Conservative Hungarian lawmaker Jozsef Szajer international headlines after he was stopped by police at a gathering that broke the nation’s pandemic lockdown protocols. But the details that have caught the world’s attention have less to do with safety regulations and more with the fact that the event has been recognized as an all male orgy, “outing” Szajer as a queer man and directly contradicting his openly homophobic political record.
Across conservative parties, rumors of closeted homosexuality are constantly used as an attack of politicians’ characters, Trump and Putin’s “love affair” being one of the most recent and widespread examples. But what happens when these rumors are true?
Before he resigned, Szajer was a founding member of Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling alt-right party, and played an instrumental role in upholding homophobic laws across the nation. After his close friend Viktor Orban was elected Prime Minister, Szaker famously drafted the nation’s constitution on his iPad.
“Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of man and woman,” Szajer wrote in the constitution, solidifying his party’s outdated ideas into the nation’s law by providing a blueprint for further LGBT discrimination that included limiting adoption to cis-gender, heterosexual couples.
The irony of the man primarily responsible for Hungary’s legal upholding of homophobia being caught at a gay orgy has inspired a plethora of ridicule and memes about the hypocrisy of conservatives worldwide. The scandal is very reminiscent of rumors surrounding American politician Lindsey Graham, who is widely believed to be a closeted gay man despite, or perhaps because of, his constant homophobic actions. Many sex workers have come forward and claimed that they were hired by the Republican politician, despite his constant efforts to pass laws targeting that line of work.
The LGBT community understands the dangers of outing other queer individuals before they are ready to come out themselves and how drastically one’s life can change as a result. Already, Szajer has announced his exit from politics and has been subjected to much ridicule because of his sexual orientation. Putting his political track record aside, he is a queer individual whose life has been altered within one weekend because of homophobia.
Of course, his political actions could probably be rationalized through psychological explanations of internalized homophobia. The sad truth is that these men probably don’t hate LGBT folks as much as they hate themselves. But because of their positions of power and how they’ve used them to create very real harm for the LGBT community, the situation becomes less a case of victimization and more of a tool they’ve selfishly helped to strengthen being turned on them.
It is no coincidence that homophobic politicians who are outed or rumored to be closeted tend to be cis-gender, white men. These individuals are not concerned with liberation for the queer community, but instead with their personal acceptance within a heteronormative society. They may be the biggest danger to the LGBT community because they are more concerned with personal gain than they are with liberation. But by turning their backs on their community, they exempt themselves from receiving any sort of pity, defense or support from the very people they spent years marginalizing and attacking.
The LGBT community is not obligated to extend any sort of aid to a person who spent his career causing harm just because he happened to attend gay orgies in his free time. He is far from the last anti-LGBT politician to secretly be queer, because despite how far queer liberation goes there will always be those who are concerned with climbing their way to the top. As far as LGBT progression in Hungary and across the world goes, Szajer resigning means an immediate elimination of the power granted to a homophobic lawmaker, a reminder that queerness infiltrates every circle imaginable and that queer solidarity is earned.