Predictably, with this widening of scope came a narrowing of what you could permissibly say at the conference. Despite the name of the organisation, the official focus of the conference was now “LBTI” people - lesbian, bi, trans, and intersex. This brand of cultural colonialism - you know, the one that dare not speak its name and everyone’s fine with - was also in evidence at the EL*C conference, where it was quietly whispered that at least €1 million had been awarded to organisers by the European Commission and other private Western funders, partly on the condition that males who identified as women be included too. The recipients simply could not afford to say no. They told me how wealthy Western funders, attempting to prop up embattled women’s services against the incursions of Orbán’s anti-feminist manoeuvres, would make their donations conditional on the insistence that organisations be “inclusive”, and so include males. Some of this second group worked for organisations dealing with the aftermath of violence against women. They exhibited a frankly staggering general knowledge of happenings on “Terf Island”, otherwise known as the UK. They gave me homemade badges in Hungarian saying “Lesbian not queer” and “Nobody is born in the wrong body.” They solicited drunken soundbites from me for a podcast about how great being a lesbian is. We smoked hookahs, got drunk, took selfies in the toilet, and talked about how stupid everything had got. albeit with some more local stuff about Roma and Ukrainian lesbians thrown in.Ī second group of mostly young activists, who I met in a Budapest bar, were homegrown Hungarian, cash-strapped, defiantly female-only, and fairly punk in their aesthetic. In other words, it was business as usual for Queer Inc. There was the robotically impersonal ejection of a heretical wrongthinker on the eve of the conference.
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There were workshops on how to undermine women’s sport. There were pronoun declarations and safe space policies.
It was international in its participant list, lavishly funded, and linguistically and aesthetically indistinguishable from any other modern LGBT event. It was the best of times it was the worst of times.įirst, I attended the “ EuroCentralAsian Lesbian* Conference (EL*C)”. Last week in Hungary, I experienced two very different sides to lesbian activism in the age of Orbán.
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