Former friends, admirers and people from all walks of life who encountered Carmen in her Wellington days have gathered to pay their respects to the late diva at a memorial service in Wellington, where Georgina Beyer made the call to current politicians present “no statue to Blanket Man, yes to Carmen”.
The statement was met with cheers and applause by the crowd that came together on the bottom level of Cuba St bar S&M’s, in a service hosted by the bar’s co-owner Malcolm Kennedy-Vaughan.
He recalled meeting Carmen when he was 16 and had left school and his home and found himself on the Wellington streets, where he met a fabulous bunch of people. He said Carmen’s now-famously infamous International Coffee Lounge was the place everyone went when everything else closed at 10PM, for whiskey-laced coffee and the best toasted sandwiches.
“It was a place where we all felt safe and secure, and Carmen looked after us. She took us all under her wing.”
He also read a newspaper article from 30 years ago when Carmen left Wellington, which offered a gorgeous snapshot of the time.
Joining Beyer and Kennedy-Vaughan in sharing memories and paying tribute to Carmen was friend and former showgirl Dana de Milo. “Carmen was the most, beautiful, loving, kind, giving person you could ever meet,” she said, before having those gathered in stitches with her tales from the classic Wellington days, stories which GayNZ.com will share in a separate feature.
Also present were Jurgen Hoffman and Robin Warea-Hargreaves, who took care of Carmen during her final years in Sydney. Waerea-Hargreaves was emotional as he assured the gathering Carmen had died peacefully and beautifully. His partner Hoffman said the last words Carmen spoke to him, when he asked what he could do, were “keep me alive”. He said he has just realised she meant she wanted her memory kept alive. The couple is part of a team which has started the Carmen Rupe Memorial Trust, which she asked a group of friends and family members to create.
Showing just how widely Carmen touched lives, a former ‘Vice Squad’ detective Trevor Morley, who arrested Carmen numerous times, spoke frankly about his memories of a very different time in the 60s and 70s. He said one of the reasons there have been such changes in laws relating to ‘vice’ and morality are because of people like Carmen.
“Without wishing to sound flippant, Carmen was one of those people who genuinely had the courage of her convictions and there are very, very few people of whom you can say that.”
Morley added “if everybody we dealt with on the Vice Squad was as pleasant to deal with as Carmen always was, then our job and the job … would have been a lot, lot better … Carmen was genuinely a nice person to deal with.”
The man Kennedy-Vaughan hopefully described the man he is “sure is going to be our first gay Prime Minister” Grant Robertson also spoke. He shared a tale of how a Taumarunui businessman and teacher Colin Mallard taught Carmen, when she was a young Trevor Rupe. “Colin clearly was very taken with Trevor Rupe, because he named his firstborn Trevor Mallard,” Robertson said, prompting surprised laughs as people realised the connection to his Labour caucus colleague.
Wellington Mayor Celia Wade-Brown kept up her strong support for her city’s glbt community by attending and sharing a few words.
GayNZ.com will share many of the great memories and stories of Carmen that were shared in an upcoming feature
