to finish. The march lasted roughly two hours, one hour to get down Andrássy, and one penned in at 56-osok tere (formerly Felvonulási tér), waiting and wondering how we would get out.
Although the felvonulás was not much of a celebration or carnival, it was a galvanising experience for all those who marched. Everyone remained calm, despite the enormously tense atmosphere. There were surreal moments: both sides documenting each other through the fences, so that people were filming themselves being filmed, and the Budapest police have since posted photographs of counter-demonstrators they want to identify on their website. Afterwards, the uneventfulness of an early Saturday evening in the rest of town away from Andrássy seemed unreal; it was as if none of that had happened. With a few notable exceptions, coverage of the march focussed on the violence and its perpetrators, rather than its intended victims.
Our discussion returned to a number of issues. On whether homophobia was motive or excuse for the violence, the overall consensus was that it was one element in the mix. Together with the verbal and physical abuse (graphic descriptions of sexual acts, and a fixation with bodily issue, namely spitting, throwing eggs, spraying water mixed with excrement from huge water pistols), there was distinct pro-natalist outrage (‘nem csináltok gyerekeket!’; ‘kihalunk!’) and a post-socialist moral majority pose which does not, one assumes, extend to hardcore porn. At times it could seem that ‘buzi’ is the new ‘zsidó’: ‘lopnak, csalnak, hazudnak’; ‘azért vagyok itt, mert a buziknak van pénzük, s nekünk nincs’, etc.
The ‘majority’ stance is, essentially, anti-minority though, again, this does not apply to Hungarian minorities outside Hungary, as Szetey also argues in the interview cited above. The Right’s victim complex, and the thugs’ conviction that men shouting obscenities define and embody who and what is Hungarian (‘Ez nem Hollandia, nem Amerika, ez Magyarország!’), were the product of a longer-term appropriation of leftist discourses by the Right, borne out on the ‘korlátlanul magyar’ website kicked off its US server, as well as in opinion columns of right-wing dailies. Finally, two questions were familiar to students and researchers of the inter-war era: the relationship between hyper- and anti-liberalism; and the desire to ‘cleanse’ the city. Whether or not one buys into the notion of a state of cold civil war existing in Hungary, the antecedents to and rhetoric of this current crisis are depressingly familiar.