Hungary once held LGBTQ+ promise — then Orbán stepped in

BUDAPEST — Not so long ago, there was reason to believe Hungary was emerging as one of the friendlier places for LGBTQ+ people in the former Eastern Bloc.

In the first two decades after the Cold War ended, many of the country’s discriminatory laws were stricken from the books as one of the region’s largest LGBTQ+ movements came into the open. The advancements reached an apex when civil partnerships for same-sex couples were legalized in 2007 after Gábor Szetey, a state secretary, publicly came out in a speech opening that year’s Pride festival. 

“It was huge to say it out loud,” said Szetey, who became the first openly gay member of the Hungarian government with his announcement. “It was a big deal. Back then in 2007, Hungary seemed to be the most progressive Central-Eastern European country.”

But in the years since, that hard-won progress has faced increasing obstacles. Marchers in the Budapest Pride parade were violently assaulted in 2007 and 2008, forcing future parades behind police lines.

In 2010, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party came to power, and within a year, they passed a new constitution that explicitly banned same-sex marriage. Later, the document was amended to bar same-sex couples from adopting children.  

Now, Hungary’s backsliding on LGBTQ+ rights has entered the global conversation after the country passed a new law forbidding content for minors that depicts homosexuality or divergence from gender at birth — including in films, television shows, advertisements and sexual education programs in schools.  

The law has cast a harsh spotlight on over a decade of policies and political rhetoric that LGBTQ+ activists say aims to stigmatize them and force their community back into the shadows. For Hungary’s sexual minorities, it’s been two steps forward — and who knows how many steps back. 

“I have wondered whether I did the right thing or not because of all the backlash,” said Szetey, who left Hungary in 2008 and now lives abroad with his family in Switzerland.

“I do believe that there is no progress without backlash, but when I look at that country, I wonder, is there progress? We are practically going backwards ever since.”

It’s a concern that is rippling through Hungary’s LGBTQ+ community, which has been able to formally organize in the country since 1988, when László Láner co-founded the country’s first official LGBTQ+ advocacy group. 

“These anti-gay policies, especially with this latest law, are trying to push gays back into invisibility and to create an atmosphere where people are afraid to stand up for themselves,” Láner said. “It’s certainly taken us back a long way.”

Rights won — and then lost

Homesexuality has been legal in Hungary since 1961, but social stigmatization and surveillance by communist state security forces meant that sexual minorities lived their lives in secret, hidden from a society which viewed homosexuality as taboo.

In 1988, amid a rise in HIV cases in Hungary, Láner co-founded that first LGBTQ+ group, Homérosz Association. The next year, he became a founding editor of Mások (Others), an underground monthly magazine designed to reach Hungary’s LGBTQ+ community outside the capital of Budapest.

In 1992, Láner also helped organize the first “Pink Picnic,” a gathering of LGBTQ+ Hungarians in the hills outside the capital, away from the eyes of a society participants felt was still not ready to accept them. The annual picnic led to Budapest’s first Pride march in 1997, an event that today draws as many as 20,000 people each year.

“We felt for years after the regime change [in 1990] that we were moving forward. More and more things were achieved, in the legal field as well,” said Láner, now 65, of Hungary’s post-socialist transition.

The LGBTQ+ community succeeded in petitioning Hungary’s constitutional court to examine age of consent laws, which were set at 14 for heterosexuals but 18 for same-sex individuals. The court found in 2002 that the disparity was discriminatory, and today, Hungary’s age of consent is 14 for both opposite and same-sex individuals.

In 2007, Szetey, then serving as a state secretary in Hungary’s previous socialist-liberal government, publicly came out. While contemplating the historic move, Szetey said he hoped to use the moment as “a spark for a political achievement.”

Within months, Hungary’s parliament had approved a law creating civil partnerships for same-sex couples.

But then Orbán was swept to power with a blowout election victory that gave his party a two-thirds parliamentary majority, setting the stage for major changes to electoral law, the judiciary, the media and a new constitution.

“From that point on, there’s been a pretty homophobic political trend,” Láner said.

In addition to the same-sex marriage ban, revisions to the constitution also enshrined heterosexual marriage as the proper family unit.

“The basis of the family is marriage and/or the parent-child relationship. The mother is a woman and the father is a man,” the constitution now reads.

Such provisions are now receiving renewed scrutiny in the wake of Hungary’s recent anti-LGBTQ+ law. 

Rights groups have decried the measure as a conscious Fidesz ploy to conflate LGBTQ+ people with pedophiles, since the measures were attached to a bill aimed at creating harsher punishment for pedophilia.

Orbán and his government vociferously deny that the law targets sexual minorities. Ahead of an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels last month, Orbán insisted the measures were necessary to ensure that parents have a say in the sexual development of their children.

“It’s not about homosexuality, it’s about the kids and the parents,” Orbán said. “I am defending the rights of homosexual guys, but this law is not about them.”

But Láner says the law is a deliberate attempt to further marginalize the gay community and stigmatize it in the public eye.

“Now they say we need to protect children under 18, not from homosexuals, but from the knowledge that homosexuality exists at all,” he said. “This is a very clear message.”

The legislation — which has been compared to Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda” law — came on the heels of other recent government measures that were seen as attacks on LGBTQ+ rights. Last year, new laws effectively barred same-sex couples from adopting children and prevented transgender individuals from legally changing their names or genders in government records.

Orbán and his party face competitive national elections next year, and critics argue that the recent moves against LGBTQ+ people are an attempt to create a common enemy as a means of mobilizing voter support — similar to the way Orbán has previously targeted migrants, the American-Hungarian financier George Soros and the EU during elections.

“This is a political weapon they are using, but the fact that they dare to use it shows that the only thing they care about is keeping power, by any means,” Szetey said.

“It’s high time for the EU to start to speak up,” he added, noting he was glad to see vocal pushback to the legislation from European leaders like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

Hoping for change

A 2019 survey by Eurobarometer showed that only 48 percent of Hungarians agreed that gay, lesbian and bisexual people should have the same rights as heterosexuals — the fifth-lowest rate in the EU.

Still, public support for same-sex marriage and equal adoption rights has been on the rise: A 2021 global poll by Ipsos found that 16 percent more Hungarians support same-sex marriage than in 2013 and 17 percent more support equal adoption rights, one of the highest increases among polled countries.

Simon Bazsányi, a 19-year-old student and member of Hungary’s LGBTQ+ community from Budapest, said that while he feels social acceptance is on the rise in Hungary, “we are still going backwards.”

“I definitely won’t be kicked out of this country by this government,” he said. “What is really important for me is not [to be] defined by them. I’m waiting for a change. Maybe next year at the elections there will be a change.”

After 33 years of taking an active role in pushing for equal rights, Láner said he is optimistic, and hopeful that within his lifetime he will have the chance to marry his partner of 30 years.

“You can get in its way, you can slow it down, you can make things very uncomfortable for the gay community … but you can’t stop this process completely,” he said. “This was a very difficult period, but the elections will show how much they were able to put the brakes on our progress.”