The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary: Art and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century

century. Why, then, has it been so difficult to know this history? Kurimay argues that the misremembering of the queer past is a post-Communist reaction. The Communist regime’s persecution and stigmatization of homosexuality led to shame and to a silencing of the queer past. For many Hungarians, queer culture seems to start in 1989. This “collective misremembering about the past” has had serious consequences (234). Queer activists have lacked a history in which they can frame their demands, and far-right politicians continue to make the case that homosexuality is a Western import. Queer Budapest is an important book that paints a complicated picture of the tensions between sexual repression and liberation throughout the twentieth century in Hungary as well as in Central and Eastern Europe.