What does the Out Spotlight have to do with the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock and Stonewall? Plenty.
Today's Out Spotlight is Elliot Tiber.
Elliot Tiber was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York. His family moved to Upstate New York in the White Lake section of Bethel NY in 1955 where they bought the El Monaco Motel. By 1969, The El Monaco Motel was run down, losing money and desperate and the family at risk of losing the whole thing, and Tiber was trying to help his family save it. That's when fate stepped in.
Tiber described living a closeted life s as he spent time managing his parent's El Monaco Motel, serving as President of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, and, at the same time, participating in the gay scene in New York city.
"We barricaded the doors to keep the cops out, but when we realized that we outnumbered them, we unblocked the exits and ran out onto the street. A group of us started yelling, 'Gay power!' Within seconds, the Stonewall Riot was underway...A bunch of us rocked a cop car back and forth, then overturned it. More people, gay men and lesbians, showed up to join us."
It led him to embrace his sexuality which he had kept a secret even from his own family.
Tiber returned to his home in Bethel and heard that the Woodstock festival was denied a permit to perform in Wallkill, NY. President of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce Tiber had a permit for the White Lake Music and Arts Festival, a planned chamber music event at his family's motel. He contacted Michael Lang or Woodstock Ventures and pitched the idea of having the festival on 15-acres along the edge of White Lake by the family motel."I think it cost $12 or $8 or something like that...It was very vague. It just said I had permission to run an arts and music festival. That's it."
When Lang rejected Tiber's offer to hold the festival on the 15 acre swampland surrounding the run down hotel Tiber got the idea of asking his milkman Max Yasgur to rent his farm to the organizers. Yasgur supported the local Earthlight Theatre group to which Tiber had rented his barn, and agreed to let Woodstock Ventures Inc. use his farm for what would become the largest music festival in history.
El Monaco Motel provided the headquarters and housing for the Woodstock Festival promoters and crew, and many of those who played. Soon after Woodstock, Elliot Tiber sold the motel and headed to Europe, and the El Monaco continued as a motel and restaurant until 2004. It was recently demolished through a partial intentional burning to make way for a marketplace. A clock tower now sits on that corner welcoming visitors as they enter Bethel.
Tiber wrote a first hand account about Woodstock and it coming together in a book called Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life. Academy Award winning director Ang Lee's movie based on the book opens this weekend on the 40th anniversary of Woodstock.
Tiber resides in New York and has performed his one-man standup show titled "Woodstock Daddy" and spearheads projected titled "Gaystock', which is planning a music and arts festival around the Fort Lauderdale area. The Gaystock festival hopes to promote peace and unity among people of any sexual orientation.
