Tens of thousands of people marched through Warsaw on Saturday to support the LGBTQ community in Poland, where the right-wing government is seeking another term in elections this year.
Poland's president has equated "LGBT ideology" with communism and the ruling party chief has branded gay people a "threat" to the traditional family.
But Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from the liberal opposition party, vowed that the LGBTQ community "will always be safe" as he opened the annual Equality Parade in the capital.
"And I hope that you all will be safe in Poland," he told the flag-waving crowd.
Michal Niepielski, a 60-year-old radio technician from Krakow, told AFP he and his partner had been attending the Equality Parade for 18 years straight and saw positive changes in Poland's "social climate".
"The first marches we came here for, we had to hide all the rainbow accents after the march, so as not to be attacked somewhere outside the city centre. Now, things are totally different," he added.
But Niepielski admitted he was concerned the authorities may try to step up the hostile rhetoric against LGBTQ people in the run-up to the autumn elections "to mobilise their electorate".
"This has been a recurrent thing for many years... And this obviously affects us, because it is not pleasant to see politicians calling us 'deviants', 'sick people', 'a threat to the Polish family'," he added.
- 'Just out as myself' -
In Poland, same sex unions are not legally recognised, either in the form of marriage or civil unions. There are also obstacles facing transgender people who seek to formalise their transition.
"To legally change your sex, you have to sue your parents, which is just honestly bizarre to me because your parents didn't do anything wrong," 24-year-old Lyndon Szrom told AFP.
For the Polish-American translator from Warsaw, discrimination against transgender people did not end there.
"If I am a transgender man and my partner is also a man, if something was to happen to him, I couldn't visit him in the hospital because I'm not technically family," Szrom said.
"We can't inherit together. And you know, forget about any kind of adoption or surrogacy."
But the annual parade was first and foremost a celebration of unity, he said.
"This is the moment when, for once, I get to be just out as myself and know that I would 100 percent be respected".
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© Agence France-Presse
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