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Overview
This condom packet features Carmen Rupe promoting safe sex for a New Zealand AIDS Foundation campaign which was launched in October 2006 when Carmen turned 70 years old. Her message is printed inside: 'Carmen attributes safe sex to her 70 years of a long and wonderful life.'
Carmen Rupe
Carmen Rupe (1936-2011) was an iconic and iconoclastic Wellingtonian and New Zealander. She was a well-known flamboyant transgender performer and businesswoman, and LGBTQI+ rights and HIV/AIDS activist.
She owned several businesses in Wellington in the 1960s-70s, notably a coffee lounge/brothel and nightclub. But her ideas were ahead of their time, and she pushed the boundaries of those with conservative attitudes towards homosexuality, prostitution, and alcohol licensing in New Zealand during this period.
Carmen left New Zealand in the late 1970s to live and work in Sydney but regularly visited New Zealand, and was a respected matriarch and cultural icon of the gay and transgender communities.