2023 LIFT Award – Laudation for qLit

This year's LIFT award was given to the qLit community, lauded by Dóri Rédai at the 14th LIFT opening ceremony.

 

The 2023 LIFT Award is not dedicated to an individual, but to a community. The group, which has been an officially registered association for four years, is made up of lesbians who, in the mid-2010s, missed the women-only leisure activities that they themselves would have liked to attend. They decided to take action to find and create a community, to help others connect with each other. They run an online magazine, organise sports and cultural activities, and have well-organised monthly events that we also enjoy attending. The rush to register for monthly programmes before they fill up shows how much demand and need there is for them.
 

We were delighted when they were founded, relieved that we are finally not the only lesbian organisation in Hungary, works very hard but cannot - and does not want to - serve all the needs and wants of the community. We have many values in common, but they organise different types of programmes to reach out to members of the lesbian community who are not necessarily receptive to our activities. To their credit, alongside the activities of Labrisz which are more actively public-political focused, there are also more relaxed, light-hearted, youthful programmes for people to relax.

We have gradually developed a good cooperation, and we can always count on them to share our programmes and events, including the promotion of LIFT. This cooperation reached a new level last year: they played a key role in the organisation of the European Lesbian* Conference in Budapest; the cooperation between Labrisz and qLit and locally supporting the main organiser EL*C was essential to make the conference a success. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dorka Szekeres personally and on behalf of Labrisz, without whose dedicated and professional organizing work this conference and the (first Hungarian) Dyke March would not have been so successful. This was the third EL*C conference, the first one was held in Vienna in 2017, where they were present and we were present. It is gratifying to see that all three organisations are thriving.
 

I could go on and on about our good experiences - Ágota Szunyog's sparkling pub quiz drives, Dorka Szekeres' hilarious ping pong twists, how they waited for us at the excursion when we got lost, how we once went to a perfectly organised girls' football game where they really cared for us and then beat us up. To sum up: with their programmes and their writing, they have become an important driving force and an indispensable cohesive element of the Hungarian lesbian community. They contribute to making lesbians* more visible, and their work allows us to experience how colourful and diverse we are.

I would like to ask the representatives of the qLit Lesbian Magazine and Programme Association to come to the stage to accept the 2023 LIFT Award, which is the work of glass artist Barbara Szőke. Congratulations and thanks to them, and we wish them strength, energy and enthusiasm for their future work!

 

(Dorottya Rédai)

 

Photo: Tea Erdélyi