A British singer and X Factor UK contestant has revealed the harassment she and her partner faced while holidaying on the island.

From people shouting “lesbians!” at them in the streets to waiters trying to make a threesome happen, Lucy Spraggan shared her disappointing and frankly concerning experiences.

“I was so looking forward to Malta and one of the reasons was because I’d heard it was so LGBT friendly and progressive,” Spraggan said in a new post on Instagram. “So many people recommended it and said they’d had such a good time.”

“Our holiday lasted 2.5 days.”

She recounted the harassment they were faced with on their first day on the island.

“First day we arrived we realised we’d landed in the wrong part of town – every other bar was a ‘gentlemen’s club’ and it was clearly a party destination, and everywhere we went someone shouted ‘lesbians’ at us,” she said. “I shouldn’t have to say this but we weren’t holding hands and both looked pretty femme, didn’t even have tattoos out so these blokes have some gaydar.”

“The woman on the desk in the first hotel said she completely understood why we didn’t want to stay there and let us leave early,” she continued.

“Same day we went to a restaurant in Valletta where the waiter said: ‘the way you girls are sitting is so sexy, you are making us all hard’. Yeah. Word for word.”

 

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A post shared by Lucy Spraggan (@lspraggan)

Spraggan before she left the island

When they asked for the bill and made to leave, the waiter tried to convince them to stay.

“It makes me so angry that all we could do was fucking laugh in disbelief and calmly ask for the bill, he said ‘don’t leave, stay here’ and to diffuse the situation I said ‘we have more to discover here’ to which he said: ‘How about I discover her with you’.”

It didn’t end there – when they returned to the hotel, they found their balcony door didn’t lock – and when they called reception, they were told it would be fixed the next day.

“‘We don’t want to stay in a room that doesn’t lock?!’ He said ‘don’t worry, this area is very safe’.”

After arguing with the receptionist, the couple went to get some ice cream, where they encountered some “local men”.

“As soon as we sat down they started doing the international first and middle finger scissor bashing sign for lesbians whilst shouting in our direction,” Spraggan said.

With even more incidents to list, Spraggan and her partner decided to the leave the island, with Spraggan using the opportunity to call out the harassment she had been put through on an island seemingly with some of the best protections for the LGBTQI community the world over.

“I am sick to fucking death of feeling threatened as a woman,” she ended. “Sick to fucking death of feeling threatened as a lesbian. I am sick to fucking death of being spoken down to by men across the globe.”

“Malta was beautiful, but experience was not.”