Freedom Index
![A Fairytale for Everyone is a children’s book about marginalised people. Illustration: Labrisz / Lilla Bölecz
This article first appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Index on Censorship, The monster unleashed: How Hungary’s illliberal vision is seducing the Western world published on 2 April 2026. The article was published before Viktor Orbán’s defeat in the Hungarian elections on 12 April.
Anyone browsing the children’s section of a Hungarian bookshop will notice something unusual: books sealed in plastic wrappers.
The popular young adult book Heartstopper by Alice Oseman will be one of them – if it’s on the shelf at all. Heartstopper is not alone. All children’s books with LGBTQ+ themes face this fate.
Hungary’s second largest bookstore chain, Líra, was made an example of in 2023 after selling Heartstopper without a wrapper. It received a large fine, and a legal battle ensued.
While the landscape has long been hostile for LGBTQ+ people in Hungary, the use of wrappers stems from a government regulation implementing a law introduced in 2021, ostensibly to protect children. In practice, the regulation conflates paedophilia with depictions of LGBTQ+ lives and was soon dubbed the anti-LGBTQ+ law.
Another provision of the regulation says bookshops within 200 metres of churches and schools are banned from selling any books which portray LGBTQ+ identities. In small towns, navigating this is almost impossible.
Grammatical pedantry wins
Hungary has two major publishing house and bookshop chains and they have both fallen foul of the law.
One is Líra, the other is Libri.
Líra received a fine of ,200 and two additional fines, while the much larger Libri received a fine of only ,100. Earlier in 2023 Libri was taken over by the Matthias Corvinus Collegium, a foundation with close links to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Following the takeover, Libri stepped into line over the plastic wrapping directive.
“There was a big question mark [over] whether Líra should challenge these decisions. But I think they made a very brave decision, and they said that they wanted to challenge [them],” Lendvai said.
They won all three cases at the first instance through pure and simple grammatical pedantry.
“We were about to write the petition and then an editor at the book publishing company said, ‘Well, it seems to be that a comma is missing,’” Lendvai explained.
He said that the wording suggested books aimed at children with LGBTQ+ themes must be placed into sealed packaging if they were distributed separately, while the government had interpreted it to mean books must be in closed packaging and also separated.
Líra neither packaged nor separated its books. As a business, arguing about a point of grammar felt much safer as the first line of argument than challenging the wider issues at stake.
Líra continued to sell their books without wrappers. The law, it felt, was on its side. It also launched its Unsealed Books campaign, using audiobooks read by contemporary authors, actors and public intellectuals to give free access to titles.
Two of the court decisions became final, but its ruling on the ,200 fine was quashed by the Supreme Court. In that hearing, Lendvai tried to read out a passage from a contemporary book about a young LGBTQ+ man being welcomed by a Christian community to demonstrate why it should not be banned from sale near churches.
“The chairwoman of the panel of the tribunal banned me from reading that passage and she said that this is not about books and it’s not about free speech,” he said.
The law was amended, the misplaced comma was fixed. More changes meant that only books with decisive LGBTQ+ themes had to be wrapped, meaning fewer books may be affected by the law. Publishers would also have to alert bookshops when their titles fell under the provision.
Líra has since filed a claim with the European Court of Human Rights, which is pending.
Challenged by Europe
The general law on LGBTQ+ content (which also bans such content from primetime TV and schools) has been challenged by the European Commission. Tamara Ćapeta, the advocate general at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), has said that it violates EU law. [On 21 April 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union ordered Hungary to scrap the legislation.]
Tamás Dombos of the Háttér Society – Hungary’s largest LGBTQ+ civil society organisation – said the law could be understood only in the country’s broader context of how it deals with LGBTQ+ identities.
This includes a media campaign smearing LGBTQ+ people and organisations, a recent ban on LGBTQ+ gatherings, the banning of legal gender recognition for transgender people, and the restriction of adoption rights for unmarried couples.
“The political message of the government is very clear: LGBTQI people are second-class citizens who do not deserve the same level of protection, and the discussion of LGBTQ+ topics in the public sphere is harmful for children,” he said.
Organisations bound by legislation, he said, implemented the bans in a broad way. They don’t include same-sex couples in adverts and don’t publish books with these themes.
Some take these actions because they fear being targeted by anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns and some bookshops now avoid stocking books with LGBTQ+ themes altogether.
In October 2025, Hungary had its first known Banned Books Week event, where among other things students could explore an exhibition about the history of book censorship in Hungary. Gergely Gosztonyi, the head of the Digital Authoritarianism Research Lab at Eötvös Loránd University, took a lead role in the event. We asked Gosztonyi whether any of the books featured in the exhibition were titles currently being challenged in Hungary.
“We came to the conclusion that we didn’t want the pilot to be very political,” he said. “We had so many books in Hungarian history that have been banned, that it was easy to pick different ones.”
He is well aware of the self-censorship, and the irony. At the same time, this was a pilot project, and he didn’t want it to be the last.
A fairytale ending?
In 2020, A Fairytale for Everyone, edited by Boldizsár M Nagy, was the unlucky star of a very unusual press conference. Dóra Dúró, a politician from the Our Homeland Movement party, called journalists together, walked out onto the podium and shredded the book.
Dorottya Rédai is executive director of Labrisz Lesbian Association, an NGO based in Budapest which raises awareness of discrimination against sexual minority women. She was also the project co-ordinator for A Fairytale for Everyone which featured our cover illustrator Lilla Bölecz.
Labrisz had the idea about creating a fairytale book from a feminist perspective on the back of their education programme. Some of the stories in the book would be reworked classics and others original, with half written by established writers and the rest by emerging voices. They put out a call for the unknown writers, which Rédai said was noticed by the far right and the government.
A national television show, which Rédai described as propaganda, invited her to talk about the book.
“People from the community were congratulating me for days for coming out alive from the lion’s den,” Rédai told Index.
Dúró’s book shredding was not the only political attack on the book. Orbán told a radio show that the LGBTQ+ community should “leave our children alone” and the book’s publisher was ordered to print disclaimers that the stories contained “behaviour inconsistent with traditional gender roles”.
Booksellers were attacked for stocking it, Rédai said, adding that fascist groups put stickers on shop windows in an echo of the Nazi practice of intimidating Jewish shops. Community members rallied round, taking flowers and chocolates to the impacted shops to show their support.
With all the attention, the book ended up being a bestseller. Foreign publishers picked it up and international media followed the story.
“The book became a symbol of democracy and resistance against the Orbán regime,” Rédai said. “We figured out from this story that cultural resistance is very, very important.”
Books are just the start
It’s not just books that are under threat. Other artistic endeavours are being censored, too.
In 2023, one particular story hit the international headlines. At the World Press Photo exhibition at the National Museum in Budapest, a complaint was filed over a set of photographs spotlighting a care home for elderly LGBTQ+ people in the Philippines.
A notice was placed at the entrance to the museum, saying under-18s were not allowed.
Museum director Laszlo Simon, a former member of the Fidesz government, was later ousted, with the government claiming he had failed to follow his legal obligations.
Soon afterwards, at the National Museum of Ethnography, a small selection of photos documenting a gay couple in 1960s Brazil were hidden from view. A black cordon was strung around the section, with a woman blocking the entrance and asking everyone if they were over 18.
“Two people challenged this ban,” Dombos said. “One was an underage person, and she was not let in. And then another person – that was me – said that cordoning off such content is a form of harassment against LGBTQI people.”
They both recently lost their cases, although Dombos aims to take his to Strasbourg.
Gideon Horváth’s sculpture which pays tribute to unfulfilled non-heteronormative love. Photo: Gideon Horváth
Gideon Horváth, a Hungarian-French visual artist who often creates sculptures from beeswax, explores queer theories, subcultures and histories as part of his work. He told Index about the times he has faced censorship. In 2023 he was part of an open-air exhibition, using the term “queer ecology”.
“The organiser of the exhibition first accepted it, and then she wrote to me and told me that she was informed that it would be wise regarding the political climate to not use the word ‘queer,’” he said.
It was the first time he had experienced anything like this, and he said he had to put his foot down.
The organiser then agreed to keep the wording, although Horváth said he saw an email from above saying it should not be allowed. A sculpture for Sidewalk the first Budapest Biennale of Contemporary Public Art labelled as “a memorial for unfulfilled, non-heteronormative loves” was allowed, he said, because the programme was organised by Budapest Gallery, which is under the municipal control of the capital’s liberal mayor.
But in another municipal gallery in the capital, where he was invited to exhibit his piece from the park, he was asked to delete a number of words from the accompanying plaque with the excuse that the gallery welcomed children. He believes they were afraid of the consequences if they got it wrong.
He refused to delete the words, suggesting they should be blacked out so that the self-censorship was visible.
When he was shortlisted for the Esterházy Art Award in 2023, he was told by the Ludwig Museum (which falls directly under the Ministry of Culture) that the sculpture would need to be hidden and roped off. He won the battle over his work being visible but did not win the war of words.
“I fought as hard as I could, but my only [other] option would have been to step out of the competition altogether,” he said. He did not want to become known as the censored gay artist from Hungary and told the museum he would not be making any changes, saying “If you change the text that’s on you”.
“The curator changed it, and I was really ashamed of it all,” he said.
He was announced as one of three winners of the award, a decision which he still cannot make sense of.
“What I’ve seen is that institutions don’t necessarily wait for an authority to step in and tell them they can’t do something. They immediately self-censor before even having any threats,” he said.
And so they go further than the law requires. The result is an erasure of LGBTQ+ voices and stories, which is likely the entire point.
READ MORE](https://fsnn.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Labrisz-3-bolecz.jpg "A Fairytale for Everyone is a children’s book about marginalised people. Illustration: Labrisz / Lilla Bölecz
This article first appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Index on Censorship, The monster unleashed: How Hungary’s illliberal vision is seducing the Western world published on 2 April 2026. The article was published before Viktor Orbán’s defeat in the Hungarian elections on 12 April.
Anyone browsing the children’s section of a Hungarian bookshop will notice something unusual: books sealed in plastic wrappers.
The popular young adult book Heartstopper by Alice Oseman will be one of them – if it’s on the shelf at all. Heartstopper is not alone. All children’s books with LGBTQ+ themes face this fate.
Hungary’s second largest bookstore chain, Líra, was made an example of in 2023 after selling Heartstopper without a wrapper. It received a large fine, and a legal battle ensued.
While the landscape has long been hostile for LGBTQ+ people in Hungary, the use of wrappers stems from a government regulation implementing a law introduced in 2021, ostensibly to protect children. In practice, the regulation conflates paedophilia with depictions of LGBTQ+ lives and was soon dubbed the anti-LGBTQ+ law.
Another provision of the regulation says bookshops within 200 metres of churches and schools are banned from selling any books which portray LGBTQ+ identities. In small towns, navigating this is almost impossible.
Grammatical pedantry wins
Hungary has two major publishing house and bookshop chains and they have both fallen foul of the law.
One is Líra, the other is Libri.
Líra received a fine of ,200 and two additional fines, while the much larger Libri received a fine of only ,100. Earlier in 2023 Libri was taken over by the Matthias Corvinus Collegium, a foundation with close links to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Following the takeover, Libri stepped into line over the plastic wrapping directive.
“There was a big question mark [over] whether Líra should challenge these decisions. But I think they made a very brave decision, and they said that they wanted to challenge [them],” Lendvai said.
They won all three cases at the first instance through pure and simple grammatical pedantry.
“We were about to write the petition and then an editor at the book publishing company said, ‘Well, it seems to be that a comma is missing,’” Lendvai explained.
He said that the wording suggested books aimed at children with LGBTQ+ themes must be placed into sealed packaging if they were distributed separately, while the government had interpreted it to mean books must be in closed packaging and also separated.
Líra neither packaged nor separated its books. As a business, arguing about a point of grammar felt much safer as the first line of argument than challenging the wider issues at stake.
Líra continued to sell their books without wrappers. The law, it felt, was on its side. It also launched its Unsealed Books campaign, using audiobooks read by contemporary authors, actors and public intellectuals to give free access to titles.
Two of the court decisions became final, but its ruling on the ,200 fine was quashed by the Supreme Court. In that hearing, Lendvai tried to read out a passage from a contemporary book about a young LGBTQ+ man being welcomed by a Christian community to demonstrate why it should not be banned from sale near churches.
“The chairwoman of the panel of the tribunal banned me from reading that passage and she said that this is not about books and it’s not about free speech,” he said.
The law was amended, the misplaced comma was fixed. More changes meant that only books with decisive LGBTQ+ themes had to be wrapped, meaning fewer books may be affected by the law. Publishers would also have to alert bookshops when their titles fell under the provision.
Líra has since filed a claim with the European Court of Human Rights, which is pending.
Challenged by Europe
The general law on LGBTQ+ content (which also bans such content from primetime TV and schools) has been challenged by the European Commission. Tamara Ćapeta, the advocate general at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), has said that it violates EU law. [On 21 April 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union ordered Hungary to scrap the legislation.]
Tamás Dombos of the Háttér Society – Hungary’s largest LGBTQ+ civil society organisation – said the law could be understood only in the country’s broader context of how it deals with LGBTQ+ identities.
This includes a media campaign smearing LGBTQ+ people and organisations, a recent ban on LGBTQ+ gatherings, the banning of legal gender recognition for transgender people, and the restriction of adoption rights for unmarried couples.
“The political message of the government is very clear: LGBTQI people are second-class citizens who do not deserve the same level of protection, and the discussion of LGBTQ+ topics in the public sphere is harmful for children,” he said.
Organisations bound by legislation, he said, implemented the bans in a broad way. They don’t include same-sex couples in adverts and don’t publish books with these themes.
Some take these actions because they fear being targeted by anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns and some bookshops now avoid stocking books with LGBTQ+ themes altogether.
In October 2025, Hungary had its first known Banned Books Week event, where among other things students could explore an exhibition about the history of book censorship in Hungary. Gergely Gosztonyi, the head of the Digital Authoritarianism Research Lab at Eötvös Loránd University, took a lead role in the event. We asked Gosztonyi whether any of the books featured in the exhibition were titles currently being challenged in Hungary.
“We came to the conclusion that we didn’t want the pilot to be very political,” he said. “We had so many books in Hungarian history that have been banned, that it was easy to pick different ones.”
He is well aware of the self-censorship, and the irony. At the same time, this was a pilot project, and he didn’t want it to be the last.
A fairytale ending?
In 2020, A Fairytale for Everyone, edited by Boldizsár M Nagy, was the unlucky star of a very unusual press conference. Dóra Dúró, a politician from the Our Homeland Movement party, called journalists together, walked out onto the podium and shredded the book.
Dorottya Rédai is executive director of Labrisz Lesbian Association, an NGO based in Budapest which raises awareness of discrimination against sexual minority women. She was also the project co-ordinator for A Fairytale for Everyone which featured our cover illustrator Lilla Bölecz.
Labrisz had the idea about creating a fairytale book from a feminist perspective on the back of their education programme. Some of the stories in the book would be reworked classics and others original, with half written by established writers and the rest by emerging voices. They put out a call for the unknown writers, which Rédai said was noticed by the far right and the government.
A national television show, which Rédai described as propaganda, invited her to talk about the book.
“People from the community were congratulating me for days for coming out alive from the lion’s den,” Rédai told Index.
Dúró’s book shredding was not the only political attack on the book. Orbán told a radio show that the LGBTQ+ community should “leave our children alone” and the book’s publisher was ordered to print disclaimers that the stories contained “behaviour inconsistent with traditional gender roles”.
Booksellers were attacked for stocking it, Rédai said, adding that fascist groups put stickers on shop windows in an echo of the Nazi practice of intimidating Jewish shops. Community members rallied round, taking flowers and chocolates to the impacted shops to show their support.
With all the attention, the book ended up being a bestseller. Foreign publishers picked it up and international media followed the story.
“The book became a symbol of democracy and resistance against the Orbán regime,” Rédai said. “We figured out from this story that cultural resistance is very, very important.”
Books are just the start
It’s not just books that are under threat. Other artistic endeavours are being censored, too.
In 2023, one particular story hit the international headlines. At the World Press Photo exhibition at the National Museum in Budapest, a complaint was filed over a set of photographs spotlighting a care home for elderly LGBTQ+ people in the Philippines.
A notice was placed at the entrance to the museum, saying under-18s were not allowed.
Museum director Laszlo Simon, a former member of the Fidesz government, was later ousted, with the government claiming he had failed to follow his legal obligations.
Soon afterwards, at the National Museum of Ethnography, a small selection of photos documenting a gay couple in 1960s Brazil were hidden from view. A black cordon was strung around the section, with a woman blocking the entrance and asking everyone if they were over 18.
“Two people challenged this ban,” Dombos said. “One was an underage person, and she was not let in. And then another person – that was me – said that cordoning off such content is a form of harassment against LGBTQI people.”
They both recently lost their cases, although Dombos aims to take his to Strasbourg.
Gideon Horváth’s sculpture which pays tribute to unfulfilled non-heteronormative love. Photo: Gideon Horváth
Gideon Horváth, a Hungarian-French visual artist who often creates sculptures from beeswax, explores queer theories, subcultures and histories as part of his work. He told Index about the times he has faced censorship. In 2023 he was part of an open-air exhibition, using the term “queer ecology”.
“The organiser of the exhibition first accepted it, and then she wrote to me and told me that she was informed that it would be wise regarding the political climate to not use the word ‘queer,’” he said.
It was the first time he had experienced anything like this, and he said he had to put his foot down.
The organiser then agreed to keep the wording, although Horváth said he saw an email from above saying it should not be allowed. A sculpture for Sidewalk the first Budapest Biennale of Contemporary Public Art labelled as “a memorial for unfulfilled, non-heteronormative loves” was allowed, he said, because the programme was organised by Budapest Gallery, which is under the municipal control of the capital’s liberal mayor.
But in another municipal gallery in the capital, where he was invited to exhibit his piece from the park, he was asked to delete a number of words from the accompanying plaque with the excuse that the gallery welcomed children. He believes they were afraid of the consequences if they got it wrong.
He refused to delete the words, suggesting they should be blacked out so that the self-censorship was visible.
When he was shortlisted for the Esterházy Art Award in 2023, he was told by the Ludwig Museum (which falls directly under the Ministry of Culture) that the sculpture would need to be hidden and roped off. He won the battle over his work being visible but did not win the war of words.
“I fought as hard as I could, but my only [other] option would have been to step out of the competition altogether,” he said. He did not want to become known as the censored gay artist from Hungary and told the museum he would not be making any changes, saying “If you change the text that’s on you”.
“The curator changed it, and I was really ashamed of it all,” he said.
He was announced as one of three winners of the award, a decision which he still cannot make sense of.
“What I’ve seen is that institutions don’t necessarily wait for an authority to step in and tell them they can’t do something. They immediately self-censor before even having any threats,” he said.
And so they go further than the law requires. The result is an erasure of LGBTQ+ voices and stories, which is likely the entire point.
READ MORE")
Listen to the article
This article first appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Index on Censorship, The monster unleashed: How Hungary’s illliberal vision is seducing the Western world published on 2 April 2026. The article was published before Viktor Orbán’s defeat in the Hungarian elections on 12 April.
Anyone browsing the children’s section of a Hungarian bookshop will notice something unusual: books sealed in plastic wrappers.
The popular young adult book Heartstopper by Alice Oseman will be one of them – if it’s on the shelf at all. Heartstopper is not alone. All children’s books with LGBTQ+ themes face this fate.
Hungary’s second largest bookstore chain, Líra, was made an example of in 2023 after selling Heartstopper without a wrapper. It received a large fine, and a legal battle ensued.
While the landscape has long been hostile for LGBTQ+ people in Hungary, the use of wrappers stems from a government regulation implementing a law introduced in 2021, ostensibly to protect children. In practice, the regulation conflates paedophilia with depictions of LGBTQ+ lives and was soon dubbed the anti-LGBTQ+ law.
Another provision of the regulation says bookshops within 200 metres of churches and schools are banned from selling any books which portray LGBTQ+ identities. In small towns, navigating this is almost impossible.
Grammatical pedantry wins
Hungary has two major publishing house and bookshop chains and they have both fallen foul of the law.
One is Líra, the other is Libri.
Líra received a fine of $37,200 and two additional fines, while the much larger Libri received a fine of only $3,100. Earlier in 2023 Libri was taken over by the Matthias Corvinus Collegium, a foundation with close links to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Following the takeover, Libri stepped into line over the plastic wrapping directive.
“There was a big question mark [over] whether Líra should challenge these decisions. But I think they made a very brave decision, and they said that they wanted to challenge [them],” Lendvai said.
They won all three cases at the first instance through pure and simple grammatical pedantry.
“We were about to write the petition and then an editor at the book publishing company said, ‘Well, it seems to be that a comma is missing,’” Lendvai explained.
He said that the wording suggested books aimed at children with LGBTQ+ themes must be placed into sealed packaging if they were distributed separately, while the government had interpreted it to mean books must be in closed packaging and also separated.
Líra neither packaged nor separated its books. As a business, arguing about a point of grammar felt much safer as the first line of argument than challenging the wider issues at stake.
Líra continued to sell their books without wrappers. The law, it felt, was on its side. It also launched its Unsealed Books campaign, using audiobooks read by contemporary authors, actors and public intellectuals to give free access to titles.
Two of the court decisions became final, but its ruling on the $37,200 fine was quashed by the Supreme Court. In that hearing, Lendvai tried to read out a passage from a contemporary book about a young LGBTQ+ man being welcomed by a Christian community to demonstrate why it should not be banned from sale near churches.
“The chairwoman of the panel of the tribunal banned me from reading that passage and she said that this is not about books and it’s not about free speech,” he said.
The law was amended, the misplaced comma was fixed. More changes meant that only books with decisive LGBTQ+ themes had to be wrapped, meaning fewer books may be affected by the law. Publishers would also have to alert bookshops when their titles fell under the provision.
Líra has since filed a claim with the European Court of Human Rights, which is pending.
Challenged by Europe
The general law on LGBTQ+ content (which also bans such content from primetime TV and schools) has been challenged by the European Commission. Tamara Ćapeta, the advocate general at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), has said that it violates EU law. [On 21 April 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union ordered Hungary to scrap the legislation.]
Tamás Dombos of the Háttér Society – Hungary’s largest LGBTQ+ civil society organisation – said the law could be understood only in the country’s broader context of how it deals with LGBTQ+ identities.
This includes a media campaign smearing LGBTQ+ people and organisations, a recent ban on LGBTQ+ gatherings, the banning of legal gender recognition for transgender people, and the restriction of adoption rights for unmarried couples.
“The political message of the government is very clear: LGBTQI people are second-class citizens who do not deserve the same level of protection, and the discussion of LGBTQ+ topics in the public sphere is harmful for children,” he said.
Organisations bound by legislation, he said, implemented the bans in a broad way. They don’t include same-sex couples in adverts and don’t publish books with these themes.
Some take these actions because they fear being targeted by anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns and some bookshops now avoid stocking books with LGBTQ+ themes altogether.
In October 2025, Hungary had its first known Banned Books Week event, where among other things students could explore an exhibition about the history of book censorship in Hungary. Gergely Gosztonyi, the head of the Digital Authoritarianism Research Lab at Eötvös Loránd University, took a lead role in the event. We asked Gosztonyi whether any of the books featured in the exhibition were titles currently being challenged in Hungary.
“We came to the conclusion that we didn’t want the pilot to be very political,” he said. “We had so many books in Hungarian history that have been banned, that it was easy to pick different ones.”
He is well aware of the self-censorship, and the irony. At the same time, this was a pilot project, and he didn’t want it to be the last.
A fairytale ending?
In 2020, A Fairytale for Everyone, edited by Boldizsár M Nagy, was the unlucky star of a very unusual press conference. Dóra Dúró, a politician from the Our Homeland Movement party, called journalists together, walked out onto the podium and shredded the book.
Dorottya Rédai is executive director of Labrisz Lesbian Association, an NGO based in Budapest which raises awareness of discrimination against sexual minority women. She was also the project co-ordinator for A Fairytale for Everyone which featured our cover illustrator Lilla Bölecz.
Labrisz had the idea about creating a fairytale book from a feminist perspective on the back of their education programme. Some of the stories in the book would be reworked classics and others original, with half written by established writers and the rest by emerging voices. They put out a call for the unknown writers, which Rédai said was noticed by the far right and the government.
A national television show, which Rédai described as propaganda, invited her to talk about the book.
“People from the community were congratulating me for days for coming out alive from the lion’s den,” Rédai told Index.
Dúró’s book shredding was not the only political attack on the book. Orbán told a radio show that the LGBTQ+ community should “leave our children alone” and the book’s publisher was ordered to print disclaimers that the stories contained “behaviour inconsistent with traditional gender roles”.
Booksellers were attacked for stocking it, Rédai said, adding that fascist groups put stickers on shop windows in an echo of the Nazi practice of intimidating Jewish shops. Community members rallied round, taking flowers and chocolates to the impacted shops to show their support.
With all the attention, the book ended up being a bestseller. Foreign publishers picked it up and international media followed the story.
“The book became a symbol of democracy and resistance against the Orbán regime,” Rédai said. “We figured out from this story that cultural resistance is very, very important.”
Books are just the start
It’s not just books that are under threat. Other artistic endeavours are being censored, too.
In 2023, one particular story hit the international headlines. At the World Press Photo exhibition at the National Museum in Budapest, a complaint was filed over a set of photographs spotlighting a care home for elderly LGBTQ+ people in the Philippines.
A notice was placed at the entrance to the museum, saying under-18s were not allowed.
Museum director Laszlo Simon, a former member of the Fidesz government, was later ousted, with the government claiming he had failed to follow his legal obligations.
Soon afterwards, at the National Museum of Ethnography, a small selection of photos documenting a gay couple in 1960s Brazil were hidden from view. A black cordon was strung around the section, with a woman blocking the entrance and asking everyone if they were over 18.
“Two people challenged this ban,” Dombos said. “One was an underage person, and she was not let in. And then another person – that was me – said that cordoning off such content is a form of harassment against LGBTQI people.”
They both recently lost their cases, although Dombos aims to take his to Strasbourg.
Gideon Horváth’s sculpture which pays tribute to unfulfilled non-heteronormative love. Photo: Gideon Horváth
Gideon Horváth, a Hungarian-French visual artist who often creates sculptures from beeswax, explores queer theories, subcultures and histories as part of his work. He told Index about the times he has faced censorship. In 2023 he was part of an open-air exhibition, using the term “queer ecology”.
“The organiser of the exhibition first accepted it, and then she wrote to me and told me that she was informed that it would be wise regarding the political climate to not use the word ‘queer,’” he said.
It was the first time he had experienced anything like this, and he said he had to put his foot down.
The organiser then agreed to keep the wording, although Horváth said he saw an email from above saying it should not be allowed. A sculpture for Sidewalk the first Budapest Biennale of Contemporary Public Art labelled as “a memorial for unfulfilled, non-heteronormative loves” was allowed, he said, because the programme was organised by Budapest Gallery, which is under the municipal control of the capital’s liberal mayor.
But in another municipal gallery in the capital, where he was invited to exhibit his piece from the park, he was asked to delete a number of words from the accompanying plaque with the excuse that the gallery welcomed children. He believes they were afraid of the consequences if they got it wrong.
He refused to delete the words, suggesting they should be blacked out so that the self-censorship was visible.
When he was shortlisted for the Esterházy Art Award in 2023, he was told by the Ludwig Museum (which falls directly under the Ministry of Culture) that the sculpture would need to be hidden and roped off. He won the battle over his work being visible but did not win the war of words.
“I fought as hard as I could, but my only [other] option would have been to step out of the competition altogether,” he said. He did not want to become known as the censored gay artist from Hungary and told the museum he would not be making any changes, saying “If you change the text that’s on you”.
“The curator changed it, and I was really ashamed of it all,” he said.
He was announced as one of three winners of the award, a decision which he still cannot make sense of.
“What I’ve seen is that institutions don’t necessarily wait for an authority to step in and tell them they can’t do something. They immediately self-censor before even having any threats,” he said.
And so they go further than the law requires. The result is an erasure of LGBTQ+ voices and stories, which is likely the entire point.
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