[Interview to be found in the winter issue of têtu·, available at your newsstands or delivered to you by subscription.] Distinguished by an award at the têtu· 2025 Ceremony, the president of the Budapest Pride organizing association, in Hungary, achieved last June a show of strength against the Viktor Orbán regime.
Photographie : Xavier Murillon pour têtu·
“Make sure that, next year, the Pride march is as boring and as banal as possible!” This is the wish Viktória Radványi, president of the Budapest Pride association, voiced last June on the eve of the largest march the capital of Hungary has known in thirty years of existence. While Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had this year obtained Parliament’s vote, with his majority, to ban any LGBT public demonstration, and had it even written into the constitution of this EU member country since 2004, the stakes of this 2025 edition were equal to the stress provoked by the new legislation: how would the police react to the procession?
“We have always had difficulty organizing the Pride march, notes Viktória. But less due to deliberate homophobia from the police than because it is a difficult event to secure in the face of a violent far-right that brands us as pedophiles.” Fortunately, on this sunny June 28 in the Hungarian capital, the police did not brandish their batons, and the Pride was able to break attendance records: 200,000 people, according to the organizers, came to say no to state homophobia. In 2012, the head of Budapest’s police had already banned the demonstration, citing traffic difficulties, but the administrative court overruled him and 3,000 people marched. But the situation today is far more serious. “This is not the same kind of attack,” reiterates the president of the association. “Since coming to power, in 2010, Viktor Orbán has chipped away at almost all the rights of LGBT+ people: we can no longer undergo administrative gender transition, our representations on television are prohibited, we are forbidden to adopt children…” The 29-year-old woman, who already has a decade of activism behind her, can only observe the extent of the regression.
Resistance
The LGBT+ topics were far from the daily life of Mezökövesd, the small rural town where she grew up, in the northeast of the country, known for its UNESCO-listed traditional embroidery. “The only source of distraction there is going to the pub. Even to go to the cinema, you have to take the bus and change towns. There are many football stadiums, built with the money of the European Union, but young people do not have access to them since they are reserved for professional players,” she describes. At 18, while comforting a friend from a breakup, they kiss. For the other, it’s an event that would be dismissed as a matter of alcohol, but for Viktória, that first lesbian kiss is an epiphany.
Problem: in her homeland’s countryside, every fact and gesture can become the subject of gossip. When one day she shaved half of her head, the neighbors talked about it for two weeks! In contrast, in Budapest, which she joined at 19 to pursue her studies, a spirit of freedom swept through the youth. But the future hero of the global reactionary lobby is already at the helm of the government. Viktória thus grows closer to Budapest Pride, not so much because she feels personally involved—thought she still might—than to defend human rights. “I did not understand at all what sexual orientation meant. At the time, I thought being straight meant being attracted to girls, regardless of gender,” she recalls. “I gained access to information through BuzzFeed and YouTube, and then I had a gay boyfriend who did not want to come out to his family.” Within the LGBT association, resistance to Orbanism begins to organize: “In the face of its attacks, we wanted to run counter-campaigns by linking hands in the street. It wasn’t about demanding marriage but about limiting the damage to our rights.”
The damage is not visible only in the public space; state homophobia seeps into minds, within families… When she tells her parents that she loves a girl, Viktória falls off her chair at their reaction: “Suddenly, my mother, who grew up in a secular communist culture, starts telling me that it is against God!” As for her father, who proclaims to hate Viktor Orbán, he nevertheless repeats the rhetoric by declaring he wants to “protect his three daughters” from these LGBT things… Since then, their relationship has not thawed; if Viktória stays in her country, it is to avoid abandoning her chosen family.
