BUDAPEST ¨C Pride in Japan has never needed permission. Each summer, hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ+ rights supporters and allies gather in Tokyo for a festival of color, corporate sponsorship and careful celebration. There are no bans to defy, no police barriers to test. And yet, beneath the ease, there is an absence: the legal recognition that would make that visibility equal.
That absence was on my mind during the annual Budapest Pride march, which I attended here last month. The students I spoke with at the June 27 march had not come for the reason the cameras assumed. They had come, they said, to defend freedom of expression and assembly ¡ª rights the previous government had trampled. What the march stood for was larger: the right to gather without permission and to be recognized as who you say you are.
The mood was lighter than a year ago, and that lightness is the news. This was Budapest¡¯s 31st Pride march, the first since Viktor Orban, who spent his final year in office trying to outlaw the march, was voted out April 12 by an overwhelming majority. After 16 years, the strongman is gone. The cameras that ringed last year¡¯s march ¡ª a surveillance effort to identify participants ¡ª are gone with him.
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