What is the use of queer history? In present-day Hungary, like in other countries with right-wing governments, LGBTQI lives have become a target for attack, often by being figured as alien to national traditions and history. In Hungary, measures such as a new family policy that figures the heteroreproductive family as key to national survival, as well as the more recent ban on discussions of transgender and homosexuality in schools, are articulated explicitly in terms of a racialized anti-immigration polemic. These measures represent genders and sexualities that deviate from the binary norm as recent “inventions,” practices implicitly without a Hungarian past that have entered the country with the arrival of “foreign” liberalism in the post-Communist era.
Anita Kurimay's important new study, Queer Budapest, 1873–1961, exposes the fallacy of such claims by carefully charting the complexities of queer lives, representations, and politics in the period from the 1870s to the...
