Budapest became a metropolis in the 1880s. It is not surprising that queer subcultures flourished there as they did in other cities like Berlin and Vienna. Historians had not searched for this history until Kurimay's painstakingly researched book. Sources about queer sexualities are scarce, but the author assembled an archive that includes detective novels, police journals, newspapers, and sexological literature, in addition to the files of the Budapest Criminal Court. Despite different political regimes—monarchy, a socialist republic, a conservative dictatorship, and communism—there are significant continuities in the state's understanding, regulation, and tolerance of homosexuality between the 1880s and 1960s. While this claim might seem trite, it is of importance in the Hungarian context, for conservative voices have recently suggested that homosexuality is foreign to Hungary. Kurimay underscores that queerness has been part of Hungarian history since the nineteenth century.
Six chapters are organized chronologically to show how queer love persisted in Budapest. In chapter 1, Kurimay argues that the Hungarian state became increasingly concerned with the regulation of gender and sexuality in the late nineteenth century. The police created a homosexual registry to keep the growing homosexual presence under control in the city. Homosexuality was criminalized under paragraph 241 of the Hungarian Criminal Code, which punished “unnatural fornication” between men. And officials borrowed German and Austrian medical theories in an attempt to explain homosexuality, which was initially considered a pathological condition in Hungary. Crucially, Kurimay explains that psychiatrists made distinctions between innate and acquired homosexuality. Medical experts and the police regarded acquired homosexuality with more suspicion since it was often connected to male prostitution and presented a ground for intervention. Despite all these measures, Kurimay concludes that the homosexual registry was ineffective, and the law was not applied strictly during this period.
Print media shaped popular opinion on homosexuality. In chapter 2, Kurimay examines Sinful Budapest (1908), a serial publication that chronicled the city's underbelly, including its queer life. The authors, Kornél Tábori and Vladimir Székely, made a distinction between respectable and immoral homosexuals. The former kept their sex lives private and were model citizens; the latter engaged in male prostitution and blackmail. Sinful Budapest normalized homosexuality in the public sphere, but it also spread misconceptions, such as the link between homosexuality and crime, or the belief that homosexuality could spread like an epidemic.
Terror, arrests, and summary executions generally characterize the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919). Kurimay argues in chapter 3 that homosexuality was also rethought during this brief period. A modernized Criminology Department adopted insights from psychology, sociology, and, perhaps counterintuitively, psychoanalysis to propose how homosexuals could be rehabilitated. This approach was part of a larger assessment of the social causes of criminality. This position, nonetheless, did not translate into support for queer people. These experts regarded homosexuality as something that could and should be changed.
Female sexuality was rarely discussed publicly, and the authorities did not pay much attention to lesbians. In chapter 4, Kurimay focuses on one scandalous exception: the divorce and libel trial of an influential, conservative woman, Eduardina Pallavicini, who had an alleged affair with Cécile Tomay, a renowned conservative author. Despite the sensational reporting on the case, the women withstood the scandal unscathed. Their class background protected them against the accusations of servants. Kurimay sees in this case evidence that the conservative, nationalist, and Christian political regime of Miklós Horthy tolerated homosexuality. This chapter makes us ponder when homosexuality matters. In this case, the conservatism and antisemitism of the two women mattered more than their sexual indiscretions. Their story reminds us that we must think of sexuality as part of a larger web of intersecting categories.
One of the most important discoveries in the book can be found in chapter 5. Kurimay explores an apparent contradiction, namely that the nationalist, antisemitic, and antiliberal Horthy regime turned out not to be a repressive time for homosexuals. The tolerance common during the monarchy continued as did the focus on rehabilitation characteristic of the Soviet Republic. However, homosexuality was tolerated but not accepted; the state defended traditional gender roles and the family. Most queer people were able to go about their lives if they kept their sexuality under wraps. It was not until the Nazi occupation that homosexuality truly became incompatible with the idea of a national community and, due to this shift, homosexuals were persecuted and severely punished.
It was the Communist regime that most actively persecuted homosexuals. Chapter 6 traces the end of tolerance of homosexuality after the establishment of the Communist dictatorship in 1948 until decriminalization in 1961. The Communist state even punished female same-sex sexuality, something that the other regimes had never done. In Communist Hungary, the state sought to reeducate homosexuals into heterosexuality. Socialism promised gender and sexual equality, but homosexuality was antithetical to socialism. The Hungarian Security Service, in turn, used homosexuals to blackmail people and as informants.
Queer Budapest illustrates how queer life has been part of Hungarian history since the nineteenth century. Why, then, has it been so difficult to know this history? Kurimay argues that the misremembering of the queer past is a post-Communist reaction. The Communist regime's persecution and stigmatization of homosexuality led to shame and to a silencing of the queer past. For many Hungarians, queer culture seems to start in 1989. This “collective misremembering about the past” has had serious consequences (234). Queer activists have lacked a history in which they can frame their demands, and far-right politicians continue to make the case that homosexuality is a Western import. Queer Budapest is an important book that paints a complicated picture of the tensions between sexual repression and liberation throughout the twentieth century in Hungary as well as in Central and Eastern Europe.
