Anita Kurimay’s brilliant and innovative Queer Budapest, 1873–1961 is an important contribution to the new body of work on the history of sexuality in East Central Europe. The book decenters the Western model of constant progress by showing that the Hungarian history of sexuality has its own unique chronology. Kurimay looks at various sources—including court files, medical publications, the popular press, and books addressed to the wider public—in order to reconstruct the rich history of Hungarian homosexualities, which until recently has remained hidden. She shows that queerness was an important element of Hungarian modernity and Hungary’s transnational connections.Chapter 1, “Registering Sex in Sinful Budapest,” focuses on the early twentieth-century homosexual registry of the Budapest Metropolitan Police. The registry—as a physical document—did not survive Hungary’s stormy history. In order to reconstruct the registry itself and its role, and uncover its meanings, Kurimay looks at multiple sources “that directly or indirectly address, talk about, mention, or provide information about the historical origins, purpose, and implementation of the homosexual registry” and reads “into silences” (21). The registry was based on paragraph 241 of the 1871 Hungarian penal code (in force until 1961), which treated male homosexual acts as misdemeanors. The code, however, did not use the term homosexuality, instead describing both sex between men and bestiality using the vague term “unnatural fornication” (23), so the interpretation of what kind of homosexuality was punished and why is central to Kurimay’s analysis. At the core of the registry lay a distinction between “authentic” and “inauthentic” homosexuals. The police were usually interested in “authentic” ones (characterized as passive and womanly), since such homosexuals could not help themselves, making them easy targets for criminals, such as male prostitutes who engaged in sexual activity with men for other reasons than authentic desire and were often blackmailers or thieves. At the same time, there were “inauthentic” homosexuals (active and manly), namely “men who otherwise conformed to the Hungarian masculine ideal,” who “could engage in same-sex sexual encounters without being judged or punished” (51). Therefore, they did not threaten the gender order, within which men were seen as “inherently sexual,” and their sexual activity with other men was acceptable as long as they “performed” in a manly fashion. Furthermore, the registry was a sign of modernity: it used modern methods (such as fingerprinting) in order to manage what was seen as the modern urban public space. Sexuality that happened in private went unnoticed.The conditions for acceptable or respectable queerness are discussed further in chapter 2, which focuses on publications authored by the investigative journalist Kornél Tábori and the head of public relations for Budapest’s police force, Vladimir Székely. Their writings testify to the existence of a vibrant queer life in early twentieth-century Budapest, but at the same time sharpened the distinction between “good” and “bad” queers. Within the context of male prostitution, they distinguished between more acceptable “men who sold themselves for money but were strong enough to keep their ‘heterosexual manhood’ intact”—such as “soldiers who made some extra cash by sleeping with men who could pay for it”—and less acceptable men, that is “those who eventually joined the ‘perverts’ permanently” (79). Tábori and Székely focused mostly on men, but they dedicated some portions of their writing to lesbians, who, they believed, constituted 30 percent of prostitutes. Although not penalized, female homosexuality was hardly ever presented as other than inherently “sick,” as respectable women were perceived as essentially nonsexual. Tábori and Székely’s attention was focused on “cruel” female homosexual prostitutes who blackmailed “women who were genuinely attracted to their own sex” (83).The approach to homosexuality that distinguished between “good” and “bad” queers was temporarily suspended during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which is discussed in chapter 3. Kurimay looks at how homosexuals were treated by the infamous Revolutionary Tribunal. While not denying that the Tribunal’s activity led to political executions and other horrors, the author analyzes the activity of its Experimental Criminology Department. Communists assumed that homosexuality was “the ‘ill-fated by-product’ of the bourgeois-ruled modern West” and saw it as a “condition that resulted from socioeconomic circumstance and personal psychological history” (93). Therefore, as the cases uncovered by Kurimay in the Tribunal’s files illustrate, even notorious male prostitutes were examined by a team compromising a sociologist and psychologist before being sent for treatment, rather than to jail. At the same time, the Communists did not even consider the option that some respectable forms of queerness existed, as every single instance was attributed to exposure to an unfair social environment.The fin de siècle concepts of queerness and gender made a comeback during the Horthy regime, as illustrated in chapter 4, which deals with a lesbian scandal. In 1923, Count Rafael Zichy filed for divorce, which he justified by accusing his wife, Countess Eduardina Pallavicini, of having “unnatural” relations with the writer Cécile Tormay. The case attracted nationwide attention, not only because the parties involved represented major aristocratic Hungarian families but also because the two women were well-known conservative activists and authors (with fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies, in Tormay’s case) who advocated for the traditional gender order. This was also why the divorce suit was dismissed, and both the husband and the servants who had testified in support of his accusations jailed for slander and libel, respectively. Kurimay not only uses the story to place the case within the context of other European homosexual scandals but also to show how sexuality, class, and gender operated in combination. Logically, conservative noblewomen could not be homosexual, as this status was reserved for “immoral” prostitutes. Furthermore, it was patently obvious that the premodern discourse on sexuality used by the testifying servants was not suited to a court that prided itself on being a space of modern expertise.Chapter 5 deals with male homosexuality in the interwar period. Drawing on medical and police sources as well as the stories of individual homosexuals that could be found in them, Kurimay argues that the conservative Horthy regime was surprisingly liberal in regard to male homosexuality. While to control sexuality the regime introduced a number of measures that were in line with Catholic morality, it focused mostly on female sexuality, leading for instance to a situation in which male prostitutes enjoyed more freedom than their female counterparts. That focus on women was strongly influenced by the dominant ideas about gender: “The members of the police and the criminal legal system, and of course the medical establishment, were painfully aware that the majority of men, regardless of their sexual orientation, fell short of living by the creeds of Christianity” (182). Furthermore, the radical Right, which influenced the conservative government on, for instance, Jewish issues, also remained silent on nonnormative sexuality, fearing, Kurimay argues, that too much talk about homosexuality would lead to its popularization. As a result, the authorities were only interested in homosexuality when it was combined with other crimes, such as blackmail or thievery, which sometimes resulted in the protection of “authentic” homosexuals.The final chapter discusses the end of this “precarious coexistence.” First, during World War II, the situation of homosexuals gradually deteriorated as the fascist Arrow Cross became increasingly vocal about homosexuality when advocating for eugenics and the racial purity of Hungarians. When the Arrow Cross took power in 1944, they proposed a new Family Law under which homosexuals would be castrated. Because of the wartime chaos, the law was never implemented, but the Communists who subsequently gained power also saw homosexuality as a threat. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, homosexuals were removed from the Communist Party and often prosecuted as “antithetical to norms of socialist society” (212). It was only after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 that “courts became more lenient” (217), and homosexuality was decriminalized in 1961. However, that did not mean that homosexuals were no longer prosecuted or never faced discrimination: the age of consent for same-sex relations was raised to twenty years of age, while it remained fourteen years of age for heterosexuals; and a new law was introduced to tackle the somewhat vague “perversion against nature conducted in a scandalous manner” (222), which allowed the police to keep homosexuals under surveillance. The registry still existed after 1961. Because of the persistent homophobia, many homosexuals were afraid of being outed. This led the state security apparatus to use information from the registry to force homosexuals to become secret informants, especially when it was potentially possible to uncover evidence of immoral activities, namely homosexuality, among Catholic priests and nuns, thus weakening the influence of the Catholic Church.To sum up, Kurimay has produced a solid piece of scholarship, which presents a history that has been deeply hidden for years. She shows that throughout the twentieth century consecutive Hungarian regimes were generally silent about homosexuality, which, on the one hand, gave queers a certain degree of freedom (so they could lead their lives unnoticed) but, on the other, erased them from history. Today, this silencing appears to have political consequences. In particular, the state sponsorship of homophobia is being shaped by Jobbik, an influential radical-Right party, and Fidesz, the conservative ruling party. Both currently argue that queerness is something non-Hungarian and an unwanted arrival from the liberal West that they present as a major threat to Hungary. In this context, reinstalling queers in Hungarian history is a political act meant to combat homophobia and oppression. And this is exactly what Queer Budapest does.