Abstract
Throughout this book, we have escorted family members on the path of integrating their non-heterosexual kin into their family, from the family member’s coming out through their handling of the stigma that falls on the non-heterosexual person as well as themselves, to a reconfiguration of family practices in a way to include the same-sex couple. From my fieldwork it transpires, however, that some family members go even further: they realize the plight of not only their own non-heterosexual child, sibling, or other relative, but of LGBTQ people in general. They become allies to the LGBTQ cause by speaking up for LGBTQ people or joining their friendship or activist networks. Eventually, some of them re-evaluate and change their own perceptions of kinship and this way they queer the (mostly) heterosexual family. They will be the focus of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
Indeed, activists from Western Europe are sometimes surprised at how many self-identified heterosexuals take up important positions in LGBTQ organizations in Hungary. This is probably partly due to the fact that there is no activist group specifically for allies, as will be discussed below.
- 2.
The formerly existing organization PFLAG was a group of LGBT activists with no effort to involve parents and friends. As mentioned above, a Facebook group for parents and family of LGBTQ started toward the end of my fieldwork; it does exhibit some of the activist tendencies of PFLAG, for instance visible presence at pride marches, which the former parents’ group did not do.
- 3.
As discussed above, this section on the website was created with the explicit goal of helping people to come out, so these stories may be seen as reiterations of a community norm.
- 4.
Directed by Russell Mulcahy in 2009 and based on a true story, this film tells about how an originally homophobic, deeply religious mother came round to accept her gay son after his suicide. Its typical Hollywood melodrama style seems to register well with the age group of most of my interviewees’ parents (40 and older), and it is also frequently used by activists (e.g., in the school project coordinated by organizations Labrisz and Szimpozion) to discuss parental acceptance and the attitude of Christians to LGBTQ people.
- 5.
On internet forums, incorrect spelling is often intentional, sometimes a ‘trademark’ of a given poster; Quasimodo is one of these. I tried to convey this by adopting incorrect spelling in my English translation.
- 6.
See Chapter 1 for a discussion of such tendencies in the Hungarian LGBTQ community.
- 7.
That is, their own intimate citizenship in addition to that of LGBTQ people.
- 8.
An excellent example of how school education, allegedly devoid of sexuality, is in fact highly sexualized (Pascoe 2007).
- 9.
There was virtually no violence in 2016 and 2017; in 2018, violent protesters were kept away from the march, and only some silent counterdemonstrators got into the ranks of the marchers. The 2019 march was virtually undisturbed by protesters, though an extreme right-wing group staged violent protests against several pride workshops (in particular those focusing on education, immigrants or Christianity).
- 10.
For a detailed analysis of pride marches and counter-protests in Budapest, see Renkin (2009).
- 11.
Later Zsófi and Emma separated, as we will see in the next section.
- 12.
Hungarian, like many other languages (e.g., Spanish), has a formal and an informal way of addressing people in the second person singular; it is not usual to use the informal address toward a person considerably older than oneself, unless s/he is a member of one’s nuclear family or a close friend, though this varies, e.g., within the LGBTQ community the formal address is virtually never used.
- 13.
Although in some cases it transpired that the non-heterosexual person does have ‘chosen kin’ but s/he did not mention them at the beginning, possibly because in the Hungarian LGBTQ community ‘family’ tends to mean one’s family of origin (often even excluding one’s partner).
- 14.
‘Fogadott,’ in contrast to legally adopted (‘örökbe fogadott’), means a person has become included in one’s family in a given kinship position, without any legal ties (like Dia in Böske’s kinship network). As English has no term for this, I will use ‘adopted’ in quotation marks when I talk about such informal ‘adoption.’
- 15.
Another lesbian birth mother, Judit, suggested that her partner’s parents may only consider the couple’s child their grandson because they do not have a biological one; Böske is in the same situation, though we do not know whether it influences her relationship to Lili.
- 16.
This sentence might be ironical, or Miklós might be worried about his mother’s safety due to violent attacks on pride marches in Hungary since 2007 (see above).
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Béres-Deák, R. (2020). Family Members Becoming Allies. In: Queer Families in Hungary . Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16319-8_6
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