The EuroPride celebrations come to an end tomorrow.  Thousands have come to Malta for the ten-day festival which is a pan-European international LGBTI event featuring a Pride parade, hosted by a different European city each year.

The event has served as a celebration of the journey of bold reforms which have revolutionised the country’s equality landscape over the past years – reforms which have placed Malta on the top of LGBTIQ+ rankings for legislative reform for consecutive years.

Yet acceptance isn’t something impose upon by legislative reform.  It is all well and good – and indeed to be applauded – that Malta’s legislative framework is as advanced as it is, but at the same time acceptance must come from society; and it is clear that widespread acceptance from society is still yet to be achieved.

We can start from comments related to the organisation of EuroPride in Malta itself. 

Questions around the €2.5 million cost of the ten-day celebrations are warranted, and like in any other case of public spending the government has a duty to give a breakdown of how this money was spent.

However there were others who questioned why there needs to be a Pride event in the first place. They said that the LGBTIQ+ community now has rights, so why bother?  Others queried why there was never some sort of ‘Straight Pride’ or ‘Family March’ – with images of a similar event happening in Serbia (a country where last year’s Pride March was marred by violence towards participants, and where this year’s Pride March was subject to anti-gay messages by the country’s leadership) doing the rounds on social media.

These people perhaps take the challenges that a member of the LGBTIQ+ community face for granted.  It is always difficult being in a minority and in this case, Pride is as much an awareness event as it is an event to inspire courage in those who are still coming to terms with themselves or who are fearful of coming out.

One of those challenges is personal safety: a member of the LGBTIQ+ community is statistically far more likely to be subjected to harassment or physical violence – something even proven during EuroPride in Malta.

The NGO LGBTI+ Gozo on Thursday reported that a group of queer people were verbally harassed after the Pride March which was held in Gozo last Saturday, and ultimately one of those people was even physically assaulted.

“We were reminded of the importance of Pride and the necessity of creating safe spaces for queer people on the island of Gozo. This message hit home in an all too real way, and a day of celebration quickly turned into a sombre reminder of why we must continue to fight for Pride,” the NGO said of the attack.

There were others who contended that they were fine with Pride taking place but drew a line when it involved children and children’s events because it can impinge on their innocence – but at the same time no such line is drawn for taking children to other events such as, say, village feasts or football matches – where the insults thrown from one group to another are well documented – or even political meetings.

It is also an implication that matters relating to the LGBTIQ+ community are somehow vulgar or obscene, rather than the fact that someone being gay or lesbian or transsexual should be just as much of a perfectly normal part of society than anyone else.

The past ten days and the lead-up to this period has shown that while Malta may be in the lead when it comes to legislative reform, there is still some gap when it comes to society coming to terms with accepting the LGBTIQ+ community.  That is why we still need Pride.