To the Transznemű Ember I Needed to See
I was looking for you before I saw you. It was 2019, the year I stopped wearing dresses, got a shaggy David Bowie cut, dropped “her” and added “they.” I was trying it on, making public something I felt in my bones, lifting weights to feel my arms tighten against the rolled cuffs of my black t-shirts; sauntering wide-legged down my Brooklyn street after being called “sir” at the bank; flirting with gay boys on subway platforms near Christopher Street. Privately, I wrote about these wordless gesture-full moments, evidence I was becoming what I was—what I am—not man or woman but creature. At dinner parties, I jokingly referred to myself as a “wolf-unicorn”—mythos as a way to articulate the inarticulate, the wholeness of all the parts of myself.
Questioning my particular flavor of genderfuckery got me wondering about its origins. If this revealing of self was a knowing I felt in my bones, where did it come from? This is how I found myself in Hungary, where my great-grandmother was born, walking the streets of Budapest and listening to everyone speak Magyar, the language like a song I heard in childhood but couldn’t place.
Raised in the backseat of an overheated van driven by my stepfather, a cocaine addict and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, I had never felt a sense of home. I ran away at sixteen to roam with my friends—self-cutters, drug dealers, voracious readers, death metal drummers, single mothers, kids from the Tseshaht and Hupačasath communities. We would park on the edge of town and blast Slayer through car speakers—our love a kind of muscle—casting side glances as we passed cigarettes, looks that said I see you, I’m with you, we can get through this. When my genderqueerness emerged, I thought back to that adolescence because I was a creature then too, roaming to find my footing through chosen family. But in Hungary I wasn’t running from anything—I was heeding the call of something deep inside, my creatureness transforming into what I had always been. To answer a call of that magnitude I needed to roam further, favor kismet over Google search, my body a homing device guiding me to chosen family amongst my Magyar ancestors.
I’d suspected my return to “the homeland” would be clouded by nostalgia, but when I deplaned, smelled horse chestnuts for the first time, and started crying—I lost all sense of reality. The trees were an ancestral calling, an olfactory glow, the same glow I saw in the eyes of the men on the street. They had my brother’s eyes. Nostalgia made everything luminous: riding a ferry along the Danube; sitting in the warm spring water of Ottoman-era spas; weeping into a plate of chicken paprikash while a violinist played a czárdás. Desperate to connect with Magyar queers but not knowing where to look, I sat in cafés eating sour cherry pastries hoping to see a butch nod. I wondered if I could get a sense of coding from a haircut or clothing choice. I passed my forints across the counter to the barista, wondering if they knew but didn’t know how to ask.
And so it felt like fate when I turned a corner one morning to find the Auróra, its rainbow flag fluttering against its stucco exterior, a long corridor opening into a sun-kissed courtyard. Chairs and tables were strewn about, painted blue and white, chipped and gorgeous. Everyone was smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, having animated conversations in Magyar, Spanish, English, and Portuguese. When you walked in—your flower print skirt and greying scoop neck shirt, your purple hair gathered in a mess at the top of your head—it was with an entourage and in extravagant slow-motion, like Zsa Zsa Gabor in one of her movies. You electrified me, not in desire (though of course that too; I’m always a little turned on by the sight of a fellow queer) but by the recognition of myself in you—kind seeing kind.
Your friends were fluttering around, but you were a half-napping cat, eyes on the door, ready to jump into motion without showing it. You gave off an air of nonchalance while continuously clocking the surroundings, assessing your safety. I recognized it because I had learned to do the same thing in public. But you also seemed content, happy to be at the Auróra, a place of luminous, atmospheric phenomena.
I should introduce myself, I thought.
I imagined walking over to you, hands in pockets, kicking at the ground in an “ahh-shucks” shy boi kind of way and exchanging names—not only the ones we had been given but the ones we had given ourselves, maybe even the names we desired. Or, if we couldn’t speak the same language, we could talk with our bodies, gestures of care, a hand on a shoulder, a wry smile. You would comb your chipped black fingernails through your long purple strands, and I would allow my ever pleasurable butch nod to make its triumphant, glorious appearance. Rolling ourselves a couple of friendship cigarettes, we might have smoked over shared stories: first trips to queer clubs, poems read out in translation, pictures of lovers pointed at on iPhones, all subtle ways of being and surviving.
“When my genderqueerness emerged, I thought back to that adolescence because I was a creature then too, roaming to find my footing through chosen family. But this time, in Hungary, I wasn’t running from anything—I was heeding the call of something deep inside, that same creature transforming me into what I had always been.”
Your fingertips tapped along your sternum as you talked to your friends, and I heard you use the word “transznemű,” placing your palm on your chest. It was similar enough to the English translation that the word enchanted me, echoing against the words I didn’t have when I was a runaway, the words I have now—enby, genderqueer, transgender, nonbinary—and words yet to come, names reverberating into the future. That these words created pathologies disturbed me. For years, my body and my desires went under the radar; kissing the bodies of the many-bodied people, secret kisses in secret spaces. Once I found names for what I felt, I also felt like an object—three-dimensional, complex, but fragile—more fragile than before, when I was just a “something.” The names helped me grow, live, be nourished, and have rights. They also defined me as something to be broken, destroyed. There is an astounding cognitive dissonance in defying and desiring definition.
There’s a Magyar story about the Markoláb, a human-creature hybrid who appears in the shape of a wolf. The Markoláb gets intoxicated on the night of the new moon, and in a fit of ravenous hunger, swallows the sun, the moon, and the stars. Before sunrise, the wretchedly sober Markoláb barfs it all up, which is why it gets so dark on the night of the new moon. The Markoláb also swallows and regurgitates discarded children, childlings, and the unwanted offspring of fairies, transforming them into celestial beings with superhuman powers—some even become Markolábs themselves, able to create the space between day and night, and restart the celestial cycle. This means the Markoláb isn't wholly bad or wholly good but somewhere in between—ambiguous, bloody, cruel, poetic—a creature offering transformation from another world. If I would have known this myth when I saw you at the Auróra, it would have made me wonder if the tale was about all of our ambiguities, that deep dark part of us that goes further back than we can remember. It would have interwoven with all the names, less pathology and more incantation—an invitation to embrace what I am and where I come from.
I imagined it all like a daydream as you left the bar and disappeared into the crowd. I was too shy to speak to you or to anyone in the Auróra that day. And there was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know that Budapest Pride operates out of the Auróra, or that queers had to barricade themselves from people throwing rocks at them during the march in 2008. I had no idea that the Auróra would be attacked by neo-Nazi groups two months after I sat there drinking my cola, ignorant of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his legislative assault of the queer and trans community. But I’m glad I know now, and I’m glad I saw you. The memory is nostalgic, overwrought, romantic, and I love it. You are a creature among creatures. Proof of the collective queer voice—we are here, we will always be here, we have always been here. Thank you for making me feel a little less raw, a little less unfounded. Köszönöm.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tanya Marquardt (they/them) is a genderqueer writer who splits their time between Lenapehoking/ Manhattan and unceded Coast Salish territories/Vancouver. Their play Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep inspired an episode of NPR's Invisibilia; their book Stray: Memoir of a Runaway was The Advocate's Best Queer History & Bio in 2018, and their writing has appeared in Grain, Huffpost UK, Plentitude, Medium, DanceGeist, and Lesbians Are Miracles.
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Header photo by Elena Mozhvilo.
Headshot by David B. Smith.