Artist and activist Elliot Tiber, best known for helping facilitate the staging of the 1969 Woodstock music festival, passed away August 3 at a Boca Raton hospice center at age 81.

According to his agent, he suffered a stroke.

Tiber’s experience with Woodstock coincided with his awakening as a gay man, as related in his memoir Taking Woodstock. (Comedian Demetri Martin played Tiber in a 2009 film adaptation of his memoir directed by Ang Lee and co-starring Jonathan Groff, Eugene Levy and Liev Schreiber.)

But Tiber, born Eliyahu Teichberg, led something of a double life—respectably managing his parent's motel in Bethel, New York, and heading to Greenwich Village to live an out gay life. In fact, Woodstock took place shortly after the Stonewall riots in New York, which Tiber reportedly witnessed first hand.

"Many younger members of today’s gay and lesbian community take their current freedoms for granted," he told Publisher's Weekly in 2011. "I always knew I was gay, but there was really no ‘choice’ at all for many of us in the 1950s and ‘60s. We often had to remain closeted just to remain safe. Coming out in the summer of 1969 was the most dangerous yet liberating thing that ever happened to me."

It was Tiber's motel job that landed him in the history books. Reports The Washington Post:

In the summer of 1969, Woodstock concert organizers had been seeking a location after efforts in Woodstock, N.Y., and nearby Wallkill failed, with local residents fearing the prospect of thousands of hippies in their small, upstate New York communities.

Mr. Tiber secured a permit for Bethel and allowed his motel to be used as festival headquarters, a scene that quickly turned chaotic once hundreds of thousands turned up for the three-day show, held on the farm of Max Yasgur.

Tiber introduced Woodstock organizers to Yasgur, at least as he tells it.

He also collaborated with Belgian filmmaker Andre Ernotte on the novel and subsequent screenplay for Rue Haute, Belgium’s entry for the Academy Awards best foreign-language film in 1976. (Tiber and Ernotte were a couple until the latter's death in 1999.)

In his 2011 memoir, Palm Trees on the Hudson: A True Story of the Mob, Judy Garland & Interior Decorating, Tiber recounted being hired in 1968 to decorate a ferry for the 50th birthday of a nightclub owner.

"I was given ‘carte blanche,’ so I conjured up a heady mix of Arabian Nights décor, a bevy of muscle boys covered in gold body paint and stationed as servers throughout the boat, and at least a hundred rented palm trees," he recalled. "What they did to those rented palm trees — let’s just say it gave me a hell of a title for the book."