Abstract
This chapter examines the practices of Hungarian same-sex couples through which they claim inclusion in a society whose laws and public discourses define the concept of family in a heteronormative way, and where legal and practical constraints make it difficult for non-heterosexuals to become parents. It suggests that LGBTQ people and communities exhibit agency in breaking through the barriers to their plans and acceptance, manifest not only in political activism but also in private, sometimes even illegal and semi-legal practices. The examination of these practices from an intimate citizenship perspective may broaden the concept itself and helps examine and acknowledge the power of individuals to fight against heteronormative views of family and relationships.
Rainbow families are defined as “families with children where parents are lesbian, gay, non-heterosexual or transgender” (Kuosmanen and Jämsä 2007, p. 13, my translation). It is worth noting that in Hungary the strongest focus of activism is on same-sex parenting. The first publications on transgender parenting appeared in 2017 (see below).
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Notes
- 1.
The Fundamental Law of Hungary. Magyar Közlöny 2011/43, p. 10658.
- 2.
This organization no longer exists.
- 3.
The acronym LGBTQ stands for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer.” It is common to also add the letters I (for intersex) and A (for asexual), but during my fieldwork these two groups were barely visible in Hungary. In terms of parenting activism, intersex people do appear among the respondents of the Transvanilla survey (Grőber and Hidasi 2017, see below), but are grouped together with transgender respondents without any mention of their possibly different needs.
- 4.
- 5.
In Hungary, however, the concept is completely unknown, and the term “citizenship” is mostly used in the meaning of formal belonging to a country, though the term “second-class citizenship” has recently been taken up by some minority groups, including the LGBTQ.
- 6.
Homonormativity is the approach whereby only non-threatening, commercialized, and assimilated non-heterosexuals can make citizenship claims (Bell and Binnie 2000).
- 7.
The survey was conducted in 2016 in the Hungarian LGBTQ community; its results presented at the Budapest Pride Open University on October 21, 2016. A written summary (much less detailed than the presentation): Budapest Pride. (2017). Felmérés az LMBTQ emberek magyarországi társadalmi és jogi-politikai helyzetéről 2016-ban. Available at http://budapestpride.hu/sites/default/files/field/file/budapest_pride_felmeres_2016.pdf. Accessed 12 Feb 2018.
- 8.
See, e.g., European Commission Gender Equality Survey. http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinionmobile/index.cfm/Survey/getSurveyDetail/instruments/SPECIAL/surveyKy/2154;jsessionid=4DF19E46B4DF6E0390462C04669CBB21.cfusion07001?CFID=37739&CFTOKEN=dd640c73cd213aba-B73FC928-E281-DF76-30EBFDB60A37DF3A. Accessed 2 Nov 2017.
- 9.
In the summer of 2019, the head of the governing party did express a plan to ban gays and lesbians from adopting, but due to summer break, the bill has not yet been proposed to Parliament.
- 10.
Apparently, this rule is not always taken seriously, as some lesbian mothers and mothers-to-be I spoke to do not recall ever signing such a document.
- 11.
It is important to note that not all these families were rainbow families in the strict sense of the word, as in many cases the heterosexual ex-partner had full or partial custody of the children.
- 12.
A planned rainbow family is where the children are born to or adopted by the same-sex couple or a self-identified LGBTQ single person, as opposed to reconstructed rainbow families, where they were originally born to or adopted by a different-sex couple.
- 13.
In these cases, the mother-to-be and the donor have to pretend to be a couple in order for the healthcare institution to conduct the insemination.
- 14.
In fact, the law gives the same punishment for incitement to surrogacy and for home insemination (up to 3 years’ imprisonment), but people probably think it is difficult to get caught with the latter.
- 15.
Some same-sex parents have given anonymous interviews in magazines, and in the summer of 2016 during a demonstration, three lesbian mothers spoke in public (though not all of them giving their real names).
- 16.
A study of Hungarian school course books revealed that only one of them mentioned same-sex parenting and only as a hypothetical possibility (“If gay people raised children…”) (Takács, I. K. 2011).
- 17.
In Hungary, LGBTQ organizations receive no financial support from the state, and Hungarian donors—whether companies or private persons—are scarce, so any organization that requires funding for its activities—e.g., to maintain an office—needs to apply to foreign donors; the funding priorities of these, however, are often out of sync with the needs of LGBTQ populations in Central and Eastern Europe (Bilić 2016).
- 18.
I refer to blog posters and workshop participants (but not representatives of the organizations) by pseudonyms. The Inter Alia blog is a border case: The posters are activists from the organization, but only some of them use their real names. For those who do not, I invented pseudo-nicks; this is standard practice in online ethnography, as the real nicknames—though often different from the person’s offline name—may make the person’s online or offline persona identifiable for members of the community (Garcia et al. 2009). Also in order to protect the anonymity of my online interlocutors I do not give links to the actual websites (many of which have ceased to function anyway) and do not list them among my sources.
- 19.
This could be explained by the low level of feminist consciousness in Hungary in general (Gregor 2014), whereby the majority are not even aware of the goals and discourses of feminist activism, and also the absence of public debate on the ethical issues around surrogacy. It must also be stated that lesbians are by no means neutral outsiders in this issue. One of my lesbian respondents was actually planning a surrogacy arrangement with her sister, who wanted to conceive through heterosexual intercourse and then give the child to the lesbian couple to raise (to my knowledge, the plan never got realized).
- 20.
For simplicity’s sake, I use the term “social parent” to the biological or adoptive parent’s partner, even though not all people in this category identified themselves as parents.
- 21.
Zsolt Semjén, head of the Christian Democratic Party.
- 22.
Assuming, of course, that Háttér’s research is representative of the community values.
- 23.
It must be mentioned, though, that during the discussions people often asked questions about parenting practices in same-sex relationships, which could be equally relevant in reconstructed rainbow families.
- 24.
At the time of my fieldwork, these workshops were the most participatory events in the Budapest LGBTQ scene, with much pairwork and small-group discussion; some attendants confessed to me that it was this that drove them to the workshops, not a desire to have a child.
- 25.
This reflects the mainstream view of trans* people as sterile: in a study describing the experiences of trans* people in health care (Takács 2006), one of the psychologists interviewed explicitly called transsexuals after gender reassignment “second-class” men or women because they are unable to bear or beget children.
- 26.
The White Book makes a brief mention of a widowed gay man who raises his children with a same-sex partner, emphasizing in the same sentence that most reconstructed rainbow families involve female parents.
- 27.
The data on parenthood are not broken up by gender but can be inferred from the number of responses to the statements “I used to be a father and I still am [after my transition]” and “I used to be a father and now I am a mother.” Of course, the number of biological “fathers” may be higher, as some may identify with the gender-neutral term “parent.”
- 28.
There is no indication of the person of the interviewer in the book, though he/she often expresses strong opinions or even tries to convince interviewees of a given position.
- 29.
It is mostly middle-class members of the community who have encountered Western ideas of LGBTQ subcultures through their travels, internet access, and/or language skills (including on the Internet, where very little relevant material has been translated into Hungarian), and the ones who have enough free time and money to participate in such activities (given that most LGBTQ organizations cannot afford to have their own venue, even some workshops and discussions require participant contribution to rental fees). It is also possible that in poor working-class environments, social and financial pressures to get heterosexually married are stronger; according to a fellow researcher, the low number of visible working-class lesbians might be due to the fact that in their class position it is impossible to make a living on a woman’s or two women’s wages only (Dorottya Rédai, personal communication).
- 30.
It seems to be a common belief in the community that private schools regard parents as paying clients and thus dare not offend them, though a recent event—the discriminatory non-admittance of a teenager into a Waldorf secondary school because he was being raised by a lesbian couple (Gábor, M. (2014, September 26). Nem vették fel az iskolába, mert leszbikusok nevelik. https://24.hu/belfold/2014/09/26/nem-vettek-fel-az-iskolaba-mert-ket-anya-neveli/)—disproves this folk theory.
- 31.
This survey also used the categories “mostly man” and “mostly woman,” which they grouped together with “man” and “woman,” respectively, but could also be interpreted as signifying an intermediate gender identity.
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Béres-Deák, R. (2020). Activism for Rainbow Families in Hungary: Discourses and Omissions. In: Buyantueva, R., Shevtsova, M. (eds) LGBTQ+ Activism in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20401-3_13
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