Socialist queer rights campaigner Rachel Evans, who helped re-launch Community Action Against Homophobia (CAAH) in 2004 when the same-sex marriage ban was touted, has been preselected on the Socialist Alliance's New South Wales Senate ticket.
Evans was National Union of Students queer officer in 2006, and featured heavily in the mainstream media as an organiser for the No To Pope protests that campaigned under the slogan "The pope is wrong, put a condom on!" during the pope's World Youth Day visit in 2008.
Evans has also been an activist in the refugee rights movement, in Melbourne and then Sydney. She led a CAAH campaign to help win freedom for three queer refugees from Villawood Detention Centre.
Evans helped organise trips of people to Villawood Detention Centre to break the refugees' isolation and build solidarity within the community. Evans is now a student at the University of Technology, Sydney, and has also campaigned against the union busting "Voluntary Student Unionism" legislation.
She has visited Venezuela and Bolivia to see the revolutions there and has used the experience to build Latin America solidarity.
"I became a socialist because the private profits system impoverishes the world, wreaks war on the global south, and diminishes women and queers and destroys Mother Earth", Evans told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly.
"I'm running in the election in order to build the grassroots movements for change, and to build the project for left unity — the Socialist Alliance. All those who generally agree should join SA and get involved — we have a world to change!"