Anita Kurimay concludes her fascinating history of queer life in Budapest with the contemporary situation in Hungary for LGBTQ+ individuals. She notes how right-wing movements have portrayed queer life as antithetical to Hungarian identity, imposed on the country by western capitalism. Kurimay also points out that many on the left agree with them and claim that queer life only emerged in Hungary after the fall of Communism. Working through significant archival gaps, Kurimay's Queer Budapest punctures this myth and highlights the vibrant queer communities that emerged as Hungarians constructed a modern state. Kurimay argues that as the targets of that state, queer men and women represented both problems to be solved and growing evidence of the ‘modernity’ of the city. Queer Budapest thus not only successfully documents the queer life of Budapest prior to the fall of Communism, but also highlights the ways queer men and women were central to Hungarian political and urban history more broadly.
Organized chronologically, Queer Budapest traces how queer cultures co-existed with the illiberal regimes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a situation that ended with the radicalization of Hungarian politics during and after World War II. Like many city-studies, with their emphasis on the policing of public space, the book focuses more on male homosexuality than on female, with the exception of a fascinating chapter on a lesbian sex-scandal following World War I. Kurimay places Budapest in the wider history of homosexuality in Europe by showing how intellectuals, politicians, and police forces looked to debates occurring elsewhere in Europe and applied them to their own efforts at modernization. In one of her most fascinating chapters, for instance, Kurimay shows how the post-World War I Hungarian Soviet Republic took up psychological theories of crime, integrated them with sociological arguments about the importance of individual circumstances and created a judicial regime that emphasized ‘rehabilitation’ rather than discipline. While Kurimay could have engaged more with the meaning of rehabilitation in this context, she successfully shows how Budapest became a major site of ongoing debates over the causes and effects of homosexuality.
While these debates could, in and of themselves, stand as evidence of Budapest's modernity, the visibility of queer life could also threaten the city's place as a modern capital insofar as it indicated a lack of social order. In order to trace the ways that the police managed this threat, Kurimay makes a fascinating move: she analyses a document that no longer exists, a police registry of male homosexuals. The focus of the first chapter of the book, the registry recurs throughout the text as a kind of phantom indicator regarding the level of state interest in monitoring and persecuting men who sought sex with other men. In order to partially reconstruct the document's contents and how it was used, Kurimay analyses publications that speak about the now-missing register. For instance, Kurimay's analysis of a 1933 medical commentary reveals that the registry at first focused on those men the police believed were prostitutes, rather than those who were ‘“authentic” homosexuals’ (p. 33). The Budapest police therefore distinguished between those they believed were born homosexual and those who took advantage of them. Queer Budapest's reconstruction of the ways the police treated male homosexuality by analysing specific archival silence is especially impressive and will serve as a useful case-study for anyone wrestling with similar issues.
Queer Budapest ultimately highlights a tension that is never made quite explicit: just as it is incorrect to claim that LGBTQ+ identities are an import of the west, it is also incorrect to claim that those identities are purely Hungarian. Rather, the emergence of queer Budapest occurred through a dialogue between local practices and transnational discussions of policing, urban space and sexual diversity. Such nuance, however, is predictably lost in ongoing fearmongering by the right-wing in Hungary itself. Indeed, I write this review just after the ruling Fidesz party banned providing minors with any LGBTQ+ themed content as part of their now-familiar campaign to foment homophobia in Hungarian society. Providing Kurimay's book to a high schooler living in the city that is its subject would, presumably, now be illegal. And yet, it is precisely the increasing homophobia of the ruling regime in Hungary that makes examinations of the country's queer past all the more urgent. In its deft handling of its sources, its engagement with the ways that Hungary both shaped and was shaped by European sexual discourses and its emphasis on the ways that queer residents of Budapest forged lives even in the face of state repression, Queer Budapest is an essential and sadly timely contribution to a growing library of queer urban histories.
