Queer Budapest, 1873-1961 / Anita Kurimay.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-314) and index.

Introduction. Sexual politics in the "Pearl of the Danube" -- Registering sex in sinful Budapest -- The "knights of sick love" : The queers of Kornél Tábori and Vladimir Székely -- Rehabilitating "sexual abnormals" in the Hungarian Soviet Republic -- Peepholes and "sprouts" : A lesbian scandal -- Unlikely allies : queer men and Horthy conservatives -- The end of a precarious coexistence : The prosecution of homosexuals -- Epilogue. Queers and democracy : The misremembering of the queer past.

"By the dawn of the twentieth century Budapest was on its way to becoming a cosmopolitan metropolis. The 'Pearl of the Danube' boasted some of Europe's most beguiling architectural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city's liberal politics, fostering its centrality as an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. As historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture-including a robust homosexual subculture. Queer Budapest, 1873-1961 is her riveting story of non-normative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the its capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality between East and West, Queer Budapest, 1873-1961 demolishes myths identifying queer life with the failures of late-twentieth-century liberalism and instead recuperates queer sociality as an integral part of Budapest's-and Hungary's-modern incarnation"--