What began as a single sentence posted to Instagram became an archive of voices living under slow political suffocation.
In 2023, after years of witnessing the erosion of democracy in Hungary under Viktor Orbán’s government, I asked a simple question: what does it feel like to be a woman in Hungary today? The response was immediate. Women and queer people across generations, professions, and social backgrounds wrote to me wanting not only to answer, but to finally be heard.
For years the Hungarian state has promoted an aggressive rhetoric of “family values” while systematically restricting reproductive rights, public dissent, and the visibility of those who do not fit its nationalist vision. In a 2021 radio address, Orbán declared that women belong “by the stove raising children,” a statement that exposed with unusual clarity the ideological framework shaping everyday life. But authoritarianism rarely arrives only through laws or speeches. It settles quietly into language, relationships, work, aging, silence, and the body itself.
No Bread For Us at Men’s Tables emerged from long conversations and portraits made between 2023 until the collapse of the Orbán regime. Combining interviews, photography, archival material, the project examines how structural misogyny enters intimate life: through domestic labor, fertility, economic dependence, fear, and self-censorship. These stories are rooted in Hungary, but they speak to a broader European and global condition in which women’s and minority rights are increasingly used as political bargaining tools within authoritarian systems.
1
At 32, I went to Slovakia to be sterilized, because I don’t want children.
Fog sat over the highway. Someone behind me was eating a salami sandwich, a middle-aged woman sprawled across two seats asleep on her phone, glam rock blasting from it’s loudspeaker. Everyone was bothered by it, but nobody dared say anything. These kinds of journeys always carry a sort of shy ordinariness. You sit among nylon jackets and thermoses, watching gas stations, trucks, roadside billboards spreading hate, while thinking about how simply certain things work elsewhere. Let’s not allow Brussels to have the last laugh.
One would not think that between certain countries not only the quality of the highways changes, but also who is allowed to decide over their own body. In Hungary, you have to be at least forty years old, or present three biological children, in order to be sterilized; as though such a decision first required proving something. I gave birth, is everyone happy now? As though our bodies were only temporarily ours, and everyone else could overwrite the terms of their use.
I found the clinic’s website in two clicks. It was in Hungarian, full of smiling women and carefully written information. The whole thing seemed as simple as booking an appointment for tartar removal. Eastern European sterilization tourism. Even the phrase is grotesque in itself; like a bad socialist joke. Women and men cross the border under the table so that neither the state, nor the church, nor a stranger’s hand can decide whether or not they have children.
The bus moves slowly through the grey landscape. The woman next to me snorts in her sleep, then turns over. I look at the faces around me and think about how long I have felt like an outsider.
I have always stood out. I love clothes, colourful hair. Quirky things. In the countryside you quickly learn how far you are allowed to stick out. That in the countryside you are finished if you are even a little different. And I was always a little different. It used to bother me that people constantly stared. But by the age of thirty-two I had grown tired of trying to please everyone all the time. Sometimes I wonder how strange it would be if there were many people like me. I wonder how much of a rebellion it is to do nothing more than live the way you want.
I never wanted children.
For very long, I did not dare say this sentence out loud. Instead I circled around it, joked it away, redirected the conversations. One learns that after certain statements the air in the room changes. As though a sudden draft had appeared. Of course nobody found it surprising that I took birth control pills for fifteen years. The medication, the ritual of my everyday life, always sat in my bag beside chewing gum and my apartment keys. I loved its precision. Its predictability. That I did not have to think about my body. Everything ran smoothly. And of course it was convenient for men too, they did not have to carry the burden of contraception.
Then after thirty, doctors began pronouncing the same words in a different tone of voice. Blood clots. Stroke. Hormonal risks. The quiet background noise suddenly grew louder. So I stopped taking the pills. Sterilization did not feel dramatic at all. More like the conclusion of a long negotiation, where at last my body and I signed an agreement.
The bus passes through a small town. Hardware stores, empty parking lots, tobacco shops drift past the window. I lived in England and Germany, and still I came back. I was homesick. It is sad to admit, because so often I hate everything around us here. But I missed the Danube. The closeness of water. Even though I am not from Budapest, but Debrecen. I missed the people too, even their anxiety. That particular Eastern European exhaustion one only notices abroad once it no longer surrounds them everywhere.
I am a data engineer, I earn well, I try to give myself everything that was missing from my childhood. Safety. A home. Beautiful objects. For a long time, I thought endless desire was the worst part of poverty; later I realized it was shame. How visible it is on you that you do not have. Not having, like a contagious disease, keeps friends away. My father was a bus driver, my mother worked in retail. My current style is often inspired by my childhood. Those images I longingly looked at back then. Those clothes we could never afford.
When I announced that I was going to be sterilized, people looked at me as though I were preparing for some irreversible madness. Yet nobody minded that a woman could spend a decade and a half taking hormones. That she has to grow accustomed to endless migraines, mood swings, constant calculation, perhaps gain weight, or in worse cases suffer a pulmonary embolism. But the moment she says she does not want children, and wants to make that decision permanent, suddenly everyone becomes deeply uneasy. As though some irreversible rudeness were about to occur.
Because a woman’s duty is to.
Because you will change your mind.
Because one day you will anyway. – These sentences are everywhere, like the smell of used oil, soaking into curtains, clothes, skin, hair.
After fifteen years, I am going to menstruate for the first time again. Sometimes I think about it with adolescent curiosity. I am waiting for the return of an old acquaintance I barely recognize anymore. I do not know when it will come. I do not know whether it will hurt. My body functioned without me for so long that now I observe it like a foreign object. Sleeping Beauty waking from a long sleep. Moving slowly. Squinting. Searching for the light.
I am heading toward Slovakia on a battered coach bus, watching these hateful billboards while people sleep around me; anxiety overtakes me, our future is eroding. What should I do, what should we do. What will become of me, what will become of us. Perhaps after Slovakia my anxiety will lessen. Because right now I am afraid that if, God forbid, I become pregnant, then the decision will not be mine, but the regime’s. I love dystopias very much, except when they happen to me. And dystopia is beginning to feel frighteningly current.
A Polish friend brought me morning-after pills from the Netherlands, told me to stock up; who knows what will happen. Other women write to me secretly, asking me to get some for them. An invisible female infrastructure, an underground network has formed; we exchange medication, addresses, experiences. Forbidden books and illegal radio broadcasts. Women pass on tiny techniques of survival to one another, the way recipes or prayers once were passed down. And meanwhile everyone pretends all this is perfectly normal.
My grandmother, of course, understands my anxiety. She looked me in the eye and simply said: if something needs to be solved, then it must be solved. Her sentence contained the entire twentieth-century history of women. Years. Events. Secret abortions. Bloody sheets washed in basins. Untold stories. Knitting needles, hangers, midwives, and improvised solutions. Because women always solved things somehow. They passed on survival methods to one another, recipes, sewing patterns, prayers. Quietly, among themselves, through fear, through shame, in good times and bad. We absorbed the techniques of silence with our mother’s milk.
Nobody needs to know about it.
I also remember when, before an STD screening, someone asked me whether I had come because of my work. Based on my colourful hair and tattoos, they assumed I was a sex worker. I answered: no, I am simply a responsible adult woman.
The sentence stayed with me for a long time.
I realized how rarely female responsibility is associated with self-determination. As though consciousness were only acceptable if it ultimately led toward motherhood. As though every female decision sooner or later had to arrive in the same room.
Not many of my friends want children. Sometimes I feel an entire generation has become permanently exhausted. Like a faucet battered for years by salty sea wind, our image of our future has eroded.
One day I would like a bigger apartment. Not because of a children’s room. I want a large walk-in closet. So I can hang up all my glittering tulle dresses. People call me a meringue in them. I used to be a crossdresser. My self-image changes constantly, and that is alright.
The bus slowly exited the highway. The fog still sat among the parking lots and apartment blocks. Around me people began to stir, bags, coats, phones reappearing. The glam rock woman woke up and turned off the music. I looked out the window at the Slovak small town, and suddenly everything felt entirely ordinary. As though I had not arrived at the end of a decision, but finally at myself.
2
In Csíkszereda, winters are so cold the dogs’ breath hangs motionless in the air. The chickens’ water has frozen again; my grandmother would grumble every morning as she was breaking the ice with a stick. Before school, my mother laid my clothes out on the radiator so they wouldn’t be freezing cold when I put them on. I used to stare at those clothes for a long time. The sweaters, the trousers, the thick tights I hated because they squeezed me so tightly I could barely breathe in them. Hey, kid, you’re suffocating from your pants, they used to mock me at school. As a child, I felt that every fabric had some secret nature to it. There are clothes that let a person breathe, and there are clothes you move around in as if someone else’s body had been pulled over your own.
I was born in Transylvania, in Csíkszereda. From a very early age, I knew I wasn’t gender conforming. I was the little boy with the coolest Barbie. I made clothes for it out of old socks, curtain fabric, my mother’s tights. I loved watching how something could change completely because of a piece of fabric. Later, my mother and I used to joke that when she got pregnant with me, she had wanted a girl. When I came out to her, she just smiled. The world is colorful, she said.
At the time, I didn’t understand how important would that sentence become.
I knew very early on that I wasn’t straight. We had internet, and I could read about things I still didn’t have words for. For a long time, I thought that eventually, with enough time, I would simply become whoever I really meant to be. I was fifteen when I first spoke to my mother about it. For days afterward, I kept watching to see whether anything around me would change. But the bathroom door creaked the same way, the laundry kept drying in the kitchen exactly as before. That was the strangest part. Nothing happens, and yet everything becomes different.
For me, self-discovery was never some single moment of realization. It was more a constant movement. There were periods when I dressed more femininely, others when I was androgynous. I always loved experimenting with my hair, with makeup, with clothes. I love dressing up, but not for occasions. Just because. On a Tuesday afternoon, for example. Platform shoes, a sheer shirt, a skirt, makeup. Before going out, I spend a long time getting ready. I look at myself in the mirror and watch the persona slowly take shape.
In this world, simply being visible is already a statement.
And of course, in a small town you quickly learn how visible you are allowed to be. People turned around after me in shops. They stared at me on the bus. After a while I could feel their eyes before I even saw them. Then slowly they got used to me. Back then I was the only openly queer person in Csíkszereda.
I got tired of constantly being watched.
I was nineteen when I moved to Budapest. I thought it would be easier there. Budapest is a more open city than Csíkszereda. And still, for a long time, I straightwashed myself. I work as a DJ, the scene is overwhelmingly made up of straight men in their thirties. I barely met any queer people. It wasn’t a conscious kind of closeting. A person simply adapts. They wear different clothes. They lower their voice. They talk less about themselves.
During the day I sat over fabric samples; at night I DJed. I love that one hour before dawn when the bass is so loud people stop paying attention to one another. From the DJ booth I watch faces shining with sweat, smeared makeup falling apart. As if everyone had only borrowed their body for the night. Before I perform, I spend a long time getting ready. I choose an outfit, do my makeup, sometimes change clothes three times before leaving. At those moments my room looks like a looted theater dressing room.
Then at some point I realized I no longer even knew who I was.
About six months ago I started reconnecting with Budapest’s queer community. I listen to people’s stories, we talk, and I think it’s probably our stories that hold us together. Through those stories we are trying to create a more livable place for ourselves and for others too. For me. For you. For them.
Lately everyone carries a great deal of uncertainty about the future. Whether it’s personal problems, family issues, healthcare, or school, everything eventually leads back to politics. The tension is palpable everywhere, in everyone. One of the remarkable things about the queer community is that it can survive anything, but right now everyone is anxious.
Especially now.
Ever since the idea of banning Pride was raised, many of us feel the noose tightening around our necks. Trans healthcare is in a terrible state. The future of rights organizations is uncertain. Can things get even worse than this?
In Budapest I’m rarely subjected to outright violence, but my experiences back home stayed deep inside me. Even now there are moments when I don’t feel safe. For example, when I go outside wearing a skirt. I think it should be completely normal for men to wear skirts. In pop culture it already is. And still there is always that second guessing inside me: will I be safe if I walk outside like this?
I feel the stares before I see them.
I constantly have to weave these mental spiderwebs. What should I wear. How should I get home. Can I hold my partner’s hand in the street. Will something happen because of it.
And yet the ideal life would actually be very simple. Not having to think about whether what I’m wearing is provocative. Not having to be afraid of holding my partner’s hand. Having access to hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgeries. Having marriage. Adoption. Knowing a child would not be harmed for growing up in a queer family.
I wish everything didn’t have to be this difficult.
Meanwhile, you try to do something. We go to protests. We talk. We argue things through, even over family lunches. Sometimes we willingly step into conflict.
This summer I went home to Csíkszereda. On the main street, two very young queer boys walked past in platform shoes with painted nails. They were laughing loudly. Nobody shouted after them.
I watched them for a while.
When I was a child, I could never have imagined something like that.
A dream had come true.
If everything stays like this, I don’t want to stay in Hungary. The hopelessness swallows everything. I want to leave the country. I still don’t know where I would go. I only know that if this political situation remains the same, one day I will definitely leave.