Perverse Frictions: Pride, Dignity, and the Budapest LGBT March

ABSTRACT

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) marches are critical and contentious events throughout post-socialist Europe: key sites of emerging sexual politics, shifting tensions between national and transnational meanings, and competing visions of citizenship. Since 1997 a ‘Pride March’, in 2008 Budapest's LGBT march was renamed the ‘Dignity March’. Taking this change as its focus, this paper explores debates within and outside Hungary's LGBT community about the meanings of ‘Pride’, ‘Dignity’, and sexuality. I argue these debates reveal competing efforts to negotiate the perilous boundaries between national and transnational discourses of identity, politics, and belonging. Situating them within Hungary's shifting political context, including recent violent attacks on the March, I suggest the move from the politics of Pride to the politics of Dignity has failed to escape the frictions of intersecting global and local discourses, instead invoking new cultural–political tensions, exclusionary boundaries, and dilemmas of identity, belonging, and politics for Hungarian LGBT people and activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Pride
• dignity
• post-socialism
• sexual politics
• globalising sexualities, Hungary

Acknowledgements

I thank Guntra Aistara, Eszter Timár, and two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions which greatly improved this paper. Previous versions of the article were presented at the COST/EastBordNet Workshop (WS3) on Gender and Sexuality in Budapest, Hungary and the American Anthropological Association Meetings in New Orleans, LA, November 2010, and at the 2nd EastBordNet Conference in Berlin, Germany, January 2013.

Notes

1. The word jobb in Hungarian means both ‘better’ and ‘right’ (as in the term of direction); thus the party's name also means ‘Movement for a More Right(-wing) Hungary’.

2. I employ the term ‘LGBT’ throughout this paper because this was the primary political term associated with the March and Festival from 2005 to 2011 (before that the terms ‘Gay and Lesbian’ were used. Unlike some other postsocialist countries, in Hungary ‘queer’ remained a marginal sexual-political term until very recently (since 2012, the March/Festival has officially used the term LGBTQ).

3. The Hungarian word that most closely corresponds to the English ‘gay’ is meleg (lit. ‘warm’).

4. Attempts to increase the size and visibility of the Pride March have faced significant resistance from many LGBT people, with the result that from the late 1990s until 2012 the March never grew beyond about 2000 people.

5. In making this argument, I am not claiming that either LGBT Marches (whether framed in terms of Pride or Dignity, or both), as ‘global’ models of sexual politics, or ‘local’, Eastern European (or other) resistances to them, are good or bad, correct or incorrect, forms of politics. Indeed, it is precisely these kinds of evaluations I strive to trouble here, by situating the adaptation of and resistance to both these models within the complexly local and global meanings and pressures that surround and shape them, and thus exposing the frictions both pose for Hungarian LGBT people.

6. While the March had seen opposition since its beginning, previously this had been both small in scale and non-violent.

7. Méltóság, of course, had previously appeared in Hungarian LGBT discourse. Indeed, one of the placards at the first Pride March in 1997 bore the word. As merely one element within an overarching discourse of the politics of ‘pride’, however, this presence had very different impact than méltoság's official deployment as the March's publicly framing concept.

8. Magyar Catholic Lexicon, 13th ed. 2009. István Diós (ed.). Budapest: Szent István Társulat.

9. Even in 2013, when for the first time ever the March according to some estimates reached an astonishing 8000 people, some attendees noted that the increase in numbers seemed due to a massive influx of largely straight members of Budapest's alternative youth culture. And while this shift in support is certainly important, it may also reveal that a larger March is not necessarily indicative of LGBT people's greater willingness to publicly assert either pride or dignity.

10. ‘Zsófi’ is short for the Hungarian woman's name Zsófia. Otherwise apparently male-bodied, in using this name, and in other aspects of self-presentation, ‘Zsófi’ invokes a transgressively ambiguous gender performance with long associations in both local and global gay cultures. I use masculine pronouns here intentionally to highlight this ambiguity.