Dark Jester
A political scholar with an interest in foreign interference. Traditional conservative. Came out of a family that fled communism and improved themselves thanks to capitalism but would consider myself a distributionist.
Queer Endurance/Defiance was first established to protest when Speak Up for Women New Zealand spoke in Wellington. But who are the people behind this group?
A Salient article was the first time that I heard of the group. The article also named some of the individuals in the group. A number of other news articles also covered this new trans activist group. The Salient article noted that the group was composed of members of pre-existing leftist organisations and other trans activists. This can be confirmed by examination of the people named in the article. Two of them, Elle Kingsbury and Serah Allison, are members of the Poneke branch of the International Socialist Organisation. They appear to be prominent members of the group as they are contributors to the ISO website. Serah Allison is also a delegate for the Amalgamated Workers Union New Zealand, the organisation to bring together all of the labour unions along with regional councils to settle disputes.
The other person of note is Amal Samaha, who is a writer for The Spinoff, a so-called ‘independent’ magazine on culture and society, which receives generous funding from taxpayers. His profile says he is an Australian-Lebanese student of history and politics at Victoria University of Wellington. There is not a lot of information about his political leanings but he seems to be an environmentalist who doesn’t like New Zealand’s relationships with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Morocco. However, I did find an article that appeared to be written by Amal which was featured on the website of Anticonquista, an anti-imperialist media collective based in Latin America. From their language, it’s clear that they are a communist group.
Finally, there is Bill Logan, a prominent gay rights activist who now works as a celebrant and counsellor and as Chair of the Drugs, Health and Development Project Trust. His activism has a long and interesting history. While studying at Victoria University of Wellington he served as editor for the student journal Salient as well as Student Representative on the University Council. He was involved in homosexual law reform and is now currently advocating for the expungement of records of men convicted under the sodomy laws. He was on the Board of the NZ Needle Exchange Programme, a programme financed by the Ministry of Health that provides free needles to drug users to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, while homosexual rights seem to be his forte, he appears to have Communist leanings. His Facebook page has a link to the International Bolshevik Tendency, an organisation that takes inspiration from the Russian 1917 Revolution which advocates for the overthrow of Western nations and a reorganisation of the Fourth International as part of their planned revolution of the working classes. One of the articles on their website is an account of the Queer Endurance/Defiance and their protest in Wellington on July 16th, which means that Bill Logan probably contributes to it.
I hope to do more research into the group, but for now, these were the people who were named. I’m sure there are other connections.
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