Deconstructing the Imagined Queer Censorship in State-Socialist East-Central Europe:

The Case of Hungarian Cinema

Author

Kata Benedek

Abstract

It is widely believed that during the political period of East Central European state socialism, the state authorities systematically suppressed the cultural visibility of sexual minorities due to a hypothetical politico-ideological motivation. In this paper, I systematically challenge the period of East Central European state socialism, when the state authorities systematically suppressed the cultural visibility of sexual minorities due to a hypothetical politico-ideological motivation. While no evidence supports this view, and the idea of queer censorship is undisturbed in the narratives of academic, political and mainstream discourses, no comprehensive argument to the contrary has been published. The concept of state socialism as a period of systematic queer censorship through the example of the post-Stalinist Hungarian People's Republic. First, using mixed-methods research, primarily qualitative analysis, I examined the legal context and political actions concerning sexual minorities and the theory of censorship methods, finding no theoretical link between the existence of sexual minorities from a political standpoint and censorship policies. Second, to test for possible discrepancies between theory and practice, I then conducted a quantitative analysis of Hungarian cinema, which likewise reveals no evidence of state-level queer censorship. On the contrary, the state actively supported queer representation, as evidenced by the distribution of 92 foreign queer films and the state-financed production of 9 Hungarian queer feature films.

Keywords

queer, history of sexuality, cultural studies, state socialism, epistemology, censorship, cinema.

Introduction to the Imagined Queer Censorship in East Central European Cultural Fields

Proving non-existence is challenging, especially when the supposed existence of the entity has not been explicitly asserted but merely believed, and the belief can only be deduced from the questions and conclusions drawn based on it. In such cases, it is insufficient to simply find the rare instances where the belief was explicitly stated; instead, we must identify patterns in the practical manifestations of the belief to make it visible. Such an example is the alleged generalised idea of a politico-ideologically motivated systematic censorship of queer¹ representation under East Central European (ECE) state-socialist regimes.²

To grasp the deep epistemic embeddedness of the socialist queer censorship claim, we must look through a wider lens. Simplified narratives about the queer past of the ECE region are often mobilised in right-wing populist political discourse, which combines pro-traditional arguments about gender roles and “lifestyles” with anti-Western rhetoric portraying queer visibility as a threat to national sovereignty. What they imply or directly assert is that legal, social and cultural visibility and emancipation of queer minorities are essentially foreign from the ECE traditions, appearing as a consequence or even as an unnecessary by-product of the liberal democratic systems adopted in 1989/90 ( e.g., Benedek 2022a and 2022b, Guasti and Bustikova 2020; Kahlina 2015; Mole 2016; Mos 2019; Slootmaeckers 2023). While scholars have analysed this phenomenon as a socio-political strategy, these imaginary truths carry a different significance for cultural historians. The above works reveal that, for many ECE societies, it is inconceivable to imagine or be aware of the progression of queer rights or social and cultural visibility before the period of regime change. Moreover, it is not only one side of the national political aisle that simplifies the complexities of state-socialist queer history.

A real-life example illustrates this last point well. In defence of his scandalous 2021 homophobic law, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, speaking in the corridors of the European Parliament to the world press, declared: “In the Communist regime, homosexuality was punished.” Several Hungarian and international outlets republished the interview. Yet, apart from a single article from the Netherlands (Struys 2021), no Hungarian or international journalist corrected the legal fallacy: namely, the Hungarian socialist decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1961. The correction was not made because it was about Hungary per se, but because it was about the region's “communist” past —where, borrowing a phrase from Halberstam (2005), compared to the capitalist West, state socialism appears as a milieu in which progress for queer identities remains unthinkable.

Academia is not immune to these misconceptions either. Look at Figure 1 from the otherwise significant and often-cited publication De-Centring Western Sexualities by Kulpa and Mizielińska (2016), focusing on queer epistemic developments in the post-socialist ECE. The image shows the timelines of the authors’ understanding of queer epistemology of the (former) West and East. Compared to the Western liberal democracies’ progressive, never-stopping development of thought, the East appears as absolutely nothing to look at, nothing we could understand or name as discourse in the frames of the region’s epistemic reality. While presenting Western-canonised ideas mainstreaming in the “knots of queer time” in the post-1989 ECE, they imply that under state socialism, there was a complete queer void. Furthermore, the absolute separation also denies the former cross-bloc circulation of information and discourse (Szulc 2017, Benedek 2022a).

Furthermore, without further explanation, Kulpa and Mizielińska claim that forms of queer self-organisation were “not possible before 1989”. This assertion is not only historically inaccurate (see, e.g., Kurimay and Takács 2016; McLellan 2012) but also, given the absences on the graph, implies that in the imagined absence of self-organisation, nothing else could have existed.\

I find Kulpa and Mizielińska’approach to be a rare outlier, where not only are no questions asked about socialist queer history, but the epistemic blind spot is visualised without targeted inquiry.

From the perspective of cultural history, an alternative and complementary idea to "it was not possible before 1989" often prevails, addressing or implying censorship or systematic silencing of queer artefacts. Foreshadowing the pragmatic, empirical evidence-based arguments that will follow, let us look at an explicit example related to cinema. As Filmvilág’s (Filmworld, 1958-), Hungary’s leading cinema journal, notes in the opening of its 2016 special issue on Hungarian queer film history, “Forbidden Desires. During the Cold War, the centralised cultural policies of socialism criminalised and banned all forms of sexual otherness from the silver screen.”.³ Nevertheless, one of the articles in the issue referred to queer censorship as “the veil covering the strictly forbidden topic” due to the ECE’s centralised cultural politics (Kiss 2016). In the one-page introduction, however, the author mentions twelve movies produced and screened in the ECE that depict same-sex love, desire, and intimacy from the period when it was allegedly “strictly forbidden”, adding that the distribution of such movies became possible only following the political system change from 1989/90 onwards.

These examples, which do not account for the discrepancy between the belief (state-imposed queer censorship) and the evidence (queer artefacts existing in sizable quantities across genres, see e.g., Benedek 2022a), continue to rely on the premise of censorship. Most often, however, this belief is not explicitly articulated but manifests itself in a failure to investigate socialist-era queer artefacts. When such an investigation does occur, it rarely produces complex interpretations situating these artefacts within a broader state-socialist (queer) political, social, and cultural discourse (see e.g., Leskowicz 2006 and 2010, Piotrowski 2009, Popa 2016, Moss 2016, Talarczyk 2025). Instead, the artefacts are treated as incapable of carrying more profound significance beyond transgressing state censorship and societal stigmatisation. Yet the underlying assumption remains that silencing is derived primarily from state ideology and/or the alleged backwardness of state-socialist orders compared to Western capitalist attitudes.

Scholarly inquiries often stem from a disciplinary oxymoron, framed as negative questions about the perceived impossibility of imagining these artefacts as a part of a complex system of discourse: Why were these artefacts not supposed to exist under state socialism? Rather than conducting systematic and/or case-study-based empirical research to uncover the contextual origins of queer artefacts, Leskowicz, Piotrowski, Popa, Moss, and Talarczyk tend to close their interpretations within the logical short circuit of convenient binary oppositions: oppressor and oppressed, silencing and subversion, “censorship” and “counter/action.” The refusal to seek the discursive or epistemic integrity of state-socialist queer artefacts appears consistent once these are framed merely as system failures—isolated enclaves of exception against the backdrop of socialist censorship.

This paper does not aim to explore all the reasons behind the highlighted belief. I do not intend to answer why or how this narrative emerged in the East-West epistemic divide, nor do I seek to analyse how current epistemological frameworks, dominated by Western theories, contribute to their perpetuation. Addressing these questions would involve drawing on the work of ECE researchers (e.g., Takács, 2018; Takács & Tóth, 2021; Kurimay, 2021), who challenge Wallerstein's world-system theory, similar to authors such as Larry Wolff (1994) and Marija Todorova (2009). All these works highlight the cultural divide and epistemic hierarchies between the Western center and the Eastern periphery, as well as the role of (imagined) sexual customs in this divide. Furthermore, the queer analysis of similar epistemic hierarchies is already integral to contemporary discussions, following Jasbir Puar's (2007) pivotal concept of homonationalism. Practiced by Western nations, homonationalism continues to influence national and international political identities by framing national politico-cultural sexual epistemes as a marker of civilisational progress and linking them to political and economic success. This logic establishes an epistemic value hierarchy between the ingroup — queer-friendly, wealthy Western democracies — and the outgroup — queerphobic, non-Western, poorer, and less democratic states. In this way, the West monopolises a single, linear, progressive narrative of the socio-political and cultural history of queerness, leaving no space for the recognition of foreign parallel queer historical processes. Neither will the present paper will also not examine who benefits or suffers from these narratives, nor explore the impact of post-Cold War global USA cultural and academic hegemony or the cultural amnesia in the ECE resulting from the desire and promise of cultural reintegration into the “former” West with the fall of the socialist regimes, discussed by scholars like Piotr Piotrowski (2009), Edit András (2009) and many others. These perspectives remain relevant, but even more so after new evidence-based argumentative frameworks are created to allow meaningful comparisons.

While a retrospective analysis of informal social attitudes, queerphobia, or stigmatisation may lead to unfounded assumptions, reconstructing state policy remains an empirical field of inquiry. This study, therefore, undertakes a theoretical and methodological inquiry, an empirical investigation, based on the case of one ECE country, to falsify the thesis of systematic political-ideological queer censorship in the cultural sphere of the Socialist Bloc. Rather than attempting to derive overarching conclusions or meanings from isolated examples or speculating on artistic intentions and performative messaging, I seek to revisit the state's attitudes and state policy in the matter. This study therefore contributes to replacing a dominant discursive element—the belief in politically and ideologically motivated queer censorship in the former Eastern Bloc—with pragmatic, evidence-based findings.

To avoid comparative biases, I aim for a strictly reconstructive approach: an inductive examination of a discourse’s internal logic. Comparative religion scholar Raimon Panikkar, in his paper, What Is Comparative Philosophy Comparing? (Panikkar 1988; Tlostanova 2012), Referred to this method as an ‘imparative’ approach, distinguishing it from comparative methodologies. “‘ means that before engaging in conscious or unconscious comparative analysis of seemingly similar socio-cultural phenomena across different cultures, we must first reconstruct the internal discursive logic of the examined phenomenon within its own national or regional epistemic framework. Such a scholarly approach can help interpret certain social phenomena and their contexts, identify discursive elements, and analyse their relationships to make sense of the given phenomenon.

With Imparative Qualitative and Quantitative Mixed Methods to Debunk the Belief in Systematic State-Socialist Queer Censorship

I chose the post-Stalinist Hungarian People’s Republic as a case study. As my focus is on debunking an alleged state-imposed category through the queer lens, I revisit evidence from fields under direct control of the state by applying qualitative and quantitative mixed methods in three areas: legal aspects, institutional practices, and cultural production.

First, combining primary and secondary sources, I analyse two legal domains. On one hand, I examine the shifting legal categorisation concerning homosexuality, particularly the 1961 abolition of homosexuality from the penal code, including the parliamentary arguments and their implications for state power. On the other hand, I review the legal provisions regarding artistic freedom and the cultural policiesto consider the relevance of decriminalisation within this scope.

Second, having established that no legal framework explicitly targets queer representation, I once again rely on primary and secondary sources to examine the cultural regulations and functioning of censorship in institutional and individual production practices. Given that qualitative analysis alone cannot rule out the possibility of informal systematic censorship, I extend my inquiry by building a quantitative dataset to provide evidence beyond the case studies discussed earlier. My conclusion is drawn from the example of the Hungarian film industry to make inferences about the broader cultural field.

Third, adopting a quantitative approach, I examine the state-monopolised film industry and compile a database of queer films produced in Hungary between the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1961 and the political transition of 1989-90. The dataset builds on several international queer film lists, cross-checked against the Internet Movie Database (IMDb 2022), which records international and Hungarian premieres. Hungarian releases listed there were automatically included. For films meeting the criteria but lacking a release date, I sought confirmation from additional sources, primarily the Arcanum DigiTheka press database,⁴ which allows keyword searches in digitised newspapers. I selected items appearing in cinema and TV programs for inclusion in the database. From longer film review articles, I only selected those where it was clear that the author had seen the film in question in Hungary.

Legal environment

Neither Marxist theories nor their Leninist interpretations offer relevant points regarding queerness as a political issue. To justify existing Hungarian censorship of queer representation would require evidence that the political leadership considered the representation of queerness objectionable, harmful, sensitive or “inconvenient” from any or all ideological, political, societal or moral positions.

To discuss relevant legal categories, I narrow the queer terminology to a more precise description of homosexuality and lesbianism, referring to men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women. While Hungarian legislation has criminalised sex between men since 1878 (§175.241 & 242), they decriminalised it in 1961. Following a private initiative in 1958, the Neuroscience Committee of the Health Sciences Council reviewed the relevant Acts of the Penal Code on unnatural fornication to provide an expert opinion for the decision by the Ministry of Health (Takács and Tóth 2021).⁵ Their arguments mainly relied on social aspects and morality, first and foremost emphasising the unchangeable innate character of homosexuality. In addition, the committee discussed several further ethical and logical dilemmas: the unprovability of the crime, the absence of victims, the ineffectiveness of punishment, exposure to blackmail, the lack of effects on population growth, the right to sexual satisfaction, and so on. The committee enclosed a partial conclusion on each entry, confirming the Council's generally abolitionist attitude. The parliament passed the change in law: the bill highlighted the unchangeable trait of homosexuality and the injustice of exposure to blackmail in connection with the legal threat: “Homosexuality is a biological phenomenon and can therefore not be handled legally as a crime.” (Takács and Tóth 2021).

The MPs accepting these arguments confirm two key points. First, the members of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party did not perceive homosexuality per se as a moral issue, but rather considered the act of punishment unethicalh. Second, the decision shows that the political leadership regarded homosexuality not as a political matter, but as a biological phenomenon.

While a further discriminatory legal distinction remained in the Penal Code - the higher age of consent for homosexual and lesbian sexual acts (20, later reduced to 18 in 1978) compared to heterosexual ones (14) - there are no previously known instances when the political leadership would have further defined the topic or added more bills objecting to other types of queer social or cultural behaviours. Decriminalisation indicates that members of sexual minorities were not considered dangerous by the political leadership, neither politically nor socially or morally. The question then arises: if queer citizens were not considered by state authorities to be politically, socially or morally threatening enough to be criminalised, or to have their existence thematised for political ends, why censor or obstruct queer representation?

Post-Stalinist socialist censorship in the Hungarian People’s Republic, in theory…

To review the question of queer censorship, we must look at the broader cultural system of the Hungarian Kádár-era (the political period named after the General Secretary János Kádár, 1956-1989), which was somewhat ambivalent in the question of censorship, to say the least. The 1949 Constitution announced that according to the workers’ interest, the state guarantees freedom of speech, press and assembly (1949. XX. 8/55. § (1) and (2)). Second, the Hungarian People’s Republic supports scientific work and art serving the cause of the working people. Third, “the Hungarian People's Republic promotes with all the means at its disposal the development of an intelligentsia faithful to the people.” (1949. XX. 8/53. § (1)) (Constitution of the People's Republic of Hungary 1956).

These rather broad statements reflect the Marxist-Leninist idea that social revolution can only be achieved in parallel with the cultural revolution. The goals were the general redistribution of knowledge to evoke the class consciousness of the masses, in other words, ideological reproduction. Therefore, the political leadership had to decide what it was obliged to support, tolerate or reject to best serve the cultural, social and political revolution.

The articles on artistic freedom remained the same under the state-socialist regime: setting a general direction without providing any practical guidance for the judgment of specific topics, styles and works. While arts policy became a separate cultural policy sector, neither the totalitarian Rákosi era (the political period named after the General Secretary Mátyás Rákosi, 1949-1956) nor the authoritarian Kádár era established a centralised censorship institution or set an exact list of exemplary regulations. The cultural politics of the time cannot be described as a single fixed, unchanging set of hegemonic rules and policies, even within the period of the two substantially different leaderships. (Bolvári-Takács 2011).

The Kádár era’s cultural policies maintained a constant reflexive political dialogue. Competing solutions were simultaneously pursued in cultural committees, parliamentary debates, and the press. These debates focused on regulating the cultural field by synthesising ideological and pragmatic bases. They also sought to balance the goals of state ideology, popular culture, and the historical tradition of the Hungarian cultural canon before the Soviet takeover, while aiming at a reconciliation with the previously ostracised intellectual elite (Bolvári-Takács 1995).

In practice, the basis of Kádár's cultural policy was the 1958 text The Directives of the Cultural Policy of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP) (Bolvári-Takács 1995). The declaration's compromising tone laid down the principles that defined the Kádárian cultural policy until the regime change. The MSZMP (KB 1958) declared that while they still advocated for socialist realism, they also allowed for the competition of genres and aesthetics in the name of creative freedom as long as artists served the workers’ interest.

In 1962, General Secretary János Kádár reaffirmed these cultural directives: "We will help and support [...] socialist realist literature and art with all our strength and means, but we will also give space to all other well-intentioned, non-hostile artistic activities" (Ságvári and Vass 1968). In a 1966 party declaration, Az irodalom és a művészetek hivatása társadalmunkban [The vocation of literature and the arts in our society], an even more permissive tone was struck, shifting the focus from “socialist realism” to more generic “humanist” approaches.

We support socialist and other humanist works aimed at the masses, and we support politically and ideologically non-hostile aspirations, but we exclude politically hostile, anti-humanist or morally offensive manifestations from our cultural life. It is up to the administration [...] to determine [...] what we support, what we accept and what we reject. (translated from Hungarian by the author) (MSZMP 1966.)

There was a discernible r shift over the years as the regulation has become more permissive, or, as in other interpretations, e.g., Miklós Haraszti’s (1987), the state included formerly excluded items and integrated them in the accepted or even supported categories of cultural production. However, the precise definition of the categories was still not set. These party declarations were primarily addressed to cultural actors and decision-makers in the cultural institution systems that corresponded to the different artistic sectors. These statements had to be individually interpreted by all those involved in the cultural field – creators, decision-makers and bureaucrats alike. In Haraszti’s words, all actors in the cultural field had to be cultural policy experts in order to understand how far they could go to convince the cultural system that their ideas were aligned with the ideological line.

While it was common sense that specific topics or attitudes - openly anti-communist, anti-Soviet, anti-Semitic, fascist and Nazi content, irredentism, and pornography (Horváth 2012) - were impossible to publish, it was not easy to decide what exactly was "against the interests of the people" or what was "against public morality" when it came to more complex or ambivalent topics.

Since the state socialist leadership had no formal censorship guidelines, they could not have formally censored queer content. Furthermore, as noted above, the political leadership did not thematise homosexuality or other forms of queerness as a political issue or as a threat to the political, social or moral order. Therefore, it would be illogical to assume that there was some hidden political motivation in the policy grey zone in which conscious, systematic censorship of queer topics by the political authorities could or would have been implemented. The only obvious obstacle would have been the decision-maker's moral bias. Thus, there were no official impediments to the circulation of queer cultural content in the state-socialist Hungarian People’s Republic.

… and in practice

Although the formal institutional environment in Hungary did not support censorship, it also did not rule out the possibility of systematic informal tactics to hinder the dissemination of queer cultural content. To draw more precise conclusions about the relationship between cultural policies and practices and queer cultural representation, we need to look at pragmatic and practical evidence, for instance, the quantity of queer cultural items circulating in public and the forms and contexts in which they appeared.

Since it would be impossible for one scholar to explore all the queer cultural productions that appeared in all corners of the state socialist Hungarian cultural field, I narrowed my scope to Hungary’s well-documented cinematic history, employing a primarily quantitative approach. I have counted the number of premieres in Hungary of films with queer themes imported from abroad, alongside films with queer themes produced and released in Hungary.

After the 1948 establishment of the National Film Office of the Hungarian People’s Republic, the state monopolised film production, import and distribution. Given that an independent film industry no longer existed, every movie had to be approved by this office: in the case of Hungarian productions, by the Ministry of Culture, Department of Cinematography, and in the case of foreign productions, by the Film Acceptance Committee. Therefore, the submitted concept and script, as well as the final movies had to comply, or at least not conflict, with state ideology. The same applied to foreign films. Consequently, when a completed film was screened, it necessarily reflected the political view of the state power regarding the film’s plot or underlying messages. What was actually screened publicly could not therefore be considered a threat to the political, social or moral order.

Contrary to low-budget, individualistic mediums – such as literature, certain branches of fine arts, or popular music – in film history research, one must not deal with the precise distinctions between the supported and tolerated pieces, as all publicly screened Hungarian-made films had received state funding and therefore were actively supported by the state. Thus, queer films screened and/or shot in Hungary during this period can be linked to the state’s general attitudes towards the cultural representation of queer themes. Another factor that separates films from individual artistic genres is numbers. Not only could they not be released without the system's approval, but there were fewer of them, which allows research to be based on a more limited and accurate data set.

In addition to the more favourable archival conditions, I also chose to analyse film as the most important cultural medium of the time. When in 1918, Lenin (1971) declared that "The cinema is for us the most important of the arts", he was referring to film as the most effective for communicating and mass disseminating any message, including political propaganda. Therefore, while it is not possible to generalise across cultural forms, simple logic suggests, that measures regulating the most popular, complicated, and expensive medium could have been the most stringent. This indicates that in other cultural forms, the rules applied here were the equally or even less strict.

Queer Film Imports to the Hungarian People’s Republic after 1961

As already mentioned, all foreign movies imported into the country had to pass the state-run Film Acceptance Committee, which had delegates from the Directorate General of the Ministry of Culture, the foreign trade company Hungarofilm, the Motion Picture Distribution Company, film professionals, film critics and representatives of social organisations. The movies passed then were licensed, dubbed and distributed through Hungarofilm. Beyond aligning with the above-described general cultural political directives, while the Committee had to deliberate on a couple of regulations, such as quotas complying with the requested Hungarian/Soviet/foreign/socialist/capitalist film ratio, it seems there were not many more specific rules (Takács 2016a). The work of the Film Acceptance Committee is illustrated by their official statement published in 1958:

We apply strict standards regarding ideological quality, artistic presentation, and educational intent, and we are ruthless if the film is overtly harmful. We try to be tolerant and generous when the intent and artistic quality are correct, with only minor or major flaws in the overall picture. (Zay 1958)

Considering the tightly controlled selection process and the official statement, it can be ruled out that issues genuinely considered "harmful" and contrary to the state's ideology could have been brought to the public's attention. Let us now see how this environment affected the importation of international queer cinema to state-socialist Hungary.

Since no database currently collects the Hungarian screenings of foreign films with queer themes, I have built my own. For the selection, I examined foreign movies made before the fall of the Soviet Union, in which queer characters appear as primary or secondary characters, and were screened in Hungary between 1961 and 1990. I focused on the premieres starting in 1961, after decriminalisation. Before 1961, one could find very few and sporadic international examples. However, this number cannot be directly linked to a single “anti-queer state socialist ideology.” On the one hand, during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stalinist cultural expansion still strongly propagated the screening of Soviet or Soviet-style films (Takács 2016b). On the other hand, only a limited number of queer films circulated internationally,and it is, therefore, unsurprising that such themes were underrepresented in the films imported into state-socialist Hungary. Following de-Stalinisation in the mid-1950s, an increasing number of Western films entered Hungarian cinemas (Takács 2016a and 2016b), coinciding with the growing visibility of queer cinema internationally (see, ie, Dyer 2003; Griffiths 2008).

For the period between 1961 and 1990, I identified 92 foreign films featuring queer themes that premiered in cinemas or on television in the Hungarian People’s Republic’s (Table 1). Within this corpus, queer topics appear in a wide variety of narrative and stylistic contexts. This diversity suggests that films were not excluded from distribution solely on the basis of their queer content. The only plausible exceptions are films containing pornographic elements; as mentioned above, this cannot be attributed to queer themes, since Hungary, like the rest of the state-socialist Bloc, officially rejected pornography across all cultural domains. Secondly, in line with the Film Acceptance Committee’s guidelines, imported films had to meet certain standards of artistic quality. As a result, B movies were less likely to be imported.

Table 1: Queer movie import in the Hungarian People's Republic between 1961-1989/90

1961 (Hungarian premiere) Dearden, Basil. Victim, United Kingdom, 1961 (original premiere).

1962 Visconti, Luchino. Rocco e i suoi fratelli / Rocco and His Brothers, Italy, 1961.

1963 Richardson, Tony. A Taste of Honey, United Kingdom, 1961.

1965 Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Mamma Roma, Italy, 1961.

1965 Wilder, Billy. Some Like It Hot, United States, 1959.

1968 Rivette, Jacques. La religieuse / The Nun, France, 1966.

1969 Lean, David. Lawrence of Arabia, United Kingdom, 1962.

1970 Fleischer, Richard. The Boston Strangler, United States, 1968.

1970 Newman, Paul. Rachel, Rachel, United States, 1968.

1970 Fleischman, Peter. Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern / Hunting Scenes from Bavaria,West Germany, 1969.

1970 Anderson, Lindsay. If..., United Kingdom, 1968.

1970 Schlöndorff, Volker. Der junge Törless / The Young Törless, West Germany, 1966.

1970 Kubrick, Stanley. Spartacus, United States, 1960.

1970 Bergman, Ingmar. Tystnaden / The Silence, Sweden, 1963.

1970 Polanski, Roman. The Fearless Vampire Killers, United Kingdom, 1967.

1972 Forbes, Bryan. The L-Shaped Room, United Kingdom, 1962.

1972 Jireš, Jaromil. Valerie a týden divu / Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Czechoslovakia, 1970.

1972 Schlesinger, John. Sunday Bloody Sunday, United Kingdom, 1971.

1972 Visconti, Luchino. Morte a Venezia / Death in Venice, Italy, 1971.

1972 Harvey, Anthony. The Lion in Winter, United Kingdom, 1968.

1973 Bertolucci, Bernardo. Il conformista / The Conformist, Italy, 1970.

1973 Sarafian, Richard C. Vanishing Point, United States, 1971.

1973 Wilder, Billy. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, United Kingdom, 1970.

1973 Penn, Arthur. Little Big Man, United States, 1970.

1973 Visconti, Luchino. La caduta degli dei / The Damned, Italy, 1969.

1974 Fosse, Bob. Cabaret, United States, 1972.

1975 Schlesinger, John. Midnight Cowboy, United Kingdom, 1969.

1975 Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Teorema / Theorem, Italy, 1968.

1975 Visconti, Luchino. Ludwig, Italy, 1972.

1975 Gainsbourg, Serge. Je t'aime, France, 1976.

1977 Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Accatone, Italy, 1961.

1977 Fellini, Federico. Fellini - Satyricon, Italy, 1969.

1977 Schlöndorff, Volker. Der Fangschuß / Coup de Grâce, West Germany, 1976.

1978 Schlesinger, John. Darling, United Kingdom, 1965.

1978 Brooks, Richard. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, United States, 1958.

1979 Brooks, Richard. Looking for Mr. Goodbar, United States, 1977.

1979 Scola, Ettore. Una giornata particolare / A Special Day, Italy, 1977.

1980 Visconti, Luchino. Gruppo di famiglia in un interno / Conversation Piece, Italy, 1974.

1980 Ross, Herbert. California Suite, United States, 1978.

1980 Pinter, Harold. Butley, United Kingdom, 1973.

1980 Molinaro, Édouard. La cage aux folles / Birds of a Feather, France, 1978.

1981 Cimino, Michael. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, United States, 1974.

1981 Parker, Alan. Midnight Express, United Kingdom, 1978.

1981 Allen, Woody. Manhattan, United States, 1979.

1981 Needham, Hal. Cactus Jack, United States, 1979.

1982 Friedkin, William. Boys in the Band, United States, 1970.

1982 Brass, Tinto. Caligula, Italy, 1979.

1982 Aldrich, Robert. The Killing of Sister George, United States, 1968.

1982 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden / In a Year of 13 Moons, West Germany, 1978.

1983 Flynn, John. The Sergeant, United States, 1968.

1983 Wyler, William. The Children's Hour, United States, 1961.

1983 Chabrol, Claude. Les Biches, France, 1968.

1983 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. Querelle, West Germany, 1982.

1982 Wyler, William. Ben-Hur, United States, 1959.

1983 Périer, Étienne. La confusion des sentiments / Confused Feelings, France, 1979.

1983 Anderson, Lindsay. In Celebration, United Kingdom, 1975.

1983 Blain, Gérard. Le rebelle / The Rebel, France, 1980.

1983 Molinaro, Édouard. La cage aux folles II / Birds of a Feather 2, France, 1980.

1984 Huston, John. The Night of the Iguana, United States, 1964.

1984 Lumet, Sidney. Deathtrap, United States, 1982.

1985 Parker, Alan. Fame, United Kingdom, 1980.

1985 Lumet, Sidney. Dog Day Afternoon, United States, 1975.

1985 Pollack, Sidney. Tootsie, United States, 1982.

1985 Yates, Peter. The Dresser, United Kingdom, 1983.

1985 Camus, Mario. La colmena / The Beehive, Spain, 1982.

1986 Spielberg, Steven. The Color Purple, United States, 1985.

1986 Edwards, Blake. Victor Victoria, United States, 1982.

1987 Attenborough, Richard. The Chorus Line, United States, 1985.

1987 Babenco, Héctor. Kiss of the Spider Woman, Brazil, 1985.

1987 Jarman, Derek. Caravaggio, United Kingdom, 1986.

1987 Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Il fiore delle mille e una notte / Arabian Nights, Italy, 1974.

1988 Frears, Stephen. My Beautiful Laundrette, United Kingdom, 1985.

1988 Oshima, Nagisa. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Japan, 1983.

1988 Lester, Richard. The Ritz, United Kingdom, 1976.

1988 Jordan, Neil. Mona Lisa, United Kingdom, 1986.

1988 Oshima, Nagisa. Ai no korîda / In the Realm of the Senses, Japan, 1976.

1988 Sharman, Jim. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, United Kingdom, 1975.

1988 Barron, Zelda. Secret Places, United Kingdom, 1984.

1988 Erman, John. Early Frost, United States, 1985.

1988 Jarman, Derek. Angelic Conversation, United Kingdom, 1985.

1988 Argento, Dario. Il gatto a nove code / The Cat o' Nine Tails, Italy, 1971.

1989 Schrader, Paul. Mishima, United States, 1985.

1989 Jarman, Derek. The Last of England, United Kingdom, 1988.

1990 Borowczyk, Walerian. Immoral Tales, France, 1974.

1990 Arcand, Denys. The Decline of the American Empire, Canada, 1986.

1990 Weir, Peter. Dead Poets Society, United States, 1989.

1990 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. Faustrecht der Freiheit / Fox and His Friends, West Germany, 1975.

1990 Robinson, Bruce. Withnail and I, United Kingdom, 1987.

1990 Hill, George Roy. The World According to Garp, United States, 1982.

1990 Donaldson, Roger. No Way Out, United States, 1987.

1990 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant / The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, West Germany, 1972.

1990 Waters, John. Pink Flamingos, United States, 1972

The sheer number of currently identified queer films suggests that their release was not an error. The release of queer films demonstrates not just that the Hungarian state-socialist apparatus did not see queer individuals as a threat to the political and social order, but they found no harm in the cultural representation of queer themes.

Queer Film Production in the Hungarian People's Republic

The socialist state apparatus contributed to the distribution of foreign queer films and supported feature films depicting queer themes produced in Hungary. The first decade of the Kádár era saw the beginning of the decentralisation of the Hungarian film industry. The right to license production was transferred to the film studios, which had the authority to decide which films would be produced. However, the release of completed films still required the ministry’s approval. Due to the two-tier decision-making process, in some cases, a script accepted and produced by a film studio could be later deemed unfit for screening by the Ministry of Culture’s Department of Cinematography. These films were then withdrawn from distribution, i.e., censored.

As a result of such preventive self-censorship, only a small number of films were actually withdrawn. These are exhaustively covered in the secondary literature.⁶ Only one film among them thematised sex between men. András Molnár M.'s documentary, Bebukottak (The Fallen, 1985) on youth prisons marginally mentioned homosexuality among the inmates, but was nevertheless not distributed after its Torino Film Festival premiere. It was not the verbal references to homosexual acts that provoked criticism, but rather the realistic depiction of the youth prison, which underscored the regime’s political failures through its portrayal of generational despair, impoverished and futureless young offenders, and institutional misconduct (Horváth 2012; Soós 2015). As a consequence, members of law enforcement were dismissed.

There were also seven other feature films made in Hungary between 1961 and 1989/90 where queer characters appeared (Table 2). Two of these, Kézdi-Kovács’s A Kedves szomszéd (Nice Neighbour, 1979) and Ildikó Szabó's Hótreál (1988), featured queer characters in supporting roles. The other five, Félix Máriássy's Imposztorok (Imposters, 1969), Zoltán Fábri's Hangyaboly (Ant Hill, 1971), Károly Makk's Egymásra nézve (Another Way, 1982), István Szabó’s Redl ezredes (Colonel Redl, 1985), and Péter Tímár’s Mielőtt befejezi röptét a denevér (Before the Bat Finishes its Flight, 1989), presented stories based on queer protagonists. However, the content and queer representational analysis of films lie outside the scope of this paper; the projects’ qualities are demonstrated by the numerous domestic and international film awards several of the films have received (Table 2).

Table 2: Queer movie production in the Hungarian People's Republic between 1961-1989/90

Máriássy, Félix. Imposztorok / Imposters, Mafilm: Hungary, 1969.

Fábri, Zoltán. Hangyaboly / Ant Hill, Mafilm - Studio 1: Hungary, 1971.

Jancsó, Miklós. Magánbűnök, közerkölcsök / Private Vices, Public Virtues, Filmes Cinematografica - Jadran Film, Italy - Yugoslavia, 1976.

1976: Cannes: Palme d’or nominated

Kézdi-Kovács, László. A kedves szomszéd / Nice Neighbour, Mafilm: Hungary, 1979.

Makk, Károly. Egymásra nézve / Another Way, Mafilm - Dialóg: Hungary, 1982.

1982: Cannes International Film Festival: Actress Award, Jankowska-Cieślak, Jadwiga
1982: Cannes, Cannes International Film Festival: FIPRESCI Award
1982: Cannes: Golden Palm Nominated
1982: Figueira da Foz, International Film Festival: Grand Prize
1982: Figueira da Foz, International Film Festival: Certificate
1982: Hungarian Artist Excellence Prize
1982: Best Director of the Hungarian Film Week

Szabó, István. Redl ezredes / Colonel Redl, Mafilm: Hungary, 1985.

1985: German Critics' Award for Best Film of the Year and Klaus Maria Brandau for Best Actor
1985: Cannes International Film Festival: Jury Prize
1985: Sopot: Best Actor Award for Klaus Maria Brandauer
1985: Valladolid: special prize
1985: Rueil Malmaison: Silver Eagle Award
1985: Visconti Prize for the lifetime achievement of István Szabó
1986: Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film
1986: Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film
1986: British Film and Television Academy Award for Best Foreign Film
1987: Warsaw: Golden Film Award for Best Foreign Film in 1986

Monori, András M. Bebukottak / The Fallen, Balázs Béla Studio: Hungary, 1985.

1985: Torino, Best Foreign Film

Szabó, Ildikó. Hótreál / [Very Real], Hunnia: Hungary, 1987.

Tímár, Péter. Mielőtt befejezi röptét a denevér / Before the Bat's Flight Is Done, Mafilm: Dialóg: Hungary, 1989.

1989: Hungarian Feature Film Festival: Best Actor
1989: Berlin, International Film Festival: CICAE Award
1989: Bergamo, International Film Festival: Bronze Rose
1989: Cadiz, International Film Festival: 1st prize
1989: West Berlin, International Film Festival: Prize
1989: Bergamo, International Film Festival: Bronze Rose
1989: Cadiz, International Film Festival: 1st prize
1990: Hungarian Film Critics' Award

These films share two key commonalities. The filmmakers’ inclusion of queer characters was a voluntary creative choice. This implies that the dozens of contributors involved regarded such portrayals as culturally, socially, and politically acceptable. Even without further exploration of the queer episteme of the period , this is unsurprising—especially given the dozens of foreign films featuring queer characters being screened.

Second, in light of the awards and prizes these films received, the directors managed to feature and capitalise on the topics in ways that advanced their careers. Furthermore, all of these films were produced with the state’s financial support in state-run film studios, and all but one were distributed both domestically and internationally through state institutions.

The findings presented so far do not rule out the possibility that other film projects featuring queer themes may have existed but failed to pass the script approval stage. However, considering the relatively large number of foreign and domestic queer film releases, it seems unlikely that such film projects, if they did exist, would have been rejected by the studios, cultural authorities, or even the Central Committee solely on the grounds of queer representation. Taken together, the two lists indicate that in the Hungarian People’s Republic, there was no censorship targeting queer works for ideological, political, or other reasons.

Discussion and conclusion

The qualitative analysis of the legal frameworks concerning both homosexuality and censorship suggests that the political leadership of the post-Stalinist Hungarian People’s Republic (1961-1989/90) did not perceive the social presence of queer individuals or their representation as political, ideological, or moral threats to the social or political order. Although it cannot be ruled out that some films were banned by the Hungarian state-socialist cultural apparatus because of particular portrayals of queerness, the large number of queer films documented in the database (92 foreign and 9 Hungarian examples) supports my original hypothesis that there was no systematic state censorship targeting queer representation as such. On the contrary, the state not only refrained from censorship but also financed the release and distribution of foreign films with queer content and and allocated funds for Hungarian productions with queer-themes, which circulated both domestically and internationally.

From these findings, several conclusions can be drawn. First, if systematic censorship of queer representation was not implemented in film, a highly centralised field of cultural production, it is unlikely to have been consistently applied in other, less centralised cultural domains, such as literature, theater or visual arts. Indeed, in these areas, we find numerous queer artefacts circulating in state-socialist Hungary (see e.g., Benedek 2022a), although the dispersed nature of their production makes them more difficult to quantify systematically than film.

Second, the absence of systematic state censorship of queer representation in film implies that, in line with the 1966 cultural directives of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP), these works—or at least their public circulation—were officially considered compatible with state-socialist ideology and cultural policy. Their meaning therefore should be interpreted within the framework of the state-socialist episteme, rather than against it.

Third, the relatively high volume of queer films challenges the dominant scholarly position described in the introduction. Queer artefacts cannot be regarded as isolated exceptions. For example, the prominence of Hungarian queer films such as Károly Makk’s Egymásra nézve (Another Way) cannot be attributed to a supposed absence of earlier queer representations. It must be situated among the numerous queer works that preceded and followed it, as well as within their political and public receptions. Such contextualisation enables more complex and robust interpretations.

Fourth, because Hungarian queer cinema has served here as a national case study within a broader regional context, these findings suggest that Eastern Bloc countries did not uniformly adhere to an anti-queer cultural policy. The theoretical and methodological approach employed— comparative qualitative and quantitative mixed methods used to challenge the belief in systemic state-socialist censorship of queerness — is proven effective in addressing epistemic bias. Replicating systematic national-level data collection across ECE countries, could provide a foundation for future research, supporting both in-depth national inquiries and regional transnational comparisons.

The disciplinary relevance of these findings is twofold. On the one hand, they expose the limitationss of current understandings of queer cultural representation, discourse, and epistemology in the state-socialist era. On the other hand, they point toward a forward-looking research agenda that foregrounds case-based and artefact-specific analyses. Such an approach enables more complex questions about the place of state-socialist queer artefacts within epistemic discourse: What is the significance of these films not as systemic anomalies but as state-supported cultural productions? How should we interpret them as part of the socialist cultural canon rather than reducing them to symbolic ‘counteractions’ read merely as oppositional gestures based on plot devices?

Addressing these questions requires moving beyond individual artefacts to consider the broader landscape of queer cultural production in ECE countries. This, in turn, calls for a cross-disciplinary framework capable of interpreting holistic categories such as “sexualities” and integrating these findings into wider reconstructions of socialist queer lives, discourses, and epistemes. Such reconstructions necessarily involve revisiting established scholarship in the histories of science, politics, society, and culture, enriching them with new insights into queer cultural representation under socialism.

Finally, interpretive balance must be maintained between cultural history and social history: what does the state-supported representation of queer content reveal about the lived experiences and perspectives of individuals under socialism? Only once these contextual relationships are fully mapped can we meaningfully compare queer artefacts across fundamentally different political, economic, and cultural systems, such as those of the Cold War-era Eastern and Western blocs.

Kata Benedek

Independent researcher

Acknowledgement

This article is based on the chapter “Deconstructing the Imagined Censorship: Queer Matter in the Hungarian People's Republic Kádár Era, 1956-1989/90” in my dissertation El Kazovszkij Revisited: Queer In/Visibilities in State-Socialist East Central European Cultural Fields, defended on 13 February 2024 at Freie Universität Berlin.

Bio

Kata Benedek is an independent researcher with a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin. Her work examines queer discourses under state socialism through the lens of past and present Cold War epistemic hierarchies along the East–West divide. She specialises in evidence-based, transdisciplinary reconstructions of LGBT realities in socialist East Central Europe, working at the intersection of politics, culture, and social history, with a growing engagement in the history of science.

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Filmography

Máriássy, Félix. 1969. Imposztorok / Imposters. Mafilm.

Fábri, Zoltán. 1971. Hangyaboly / Ant Hill. Mafilm – Studio 1.
Jancsó, Miklós. 1976. Magánbűnök, közerkölcsök / Private Vices, Public Virtues. Filmes Cinematografica – Jadran Film.

Kézdi-Kovács, László. 1979. A kedves szomszéd / Nice Neighbour. Mafilm.

Makk, Károly. 1982. Egymásra nézve / Another Way. Mafilm – Dialog.

Szabó, István. 1985. Redl ezredes / Colonel Redl. Mafilm.

Monori, András M. 1985. Bebukottak / The Fallen. Balázs Béla Studio.

Szabó, Ildikó. 1987. Hótreál / [Very Real]. Hunnia.

Tímár, Péter. 1989. Mielőtt befejezi röptét a denevér / Before the Bat's Flight Is Done. Mafilm – Dialóg.

Suggested citation

Benedek, Kata. 2025. “Deconstructing the Imagined Queer Censorship in State-Socialist East-Central Europe: The Hungarian Case of Cinema”. Queer Memories (ed. Jasmina Šepetavc and Katja Čičigoj). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 21. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00021.378.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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