Bookstores brace for law banning LGBTQ content

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Some bookstores in Hungary have placed notices at their entrances telling customers that they sell “nontraditional content.” The signs went up in response to a new law that prohibits “depicting or promoting” homosexuality and gender transitions in material accessible to children.

While some writers, publishers and booksellers say the law curtails free thought and expression in Hungary, the country’s secondlargest bookstore chain, Lira

Konyv, posted the advisories to be safe. The new prohibition has gone into effect, but the government has not issued official guidance on how or to whom it will be applied and enforced.

“The word ‘depicts’ is so general that it could include anything. It could apply to Shakespeare’s sonnets or Sappho’s poems, because those depict homosexuality,” Krisztian Nyary, the creative director for Lira Konyv, said of the legislation passed by parliament last month.

The law, which also prohibits LGBTQ content in school education programs, has many in Hungary’s literary community puzzled, if not on edge, unsure if they would face prosecution if minors end up with books that contain plots, characters or information discussing sexual orientation or gender identity.

Hungary’s populist government insists that the law, part of a broader statute that also increases criminal penalties for pedophilia and creates a searchable database of sex offenders, is necessary to protect children.

But critics, including highranking European Union officials, say the measure conflates LGBTQ people with pedophiles and is another example of Hungarian government policies and rhetoric that marginalize individuals who identity as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer.

Last week, a government office in the capital of Budapest announced it had fined Lira Konyv $830 for failing to clearly label a children’s book that depicts families headed by samesex parents.

Noemi Kiss, the author of several novellas that feature some characters that are not straight or whose gender identity does not match the one they were assigned at birth, said she supports parts of the law that are intended to stop pedophilia and to protect children from pornographic content.

But she called making literature offlimits based on whether it contains LGBTQ themes “absurd” and “a limitation of freedom of opinion and expression.”

Laszlo Balogh / Associated Press Activists pass a rainbowcolored heart outside Hungary’s parliament in Budapest this month to protest laws they say discriminate against LGBTQ people.