Oops–this is going to be a longish, serious post, because it could be subtitled: ‘Thank god for Budapest riot police’ or ‘Gay rights lacking in a former Eastern block capital’ or just ‘Some weird shit happened today’.
So I’m watching this violinist in the metro station. I’ve tipped him once, and I’m about to thank him for playing, when the metro police come up to him (group of three) and they start to have an animated conversation, one of the police looking at his watch and gesturing for the guy to move along. I’m about to become a citizen journalist and capture the police brutality on my cellphone, when I hear this extraordinarily loud techno music coming from the street level. Guys with press credentials are flying through the station, video cameras running. The gypsy violinist is suddenly gone, and the metro police too, so I pop upstairs to see what’s going on.
Men in pink hula skirts, women in tuxedoes with hair slicked back, rainbow flags and umbrellas: of course it’s a pride rally. All my experience with Pride marches is that they’re good clean fun. I join in. The music is pumping and people are moving along at a very enthusiastic pace not only on the street where the main parade is, but also along the sidewalks outside the cordons. Wow–lots of energy. The fact that the police are wearing full riot gear, and the fact that there are as many of them as there are marchers, doesn’t really register on me except in an ‘isn’t that interesting’ sort of way.
Then the first bottle breaks, about fifteen feet to my left. I looked up at one of the two floats, to a guy who was dancing wildly and whose arm motions suggested the trajectory of a glass object. I thought to myself, these Budapesti gays are rowdy. Then I watch as a guy flinches when an egg hits him on the side of the head. I notice that the guys marching so intently on the sidewalk are on the other side of a cordon of riot police. They are almost all wearing black shirts, many with shaved heads; many, stereotypically, in boots. The occasional regional or national flag. There were a lot of them. So I don’t know why I continued marching down the street, so close to these hooligans. Maybe I was just becoming accustomed to hearing people talk about me in a language I didn’t understand (although chants of ‘Auschwitz’ are pretty universally understood). By the time the march reached a stall, I had a thin film of spit and beer and egg on my right side (fortunately no glass), and was wondering what would happen when we all got where we were going.
As it turned out, the march organizers were clever, and corraled the whole queer and gay-friendly lot of us into a really cool riverfront bar/lounge/club. The shouting of the counter-demonstrators rang in my ears–it was just like dogs barking; there didn’t seem to be a human component. I enjoyed a beer, and flirted harmlessly in solidarity, and then the eeriness set in. There was no way out. Everybody was settling in for the evening. Through the ordinary exits you could see the blackshirts hanging out with video cameras and occasionally shouting over at us. We were in a tidy gay ghetto.
Now, I wouldn’t have minded staying longer, if I had had the option to leave. Going back a second time to a small corner exit, I pleaded my case to get back to the Disney Budapest. The guy let me out, motioning to the riot police still on duty all around us. Once through their cordon, I walked around the corner to see why they were still around. Hundreds of loitering skinheads. I did a quick auto-inventory: short haircut since Zagreb, my shorts are sort of … khaki. My sandals are black. And my shirt, although almost sheer, with reverse-color stitching and purchased at a clubbing shop in the Castro, is…black. So I just lower my head and smell the brain tissue burning as the punks try to figure out what to do with me. I register on gadar in the Castro at about 50 feet, and then become invisible again at 20. These guys were oblivious.
The thing that sticks with me though (apart from making it back to my hostel alive) is the guy in the red, egg-stained t-shirt, who came through the crowd during the march, amidst all the loud music, confronting the faces of the marchers in which he saw a mixture of fear and defiance. ‘Okay people,’ he said in English, ‘–at least try to smile.’
