BUDAPEST -- As a keen amateur photographer, Peter had wanted to visit Claudia Andujar's photography exhibition at Budapest's Museum of Ethnography since its opening in September, but he hadn't yet gotten around to it. But when the 70-year-old, who preferred that RFE/RL only use his first name to protect his privacy, heard that some of the Brazilian artist's photographs had been hidden from view, he knew immediately he had to go.
In the spacious exhibition hall, the offending photograph was exhibited but cordoned off behind a stanchion. The photo is from Andujar's 1967 series, simply titled Homosexuality. It shows two male torsos, with one man's hand placed on the other's shoulder. A sign is attached to the stanchion warning minors not to step foot behind the cordon.
The picture had fallen afoul of Hungary's controversial "child protection law," which has been widely criticized for being discriminatory, limiting freedom of expression and targeting the LGBT community. Adopted in 2021 by the right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the law restricts underage people's access to books, movies, and other cultural products that "promote or portray deviation from [gender] identity aligning with sex at birth, gender reassignment, or homosexuality." The law also limits sexual education in schools, with only government-approved instructors allowed to teach the subject.
A photo titled Homosexuality (center) is cordoned off at the exhibit to prevent minors from viewing it, to conform with the government's "child protection" law.
There are signs, however, that the new legislation, which its supporters say protects children and the integrity of the traditional family, might have backfired. Since the implementation of the law, not only are more people in Hungary curious about issues of gender and sexual identity, public support for the LGBT community and interest in LGBT themes in art and culture have grown.
After opening in 2022, the building of the new Museum of Ethnography is adorned with Hungarian embroidery and framed by Hungarian flags. A company owned by a friend of Orban built the museum, and the project received criticism for its rising costs and delays. The museum is not narrowly focused on Hungary or Hungarians and, in its collections and exhibitions, there are artifacts, manuscripts, and photography from all around the world.
The reason they had to put the barrier up wasn't actually to do with the picture itself, said a museum staff member who wished to remain anonymous. It was because of its title, Homosexuality, displayed on the wall. (Whether child or adult, it's still possible to see the offending photo and its title from outside the cordon.)
Critics have accused Orban and his Fidesz ruling party of dismantling democratic institutions, undermining judicial independence, seizing control of the media, and being antagonistic toward Muslim migrants and members of the LGBT community during more than a decade in power.
In recent years, Hungary has passed laws that have been widely condemned as homophobic and transphobic. Two such laws are the de facto prohibition of same-sex adoption in December 2020 and the removal of legal recognition for transgender individuals in May 2020.
To Peter, the censorship at the gallery didn't make much sense. In Hungary, the minimum age for marriage is 16, he said, yet an 18-year-old isn't allowed to read the word homosexuality.
He was one of many people who visited the exhibition in the capital, some of whom might normally not have gone but were intrigued or inspired after media coverage of the censorship decision. Museum staff said they had to turn away at least one family who tried to access the restricted pictures with an underage daughter. They wouldn't care, they told RFE/RL, but they didn't want to get into trouble if someone took a picture of a young person behind the barrier.
The exhibition was in the spotlight again when young members of the United Student Front, a progressive student group, staged a protest at the museum, saying the government was taking away parents' right to educate their own children.
Noel Perlaki-Borsos, a 19-year-old high-school student and co-chair of the United Student Front, told RFE/RL that "the new restrictions curb one's right to education," referring to the Hungarian constitution. For organizing the 17-person demonstration without notice, he was fined by the police.
'Protected' With Plastic Wrap
The first tremors of the 2021 law, which is officially called Act LXXIX and amends various bits of legislation for the protection of children, were felt in July 2023, when books containing LGBT characters or themes were removed from bookstores or could only be displayed if they were wrapped in plastic.
People shared their outrage online, tweeting pictures of beloved young adult novels now covered with plastic. The owner of one of the biggest chains of bookstores in Hungary, the Lira Group, was fined 12 million forints (around $36,000) for displaying books from Alice Oseman's Heartstopper series, which explores the blossoming romance between two teenage boys.
Books that feature LGBT characters are seen wrapped in plastic at a bookstore in Budapest on July 11, 2023.
The hefty fine prompted booksellers around the country to wrap the books that might be deemed offensive in plastic. A few days after Lira was fined and the plastic-wrapped books appeared, thousands of people marched for Budapest Pride. "Are you going to wrap me in plastic, too?" asked one of the signs.
"It's incredibly harmful," said Hungarian author and screenwriter Krisztian Marton about the plastic wrapping of books. "It stigmatizes authors and books and even the readers who would have access to something that resonates with their experience, could guide them, or just give them refuge."
His book, Whiner, was published in October 2023 and tells the story of Marci, a gay, black man growing up in a Hungarian town. It's not dissimilar to the experience of Marton, a gay man who grew up in the city of Szeged as the son of a Hungarian mother and an African-American father.
Whiner is available at Lira bookstores but was placed in the section for 18+ books. "It was a weird feeling. That's not where it should be," Marton told RFE/RL over the phone. "But at least it's there, and it isn't wrapped in [plastic]."
There was another shockwave in October 2023, when the government stopped minors, even with parental consent, from visiting the World Press Photo exhibition at the Hungarian National Museum due to the presence of LGBT images. The decision followed a complaint to the Culture Ministry from Dora Duro, a parliamentary deputy from the far-right Our Homeland Movement party, who objected to a series of photos showing elderly LGBT people in the Philippines.
The director of the institute, Laszlo Simon, got into hot water after he posted a photo showing how popular the exhibition was after all the outcry, with people lined up outside the museum. A few days later, on November 6, 2023, he announced in a Facebook post that he was fired from his post for "sabotaging" the child protection law.
Increase In LGBT Support
Gender and sexual identity issues may have even benefited from the contentious anti-LGBT law and the strong feelings and media attention it garners, albeit unintentionally.
The latest polling data suggests an increase in support for the LGBT community in Hungary. According to a 2023 Ipsos survey, 67 percent of Hungarians support the legal recognition of same-sex couples, compared to just 54 percent in 2015. According to the international market research company, the percentage of those opposed to gay marriage has shrunk over the course of the last eight years, from 24 percent to 16 percent.
People march in the Budapest Pride parade in July 2021.
In a 2021 survey, Amnesty International found that 73 percent of Hungarians disagree with the government's argument that gay people are a harmful influence on children and 75 percent believe that "transgender people should be allowed to officially...change their gender and name in their [official] documents."
Pride events continue to grow. According to the organizers, 35,000 people marched in Budapest Pride despite the heat in July 2023. Since 2021, there have also been Pride marches in Pecs, a city of 140,000 people, with over 500 taking part in September 2023.
Book Shredding
Fairyland Is for Everyone, a Hungarian collection of short stories featuring diverse characters, has become a bestseller after Duro, the politician who objected to children seeing the World Press Photo exhibition, shredded a copy at a 2020 press conference, saying it promoted an agenda that would be harmful to traditional family values.
Since then, the book has been reprinted three times in Hungarian and has been translated into 11 languages. Dorottya Redai, the coordinator of the anthology, was included in Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of 2021.
Duro's shredding of the book, Redai says, "reminded a lot of people of very dark times." Redai is also a research fellow at Central European University (CEU), a private institution founded by the Hungarian-born financier George Soros. CEU left Hungary in 2019 after a legal dispute with the government over a law that placed restrictions on foreign-accredited universities operating in Hungary, which was widely seen as targeting the Soros-backed college.
People march across the Szabadsag, or Freedom Bridge, over the River Danube in downtown Budapest during a gay pride parade in Budapest in July 2021.
As demand for the book soared, Redai and the book's publisher, the Labrisz Lesbian Association -- an organization focusing on the rights of lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women -- struggled to find a printing house in Hungary. They have found one now and Redai says a recently launched website for the book still draws a "surprising" amount of people, and for many, it became a symbol, "a tool of protest."
She is also happy to admit that Duro's dramatic stunt gave the fairyland anthology a little push. At the recent premiere of a movie, Second Golden Age, Redai wore a cardboard costume mask, disguising herself as Duro as a joke. Produced by the Labrisz Lesbian Association, Second Golden Age is, according to the director's assistant Magdi Cilin Timar, a "human rights soap opera." After two premieres to a full house, the movie, which portrays the growing love between two women in a rural city, will be available online and hopefully in cinemas across the country, Timar adds.
'We Get More Support Than Criticism'
Many Hungarians are simply curious about the content that has been banned or censored. Hungarian-Italian historian Stefano Bottoni was one of those and took his two underage sons to the World Press Photo exhibition, which showcases some of the world's best photojournalism. He told RFE/RL's Hungarian Service that he took them to see if they would be allowed in. "The woman [at the exhibition] looked at me and asked if I was aware that they could only enter with parental consent," he said.
Bottoni said he wasn't particularly keen on his sons seeing a picture of a pregnant woman, clutching her abdomen while being carried on a bloody stretcher from the ruins of a bombed-out maternity hospital in Ukraine's war-ravaged city of Mariupol. But he said he certainly didn't mind them seeing photos from the Home for The Golden Gays series, which showed the lives of elderly LGBT people in the Philippines, who lived together and cared for each other as they aged.
"It's a pretty bad joke to think that anyone will be hurt by seeing the lives of old gay people in the Manila nursing home. I explained to my children that these people lived alone, in poverty, and they made [the retirement home] for them to be a little happier and have a good time," Bottoni said.
Budapest's Museum of Ethnography
According to the anonymous staff member from the Museum of Ethnography, Claudia Andujar's Homosexuality photograph was closed off after the public furor over the World Press Photo exhibition. "Perhaps the [Museum of Ethnography] curator got scared that Dura Duro would go to the exhibition," says Johanna Majercsik, the press officer for the Budapest Pride organization.
"It's important that people see that we are not afraid. But it's not easy," says Redai, the coordinator of Fairyland Is for Everyone. Despite the laws restricting their activities and government propaganda conflating homosexuality with pedophilia, "we get more support than criticism," Timar, the film director's assistant, added.
Being transgender or gay still isn't easy in Hungary, with continued incidents of violence against the community after the introduction of the "child protection" law in 2021. But reports of homophobic assaults are relatively rare, and organizers of LGBT events have said they don't worry about counterprotesters or violence. At the 2023 Budapest Pride march, which went down peacefully, only around 30 people gathered to protest the rally, according to a count from the organizers.
That doesn't necessarily mean members of the LGBT community feel unthreatened. According to a 2022 survey, only 12 percent of LGBT students feel safe in school, and almost 75 percent of LGBT adults say they have experienced some form of discrimination in the workplace.
"I don't want to paint the situation [too rosily], but I think what appears in the Western [and] EU press" and what people think "is very unbalanced," says Majecsik from Budapest Pride. The new law and how it is being implemented, she says, have actually resulted in a broader political discussion about such topics.
"I obviously wouldn't thank the government for the propaganda law, but as an effect of that law, more books and movies are being made, which is awesome. I just wish these things didn't happen because of the law," Majecsik said.