New Zealand-born transgender icon Carmen Rupe has died aged 75.
The one-time stripper, gay rights advocate and former Wellington mayoral candidate passed away this morning in Sydney’s St Vincent Hospital. She died from kidney failure; something she had been suffering with for recent months.
Carmen can be remembered as New Zealand’s first well-known drag queen. Born as Trevor Rupe, she grew up on a Taumarunui farm as one of 13 children.
It was in her adopted home of Sydney in the 1959 that she decided men’s clothes weren’t for her, having dabbled with drag in New Zealand in the 1950s.
The world Carmen worked with was a lot tougher than what we see today, where reforms in the law have endeavoured to accept the GLBT community. Gay Express reports back in those days, Sydney police would pick transgender prostitutes off the street and take them back to the station where they would be hosed down and beaten. GE says in the late 1990s, she was the only transgender prostitute that survived that era. She was one tough cookie.
She came back to New Zealand to open Carmen’s International Coffee Lounge in Wellington, where the GLBT community could come together. Homosexuality was illegal in those days, so Carmen designed the place so, should a police raid occur, patrons could escape. She ran a nightclub for 12 years which had to run seven days because it was so busy and popular.
Carmen ran for Wellington mayoralty in 1977, campaigning for gay rights and prostitution reforms.
Gay Express reports Carmen will be buried in Sydney.
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