On 18 March 2025, Hungary’s ongoing legislative assault on LGBTQ+ folks escalated with a legislation that strikes on the coronary heart of fundamental human rights and elementary European values. The Hungarian parliament handed a invoice that successfully bans Pleasure occasions, citing ‘child protection’ as its justification.
This was not merely one other authorized measure meant to discriminate in opposition to the LGBTQ+ inhabitants. It was additionally a efficiency of ideological management. A spectacle. A message. One which recast Pleasure from celebration to provocation, and queerness from id to risk.
However on 16 June, in transfer unprecedented in its defiance of presidency stress, Budapest’s mayor Gergely Karácsony introduced that the town would formally co-organize Budapest Pleasure as a celebration of freedom, thereby circumventing the legislation that enables the police to ban LGTBQ+ marches.
This positions the capital as a symbolic and literal counterweight to Orbán’s legislative assault. By providing municipal backing, Karácsony affirms that Pleasure just isn’t solely a protest, but additionally a protected expression of civic freedom.
Picture: Pasztilla aka Attila Terbócs / Supply: Wikimedia Commons
That is however one victory in an ongoing battle for LGBTQ+ freedoms in Hungary and throughout the throughout the area. For sadly, Hungary is now not an anomaly in Europe. Quite the opposite, in the case of persecuting LGBTQ+ folks, the nation has develop into a trendsetter.
From progress to persecution
It was on no account all the time this manner. Homosexuality was decriminalized in Hungary as early as 1961, and though cultural conservatism endured, authorized reforms progressively caught up. Earlier than Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz returned to energy in 2010, Hungary had made regular, if cautious, progress towards LGBTQ+ equality and acceptance. In 2009, Hungary launched registered partnerships for same-sex {couples}, a major – if imperfect – step towards recognition and dignity.
However after 2010 and the pivot in the direction of illiberalism, LGBTQ+ rights turned collateral harm in Fidesz’s quest to ‘restore national values’. Though the shift was not speedy, ominous indicators emerged early on. In 2012, the far-right get together Jobbik launched a invoice searching for to ban the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality. The invoice didn’t move, but it surely was a warning shot. On reflection, it seems to be much less like an outlier and extra just like the opening line of a broader political script.
The true rupture got here in 2020, when the Hungarian Parliament handed laws banning the authorized recognition of gender modifications. Transgender and intersex folks had been stripped of the correct to replace their paperwork, locking them into misidentification and each day bureaucratic humiliation. From that second on, transphobia was enshrined in legislation. The brand new laws marked a chilling escalation: from hostile rhetoric to focused, codified erasure.
Then got here 2021, and with it the so-called ‘Child Protection Act’ – a legislation that nominally claimed to guard minors however in apply served to silence queerness. Modelled carefully on Russia’s ‘gay propaganda’ legislation, the laws banned the depiction or dialogue of homosexuality and gender transition in content material accessible to minors, whether or not by way of schooling, tv, literature or different channels.
The framing was strategic: queerness wasn’t criminalized however forged as inappropriate, corrupting and harmful for youth. Drawing on long-standing ethical panic techniques, Fidesz equated LGBTQ+ visibility with grooming, sexual deviance and baby endangerment. Handed swiftly and with out significant public enter, the legislation sparked protests and triggered infringement procedures by the European Union.
Later that 12 months, an implementing decree prolonged the legislation’s logic into on a regular basis cultural areas – most notably, bookstores. To any extent further LGBTQ+ books needed to be faraway from youth sections, offered in non-transparent packaging, and stored out of store home windows or places inside 200 metres of a college or church.
These guidelines technically got here into impact in 2021, however solely started to chunk in 2023, when enforcement was ramped up. In a broadly publicized case, a serious bookstore chain was fined for displaying the favored queer graphic novel Heartstopper with out the closed, opaque wrapping prescribed by the legislation. The message was unambiguous: queer tales may nonetheless exist – however solely out of sight and out of attain.
The transformation of LGBTQ+ identities right into a perceived nationwide risk is the results of a deliberate and sustained political technique. One of many earliest indicators got here in 2019, when the Speaker of the Nationwide Meeting, László Kövér, in contrast same-sex marriages and adoption to paedophilia. This outrageous remark was not retracted even after being condemned by rights teams. As an alternative, it established a brand new rhetorical terrain the place queerness is related to hurt, significantly to youngsters. A 12 months later, Viktor Orbán himself declared that ‘gays must leave our children alone’, drawing a so-called crimson line that blurred the excellence between id and risk.
These and different statements weren’t offhand remarks however calculated strikes in a broader discursive shift. In 2020, state-aligned shops and official speeches started referring to LGBTQ+ rights as ‘gender propaganda’ or ‘foreign ideology’. The narrative crystallized: LGBTQ+ visibility was a type of liberal colonization – an exterior pressure being imposed on Hungary by international elites, EU bureaucrats, and ‘woke’ activists. Conventional households – whose definition clearly excludes non-heterosexual, non-cisgendered and non-nuclear households – had been forged because the final bastion of nationwide integrity.
The 2021 ‘Child Protection Act’ put these concepts into authorized type, and the federal government doubled down. Referendums had been launched to legitimize the crackdown; press releases framed the measures as essential ethical defences. Kids turned a rhetorical protect whose security was invoked repeatedly to indicate that queerness was not solely inappropriate however predatory.
This shift was echoed by state-aligned media, the place LGBTQ+ points had been handled not as civil rights questions however as ideological battlegrounds. Newspapers comparable to Magyar Nemzet and the tv channel HírTV linked Pleasure to chaos, cultural decline, and ethical confusion. The impact was cumulative: a gradual poisoning of the discourse, during which queer folks had been stripped of complexity and portrayed as brokers of decay. Gender concept was demonised within the course of, to the detriment of ladies’s rights.
Symbolic violence thus turned institutionalized – each by way of what legal guidelines say, and thru what they indicate. To be queer in Hungary at this time is to be handled not simply as unequal, but additionally as undesirable. The message, repeated in coverage and press alike, is that queerness is anti-Hungarian or ‘un-Hungarian’. As soon as that symbolic boundary has been drawn, exclusion is feasible and certainly standard.
The making of the Different
Framed as a measure to safeguard morality, the legislation banning Pleasure is a direct assault on freedom of meeting and expression and marks a chilling milestone within the authorities’s marketing campaign of exclusion.
The brand new laws foresees a positive of as much as 200,000 HUF (roughly €500) for people collaborating in Pleasure occasions and imprisonment for as much as a 12 months for organizers. The legislation additionally authorizes the Hungarian authorities to make use of facial recognition know-how to determine contributors, a transfer that has sparked vital privateness and human rights issues.
That is greater than laws; it’s a efficiency of energy. The Pleasure ban is a communicative act – one which constructs and enforces boundaries across the nationwide public area, defining who’s permitted to be seen and converse in it. Collectively, with earlier legal guidelines, it kinds a story structure during which queerness is framed not simply as deviant, however as incompatible with Hungarian id and the protection of the nation. Queerness just isn’t solely erased from public area however decreased to a cultural contaminant – coded as inappropriate, threatening, or obscene. That is the language of euphemism, of ethical panic, of symbolic violence with out bodily bruises.
The state depends on binary oppositions to safe this narrative: Hungarian versus overseas, Christian versus liberal, ethical versus deviant. These oppositions aren’t simply semantic instruments. They’re ideological weapons. By means of them, the state attracts a line, inserting queer folks on the mistaken facet of it, stripping them of ethical worth, cultural legitimacy, and symbolic citizenship. Queerness is forged as an ideological intrusion – imported, alien to Hungary’s cultural core.
Othering works by decreasing folks to caricatures, by remodeling advanced human lives into threats, spectacles, aliens or cautionary tales. In Hungary’s present discourse, to be queer just isn’t solely to be completely different, however to be mistaken – unnatural, harmful, contaminating.
By means of this binary logic, LGBTQ+ persons are positioned as every thing Hungary just isn’t alleged to be. The state thereby performs symbolic violence: a subtler however deeply damaging type of hurt that works not by way of bodily pressure, however cultural exclusion. It chips away at recognition, legitimacy, and belonging – legally, publicly and repeatedly casting queer existence as an ethical risk. Because the proper to amend one’s gender in authorized paperwork was abolished, even current in public is an act of defiance for a lot of trans Hungarians – visibility itself turns into each danger and resistance.
When the state decides that queerness isn’t just exterior the norm however in opposition to the nation, it licenses greater than exclusion. Suspicion, hatred, even bodily violence are additionally sanctioned. Pleasure is banned not due to what it’s, however due to what it represents: an unapologetic declare to area, pleasure, dignity and belonging. And for a authorities invested in purity – of the nation, of values, of our bodies – that’s insupportable.
The state doesn’t must deny rights explicitly – it solely must legislate queerness out of public life, out of visibility. A Pleasure march turns into a ‘morality risk’. A youngsters’s guide with two dads turns into contraband. Erasure turns into coverage. The closet turns into legislation.
Regional homophobia
Hungary just isn’t an outlier. Throughout central and japanese Europe, related techniques are taking root. Although adjusted to native political realities, all observe the identical ideological blueprint.
In Poland, the get together Legislation and Justice (PiS) made LGBTQ+ rights a scapegoat in its tradition warfare, with municipalities declaring themselves ‘LGBT-free zones’ and authorities officers describing queerness as a overseas ideology threatening the Polish household. Underneath the PiS authorities, Pleasure occasions in Poland had been routinely obstructed or violently attacked, and queer activists topic to surveillance and harassment. Though PiS was changed because the get together of presidency on the finish of 2023, the anti-LGTBQ+ rhetoric stays. The president elect, Karol Nawrocki, is a conservative who helps shut ties between the federal government and the Catholic Church and is a inflexible opponent of same-sex marriage.
In June 2020, the Romanian parliament handed a legislation amending the Nationwide Training Legislation to ban actions aimed toward ‘spreading theories or opinions on gender identity’. Human rights organizations, lecturers, and college students pushed again in opposition to the legislation, which successfully bans discussions on gender id in academic settings, calling it a violation of elementary rights and an assault on tutorial freedom. In December 2020, the Romanian Constitutional Courtroom struck down the ban – however solely after months of political debate framing ‘gender ideology’ as a western import eroding nationwide values.
These examples should not equivalent, however they rhyme. They converse to a broader regional technique: the usage of queerness as a symbolic enemy, a stand-in for all that’s overseas, destabilizing, and morally suspect. It’s a technique rooted in othering, legitimized by way of the language of sovereignty, household, and baby safety, and executed by way of authorized restrictions, censorship, and cultural vilification.
Clearly, what is occurring in Hungary just isn’t an remoted case. Moderately, it’s a part of a gradual however regular regional realignment – a roll-back not simply of rights, however of recognition itself; recognition not simply of dignity or citizenship, however of humanity. When queerness is framed not merely as alien however as actively threatening – to the nation, to cultural id, to household values, to the wellbeing of youngsters – it creates fertile floor for additional hurt. What begins with erasure of visibility can shortly develop into permission for the violation of our bodies. Symbolic exclusion makes bodily violence simpler to justify.
In 2022, two queer folks had been murdered exterior a homosexual bar in Bratislava, Slovakia. The federal government condemned the violence – however most of the similar officers had beforehand trafficked within the anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric that helped allow it. Symbolic violence isn’t simply symbolic. What begins with the erasure of visibility shortly turns into the justification for real-world violation. And what’s banned from public area can, in time, be banished from life itself.
For a lot of queer folks within the area, this local weather doesn’t simply threaten their rights – it erodes their sense of security, dignity and future. What does it imply to return of age underneath a authorities that denies your existence? To have your physique politicized earlier than you even know its identify?
It means navigating adolescence with disgrace stitched into your citizenship. It means studying early that want, when misaligned with the state, could make you a prison, even earlier than you’ve kissed anybody in any respect.
Symbolic resistance
Nonetheless, even underneath erasure, resistance speaks. LGBTQ+ organizers in Hungary have answered the state’s communicative and legislative acts of violence with symbols of their very own. The 2025 Budapest Pleasure theme, We’re (house), asserts what the federal government denies: that queer persons are not outsiders, however residents, woven into the material of Hungarian life. Pleasure’s revival of the revolutionary slogan Éljen a magyar szabadság! (‘Long live Hungarian freedom!’) reclaims nationalism from the far-right, merging queer resistance with the language of nationwide delight.
These gestures could seem symbolic – however when visibility itself is criminalized, symbolism turns into survival. What the state tries to silence, Pleasure declares within the nation’s personal tongue: we exist, and we belong.
The symbolic defiance of Budapest Pleasure just isn’t new. One of many oldest Pleasure actions in Central Europe, its organizers have lengthy understood that visibility isn’t impartial. In a rustic the place queerness is legislated out of lecture rooms and bookstores, exhibiting up – with flags, slogans, one another – turns into an act of radical presence. Within the face of rising authoritarianism, even pleasure turns into a political act. On-line campaigns, worldwide solidarity posts and queer mutual assist initiatives now type a decentralized community of resistance, one which the state struggles to include.
What is occurring in Hungary and different CEE states is a concentrated model of what’s simmering throughout a lot of the world. From Florida’s classroom bans to Russia’s anti-LGBTQ+ legal guidelines, the script Hungary follows is now not native – it’s international, and it’s being copied. The criminalization of visibility, the rhetorical reshaping of queerness into deviance, the gradual drift from symbolic exclusion to institutional erasure – these should not remoted strikes, however rehearsed methods. A sample.
And but, queer resistance endures. In 2025, Budapest Pleasure responded not with confrontation, however with symbolic jiu-jitsu: flipping the federal government’s nationalist imagery again on itself, claiming the flag, the historical past, the language of freedom.
In lots of western nations, gender range is selectively embraced as branding, as advertising and marketing methods, or as a company efficiency. However in Hungary, range just isn’t mismanaged however being actively dismantled. The state just isn’t stumbling on its path of making a extra equitable society. It’s selecting to regress.
But, regardless of censorship, surveillance, and silence, LGBTQ+ Hungarians live on, resist, and reimagine what it means to belong. Their protest just isn’t solely political – it’s a communicative act and it’s symbolic pushback. A refusal to fade and be erased: a declaration of presence.
In the long run, visibility isn’t just a proper. It’s a battleground.
We’re (house). We’re nonetheless right here. And we aren’t leaving.
