Too gay for the government and the public service media? With this question, the well-read Hungarian news portal "Index" wrote an article about why Hungary is no longer participating in the Eurovision Song Contest in the coming year. "Index", known for good networking and reliable journalistic work, quoted several anonymous sources from the government and the government-related media holding MTVA. According to them, not lack of money is the reason for Hungary's ESC exit, but homophobia.
The report made many headlines both nationally and internationally - and also for the most outraged denials of the Hungarian government. Of "fake news" and "shameless sensationalism and gossip in liberal press organs" tweeted, for example, Hungary's government spokesman Zoltán Kovács.
What are you talking about? This is shameless muckraking, gossip from your liberal press organs. Nobody in the HU government ever said Eurovision is, in your words, "too gay." But do not let the facts get in the way of your sensational, liberal story line. #fakenews https://t.co/yLc0TW8CUr
- Zoltan Kovacs (@zoltanspox) November 27, 2019In fact, however, Hungary is one of the countries of the European Union where homophobic statements are most often heard. It is not so much the Hungarian society that has an outstanding number of prejudices against homosexuals. Resentment against them tries to incite the official Hungary in particular.
Public-law and government-related private media routinely incite homosexuals in little codified form - for example, they report on the supposedly dramatic consequences of the introduction of the third sex in Western countries or interview "cured homosexuals" who have gone through so-called conversion therapies.
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and leading politicians of his ruling party Fidesz sometimes slander political opponents with anti-gay stereotypes. Any discourse for more equality of homosexuals is considered by Orbán followers and adherents as a modern form of totalitarianism. In her eyes, the five letters LGBTQ embody the decadence of the Western world and its near apocalyptic end.
Homosexuals have never had it easy in Hungarian public life. The first openly gay government member in the country was Gábor Szetey, Secretary of State in the social-liberal Gyurcsány Cabinet. In July 2007, Szetey outed, the year after he left Hungary - he saw little chance to lead a normal life in his homeland as a politician with his sexual orientation. Even the well-known gay journalist József Orosz could not stand it anymore after a years-long right-wing, downright hateful hate campaign against his person - he went to Canada in early 2010.
Gay haters at Orbans side
Since Orbán's rise to power in April 2010, however, homophobia has been an integral part of state ideology. This was the case years ago of Róbert Alföldi, the former director of the National Theater, who lives openly gay. Shortly before his contract expired in the summer of 2013, Hungary's top cultural official, Imre Kerényi, said at a press conference that "in the future, the theater will no longer be about fancy, but about love, honor and loyalty". This was preceded by a year-long homophobic hate campaign against Alföldi and his - mostly very successful - productions.
Hungary's gay haters on duty are two of Orbán's oldest companions: the Speaker of Parliament László Kövér and the publicist Zsolt Bayer - both have been waging a cultural war against the "liberal gender and fagot lobby" for years. During a campaign appearance in Budapest in May this year, Kövér compared the adoption of children by gays with pedophilia and said: "A normal homosexual tries to adapt to the world order, in which he does not necessarily consider himself equal." Bayer, known for his inhuman lyrics, often in fecal language, announced in his TV show in July: "A healthy heterosexual man is filled with the sight of two kissing men with horror and disgust." Let's make it happy, courageous and proud: Yes, we are homophobic. "
Orbán himself has not publicly gone to this level - it remained at embarrassing-primitive remarks. So he taught a - even homophobic - right-wing opposition politicians once that you in politics "needs more than just an eyebrow tweezers". In general, Orbán warns above all of the collapse of the Christian-conservative, tradition-and family-centered Europe. From this point of view, last year the subject gender studies was banned at Hungarian universities.
However, Hungary is far from being the only country in the east of the EU where homophobia is part of government policy. In Poland, the election campaign this autumn has largely had the character of an anti-LGBTQ campaign, and in Estonia the right-wing coalition party EKRE also sees the fight against LGBTQ as the primary goal. In Slovakia, a referendum against homosexual marriage took place in 2015, in Romania in 2018 - but both failed. In the Czech Republic, President Milos Zeman, and in Bulgaria, Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, sometimes with homophobic remarks. Alluding to the Iron Curtain, some LGBTQ activists therefore speak of the "rainbow curtain" separating East and West.
In Hungary, the previous ESC selection competition "Das Lied" will be organized in the Hungarian-national future. For 2020, there has already been a huge number of candidates, the media holding MTVA said this week in writing. It was therefore a good decision, according to the statement, not to join the ESC, but instead to support "Hungarian songs, talents and value-creating productions".