Can We Talk About...? The Gay Guy That Made Woodstock Possible 50 Years Ago | NewNowNext

Can We Talk About...? The Gay Guy That Made Woodstock Possible 50 Years Ago | NewNowNext: Can We Talk About…? is a weekly series really pulling for Grace and Karen to iron shit out. Woodstock has long been resigned to the fading memory of straight white baby boomers as the last gasp of their idealistic youth. Over the course of three days in mid-August 1969, rock gods like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, and The Grateful Dead performed for the counterculture set that had wholly embraced their sound on a dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y. But without the help of Elliot Tiber, a gay rights activist who secured the farm for the festival, Woodstock—which turns 50 this week—may not have happened at all. Tiber died in 2016, but before that he penned two memoirs about the legendary festival, one in 1994 and another in 2007, the latter becoming the basis for Ang Lee’s 2009 film Taking Woodstock, in which Tiber is portrayed by comedian Demetri Martin. A former yeshiva student from Brooklyn, Tiber helped run his parents’ Bethel motel, El Monaco, on the weekends and served as president of the small upstate New York town’s chamber of commerce. During the week he worked as an interior decorator in Manhattan, where at night he would frequent the gay bars, a habit that two months be