The End of the Parade, Pride 2025, Budapest, Hungary (notice the extremely small white banner in the mid-section, held by five fascist boys, the extent of the counter-protest)

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The journey began in Vienna, the more antiseptic of the two capitals of the now defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire.

During the first hours of the journey at the Viktor Frankl Museum, we each established our own sense of meaning for the trip.

The museum is overtly philosophical, an extensive introduction to Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy and his invitation to consider how to live a meaningful life.

“The past is the surest form of presence,” Frankl said in reference to the idea of “the barn of life,” where everything is “irrevocably stored.”

The question, then, is quite simple for Frankl: what do you choose to harvest?

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In Vienna, the harvest could very well be proud traditions. An aristocratic woman sits on a bench in a manicured public garden, where, in front of the sculpture of Mozart, a treble clef made of red flowers basks in the sun. Picture the aristocratic woman’s elegant fashion with her summertime heels and polished jewellry and vintage-style blue dress. Her posture—legs crossed, a newspaper in her lap, her delicate fingers scanning the pages—frames her coiffed, bygone hairdo. Somehow the dancing dappled light in the public garden, sunshine and shadow forever intertwined, confirms both the aristocratic woman’s enduring status in Austrian society and the ever changing landscape of the world at large.

After being wined and dined by an extremely generous older couple two lovers who were still very much in love, we combatted our Austrian-wine-and-cigar hangover with a visit to the Belvedere. The baroque palace, built in 1723, was designed as a summer residency for Prince Eugene of Savoy, and to this day it houses the most romantic painting in the world, “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt. This palatial museum was the reason we’d decided to come to Vienna in the first place, to visit the Radical! Women*Artists and Modernism 1910-1950 Exhibition.

On a wall at the exhibit’s culmination was a collection of quotes by famed women artists. “You may be a woman and you may be an artist,” Dorothy Tanning said in 1990, “but the one is a given and the other is you.”

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Much of the Austro-Hungarian Empire took its inspiration from Paris, yet despite its feigned familiarity, Vienna still feels like a foreign place. The streets are pristine but empty, the language is direct yet complex, and the past doesn’t easily give itself away to the present. Here on the wide Parisian-style terraces dolloped with Viennese cream tablecloths and black elixirs, lining the vast, majestic boulevards with their 19th century décor, the story of the founders of psychoanalysts having a chat on the terrace makes way for the pristine memory of ball gowns, top hats, expertly tailored coats, horse-and-carriages clop-clop-clopping along the cobblestones laid in times of yore.

This is Vienna 2025, however, and the capital city’s harvest is clear: history is approachable, class is attainable, and the water is clean, but one can’t help but leave the city feeling a bit sterile. Vienna is a simulacrum of everything it ought to be, the enduring capital of a once-bustling Empire that has since thought better of expanding its borders beyond the elegant opera houses and national museums, for to the southeast of Vienna, somewhere along the gentle currents of the Danube, there exists a much older story that cannot be as neatly nestled into the shadow of the Alps.

Buda·Pest

“The past is never dead. It is not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

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Let us tell ourselves a story about our condition. It’s a story we’ve heard before, but for some reason, it never ceases to shock. Why don’t we listen?

The “House of Terror” is located at 60 Andrássy Avenue, that glorious tree-lined boulevard on the “Pest” side of the city. In 1944, the Hungarian Nazi Party, Arrow Cross, began using the building to interrogate and torture Jewish citizens human beings. Just a year later, after Stalin’s armies liberated the city, the secret police proceeded to occupy the city and use this elegant building for a different similar reason.

The story of 60 Andrássy Avenue has been told before, but the story told in the museum is somewhat unique. On the surface, it is the narrative of the identity of contemporary Hungary, forged in the bloodlands of state-sponsored terror of the twentieth century. Without a doubt, the museum’s design, layout, and narrative is a must-visit for anybody interested in understanding the depths of the human condition, but the museum, like history, is also a paradox—particularly in skirting the question of how and why so many Hungarians participated in the Nazi genocide were complicit in the Holocaust. The museum’s curation focuses on the brutality of the Communist Soviet years, which is perhaps unsurprising when one learns the space was inaugurated by Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s contemporary far right leader, way back in 2002.

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But oh, the baths. Oh, the Hungarian baths! What culture but one with variously heated, naturally occurring thermic pools could better understand the need to heal?

There is a solitudinal wisdom in soaking in public silence, in descending below the earth to bask in communal warmth. Here in Buda, at the Gellert Thermal Baths on the western side of the Danube, somewhere within the quiet section at the back corner of the spa where tiled mosaics reveal a 36° and 40°C pool, there is a wisdom that accompanies the act of bathing with strangers in heat, with choosing to share this space devoid of words.

Witness all the bodies, young and old, dark and light, busty and slim. Most of the mostly-naked people found in this subterranean liquid labyrinth have no need to speak, for they are healing—just take a deep breath. Down here, the elders might get the best position in the pool, but there is room for everyone, too, because everyone needs to be healed, and we could all use a good soak.

Such is the luxury afforded by a public bath: to feel the body and to sit with it. To soak. To close our eyes. To emit a moan. To witness our mostly-naked elders—we’d all of us be so lucky to step out onto these tiled floors at that age—grab onto the railing as they ascend from the steaming hot pool, take a deep breath, and cross the mosaic floor to slip their steaming bodies into a cold plunge.

What is the effect of witnessing the wet human skin of many dozens of humans beading in the heat? And what does it mean to sit in silence with strangers in a hot body of communal water? What effect does it have on our understanding of others? Of the other? What effect does bathing with strangers have on our collective understanding of the human being body—not as a commodified idea filtered photo but as a real-life undulating thing—sometimes thin, sometimes fat, sometimes skinny, sometimes thick, flabby arms and tight muscles and flat asses and large breasts and shriveled pectorals, luscious belly rolls cascading forth to meet golden-brown beer-bellies distending towards the warmth, submerging into the weightless waters where mothers can float and children can witness what it feels like to have a moment alone.

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What does it mean to lounge alongside a supermodel on one side and an overweight man on the other? What is this the poverty of language of the human body when it comes to describing the myriad ways in which each and every one of us our bodies can be unique sexy. Because to be clear: there is no guarantee of uniqueness, only the possibility.

Enter a cackling French male caricature—Gaston’s minion—as he tries to influence the quiet space with his booming voice. His guttural humor and childish jokes echoed throughout the tiled walls down below. Taissez-vous, monsieur, ça suffit, I wish I were bold enough to say, but after ascending towards the upstairs area of the Gellert pools, it becomes apparent that this man’s objectionable nature wasn’t in fact a gendered thing, for his gaggle of drunken girlfriends was just as loud.

Oh, the humanity. They fueled their complaints about life with champagne in the scorching Hungarian sun, but at least up here there were more eyes on them, more opportunities to glare, more subtle hints, and more opportunity to find beauty in the sunshine reflecting off of deep end of the pool and its 1913 mosaics.

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“Such is human nature,” Mary Shelly wrote in The Last Man, “that beauty and deformity are closely linked.” And it’s true: I shall not let these drunkards ruin one of the most beautiful places in the world, for I now know that I’ve met these drunken French tourists before. This time around, they happened to be from France, but in a different rendition they could be Spanish, or United Statesian, or Russian, or Congolese. We’ve all of us met these obnoxious types of tourists, not travelers, and one doesn’t have to travel too far to know they exist everywhere in the world—the shouters, the cacklers, the drunkards, the entitled, those lonely souls who have no idea where they are and even less where they’d like to be.

The loudness of others soon passes.

It always does, and has been passing for millennia, particularly here on both sides of the Danube, in a region once conquered by Huns and Nazis and Soviets and Rome.

It is always passing, the loudness of violence, and we should pity them, perhaps, the ones who would start wars.

But question remains: who is willing to confront them, and how? That is the question, how people choose to face the sun-kissed nakedness of our most brutish forms, whether sitting by a thermal pool in Budapest in 2025 or in Vienna in 1938 or in Hungary in 1944 … how we decide to confront tyranny, it seems, is the enduring question, and June 28, 2025 provided a perfect opportunity.

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2025 Pride in Budapest was an historic event. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world showed up to confront Viktor Orbán’s bigoted government, and millions more are supporting the event via the power of their phones.

After dancing behind a techno truck in the summer sun, we sat down for a cold beer not one-hundred-meters from the parade route. The waiter with the unkempt beard and the nascent beer belly was kind and generous and spoke with a genuine smile. One glance out towards the parade, however, and he shook his head and said something along the lines of “This is crazy.”

“Yeah,” I said, unsure of what he meant. “An incredible turnout, isn’t it? We’ve been dancing for a while and would love a cold beer.”

The waiter’s eyes were genuinely surprised. He leaned towards me and pointed at a rainbow flag. “Wait, so … you’re something like … something like that?”

“Yes,” I didn’t hesitate. “I am something like that.”

Still confused, the waiter mouthed the silent word: “G-A-Y?”

I smiled and repeated, “Sure. Something like that. We’re all of us on a spectrum.”

It took a few more muddled words and a steadfast smile to sus out each other. After an awkward chuckle, his fingertips tapping on the table, he asked, “But, so … you are atheists?”

“Yes, artists! We’re artists.”

“Ah! Artists? No I said atheists.”

He laughed a bit nervously. “Okay. So would you like some shots of Palinka?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll have three! And a cold beer, please.”

Epilogue

The police presence was calm throughout the parade, it must be said. Perhaps it had something to do with the liberal mayor of the city. There were no whispers of a single confrontation the entire day, but towards the end of the Parade while crossing Elizabeth Bridge with many tens of thousands of people, I noticed a well-designed placard that read: Boys don’t wear makeup. Men do.

On the Buda side of the bridge, perhaps to intimidate all who passed, were the only counter-protesters of the day, four post-pubescent boys to be precise, each of them wearing sunglasses and standing silently in black garb, clutching a flaccid, flapping banner in the wind that read: DEFEND EUROPE with a big red X drawn on a rainbow flag.

To witness tens of thousands of people walk past this pathetic group of five children was a revelation. Keep dreaming, boys. You’re on the wrong side of history. When it comes to historic battles, the allies always win.

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