“I've Also Lived as a Heterosexual”—Identity Narratives of Formerly Married Middle-Aged Gays and Lesbians in Hungary

Abstract

This article examines the sexual identity narratives of middle-age Hungarians who now identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual but were married in an earlier period of their lives. Based on semistructured ethnographic interviews and texts published in the interview volume of the Lesbian Herstory Project, the author tries to explore how these people make sense of their sexual orientation with a view of the homo/hetero binary that predominates in the Hungarian lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community. The author discusses the reasons of their marriage and the sexual identities they adopt, as these are shaped by the geopolitical and historical context. As these people came out before or soon after the fall of state socialism, their life narratives can shed light on how this political system shaped the lives and identities of nonheterosexuals.

KEYWORDS:

• life course
• bisexuality
• sexual categorization
• identity
• narratives
• biphobia

Notes

1. There are different explanations for state permissiveness in the two cases. E. Tóth and Murai (2014) claimed that the GDR tried to compensate for the curtailment of civil and political rights by allowing greater freedom of sexual expression, also because it tried to compete with West Germany in the field of modernity, whereas Yugoslavia was different from other state socialist countries in many respects, and in fact rather marginalized after Tito's conflict with the USSR among the other Eastern European states.

2. Queer theory is limited to academic work at English-speaking departments of some universities, mostly focusing on humanities. Although recently a group called Queer New Wave (Buzi Új Hullám) has been formed, its most loudly voiced critique towards the mainstream LGBT movement is not its identity categories but its class-blindness. Most of my interlocutors were not familiar with the word ‘queer' or misinterpreted it.

3. It is important to note that similar long identity accounts were produced by two middle-age interlocutors who have never been married but who began to self-identify as gay and lesbian in their midthirties.

4. I do not use exact ages to protect the anonymity of my interlocutors, and also because my research lasted several years.

5. One of these eight women was also interviewed for my project; in her case I use my own interview, as I felt this gives a more detailed explanation for her life choices.

6. An article analyzing the stories in the interview volume follows the same strategy (Borgos, 2014).

7. Gerda speaks broken Hungarian, which I tried to reproduce in the translation.

8. The ‘state feminism' of socialist states laid emphasis on women's equal rights and inclusion in paid work, and ignored topics connected to the private sphere, especially to sexuality (Einhorn, 1993).

9. Some of my younger interviewees do identify as bisexual, but most of them occupy marginal positions within the community (rural, working-class, or newcomers). Also, those who live in Budapest often downplay their different-sex attractions when talking to gays or lesbians, or use the labels ‘bisexual' and ‘lesbian/gay' interchangeably.

10. A telling example is lesbian pilgrimages to places connected to famous women-attracted women and lesbian communities in the 20th century (Renkin, 2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rita Béres-Deák

Rita Béres-Deák, MA, is a cultural anthropologist and LGBT activist in Hungary. She received her BA in cultural anthropology at ELTE Budapest University in 2001 and her MA in gender studies at the Central European University in 2002. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Central European University in Budapest, where her dissertation topic is the relationship between same-sex couples and their family of origin. Her main research interest is LGBTQ communities, but she has also done research on gender representations and people with disabilities. She is involved in national and international LGBTQ activism.