Destination: CONDOM, France

Armagnac town seeks to capitalize on its name

By CHRISTOPHER BURNS -- Associated Press

Gerard Dubrac, right, the mayor of Condom, talks with a resident at the road sign for the town in southwestern France. -AP

Don't get mad, get famous! After visitors kept asking a local pharmacist for his shop's stamp on condom boxes, he decided there was notoriety -- and money -- to be made off the town's name, the English word for "un preservatif."

Why not a condom museum? The pharmacist, Gerard Dubrac, pitched the idea to town officials about five years ago. "At first they laughed," he says.

Two years later, Dubrac was elected mayor.

The museum, he says, will be more than a freak show of models from way back, but a conference center on safe sex in a country where condom use is dangerously neglected.

"It's not a museum, in precise terms," says the 45-year-old father of two. "It's a research center."

Call it what you want, but the main draw will be displays of hundreds of items, including a turn-of-the-century condom made of thick rubber donated by the condom makers Durex.

It won't be the first museum with condoms. There's a History of Contraception Museum outside Toronto. But Mayor Dubrac's got the town name.

"There's business to do," he says. "You can make hats, objects, whatever you want." Already, Condom sells plastic copies of its real town signs, which disappear periodically.

Dubrac has produced a 12-page glossy pamphlet with blueprints for a three-story museum. Costing $5 million, it would have exhibition space, a 400-seat auditorium and a library.

Dubrac this year won government support for the first "National Condom Days" July 3-4.

The event included Condom's first condom exhibit, with posters, archive footage of TV commercials and World War II films on how troops can avoid syphilis. It travels to Paris in October, at the Centre Info-Sida (AIDS Information Center.)

The exhibit was coupled with a condom colloquium in nearby Toulouse, the kind of event Dubrac hopes his center will host. Medical experts discussed the condom's history, manufacture and use.

French officials see the museum as a way to boost condom use.

"Youth are neglecting the condom," was a front-page headline this month in the daily Le Parisien, citing figures that only one in four youn adults uses condoms.

But funding has been an uphill battle. For the current exhibit, the Health Ministry donated $8,200. Durex provided materials but has yet to commit funds to build the museum as it waits to see which other partners join in.

The name "condom" may well have originated in the town, contends Dubrac, basing his claim on an 18th-century French book called "History of the Skin Trade."

The book says a professor Le Baudroyeur made condoms during the early 1700s. Protestants in Armagnac circulated a rumor that one of the professor's customers was Bishop Bossuet in the town of Condom.

Many of the 7,700 residents of Condom are skeptical that the museum will come to fruition, but they like the idea.

"If it attracts tourists, that's great," said Philippe Sabaron, 31, a video shop owner.

(First featured: September 28, 1998)