The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary: Art and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

century. Why, then, has it been so difficult to know this history? Kurimay argues that the misremembering of the queer past is a post-Communist reaction. The Communist regime’s persecution and stigmatization of homosexuality led to shame and to a silencing of the queer past. For many Hungarians, queer culture seems to start in 1989. This “collective misremembering about the past” has had serious consequences (234). Queer activists have lacked a history in which they can frame their demands, and far-right politicians continue to make the case that homosexuality is a Western import. Queer Budapest is an important book that paints a complicated picture of the tensions between sexual repression and liberation throughout the twentieth century in Hungary as well as in Central and Eastern Europe.