UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Saturday 18 February 2:30 – 4:00: Panel K3: Sexualities

Hadley Z Renkin (University of Michigan/University of Latvia): ‘Skeletons in the national closet: sexuality, history and belonging in postsocialist Hungary’

It has been oft-noted that rituals of burial and reburial have played significant roles in the social and political reconfigurings of many post-socialist transitions. Considerably less remarked upon has been the growth of sexual political movements in many post-socialist countries, and the roles they have played, and continue to play, in attempts to develop more inclusive and effective civil societies. A fascinating example of the conjunction of these two phenomena is the recent rededication in Budapest of the gravestone of an almost forgotten "gay ancestor", Kertbeny Károly, by Hungarian lesbian and gay activists, and the establishment of an annual "pilgrimage" to his gravesite as part of the yearly Gay Pride Festival. In this paper I explore this event ethnographically. I argue that this memorial ritual serves performatively to create bonds of identity and community between present-day and past Hungarian lesbians and gays. More significantly, however, by connecting lesbians and gays to a specifically national past, and thus to the structures of genealogy and history that underlie national community, the funerary ritual imaginatively repositions them in relation to Hungarian society as a whole, symbolically legitimating them as equal members of the nation, and so enhancing their claims to acceptance as "proper" citizens. Yet the ritual at the same time invokes another, more "global", lesbian and gay community and its history. The Kertbeny memorial thus complexly positions Hungarian lesbians and gays with respect to national and transnational borders of inclusion and exclusion – a situation emblematic of the ambiguities and tensions currently facing Hungary itself in its efforts to integrate national and European identities.