| Absztrakt | The dissertation examines the ideas, regulations, and experiences of queer
sexualities in Hungary between the birth of Budapest as a unified metropolis in 1873 and
Hungary’s entry into World War II in 1941. Focusing on same-sex sexuality throughout
Hungary’s turbulent history provides an illuminating case study about how political
conservatism and tolerance of non-normative sexualities could coexist prior to WWII.
By piecing together scattered information on how regulatory bodies (police, courts, and
medical establishments) and individuals negotiated sexuality throughout Hungary’s
turbulent history, while simultaneously reading for historical and current silences around
sexuality, the study exposes the complex interplay between the modernization efforts of
Hungarian authorities, liberal ideas that equated “gay friendliness” with progress, and
practical realities on the ground. I reconstruct the ambiguous legal discourse of same-sex
sexuality, which criminalized male homosexuals, and, yet left a lot of room not to
iii
prosecute them. The chapters examine both discourses and lived experiences of non-
normative sexualities using a wide range of sources that include: the homosexual registry
of the Budapest Metropolitan police, contemporary investigative journalism reports, a
lesbian scandal and legal case involving two of Hungary’s leading conservative women,
the records of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic Revolutionary Tribunal’s
Experimental Criminology Department, and various documents from the Hungarian legal
system. I argue that regardless of the varying political constellations between 1873 and
1941, authorities did not attempt to repress “respectable” homosexuals because they
believed that tolerance was a means to secure Budapest’s place in the transnational
Western urban community. I demonstrate that in spite of Hungary’s authoritarian
conservative climate of the interwar years, the discourses, regulation, and policing of
same-sex sexuality show remarkable continuities from the pre-WW I era. Using same-sex
sexuality as a lens, the dissertation also illustrates that Budapest was not a cultural
backwater in prewar and interwar Europe, but was in fact an important location in a
European conversation about non-normative sexuality that is more commonly associated
with Berlin, London or Paris. In spite of the West’s sense of “superiority” and Hungary
and Eastern Europe’s keenness to “catch up,” the transmission of knowledge about
sexuality and its management was not a one-way flow.
|
