Scotty Bowers, who arranged sexual hookups for movie stars in the mid-20th century, has died at the age of 96.

Matt Tyrnauer, director of the 2017 documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, made the announcement to The Hollywood Reporter.

Bowers was a popular "male madam" to celebs during Hollywood's Golden Age, fulfilling the (often queer) needs of the film industry's closeted stars. His pearl-clutching 2012 memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, blew the closet door open for many of Tinseltown's most popular leads and spilled many other secrets from Hollywood's heyday.

He claimed in the book that he provided hookups for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, who were both gay and not actually a couple. He also claimed that he set up Rock Hudson with Cary Grant.

"His story, which he waited to tell until he was in his late 80s—and for years refused to tell at all—forms an astonishing counter-narrative of Hollywood and exposes the mores of the movie capital in a time when gay men and women were forced to be sexual outlaws and were publicly shunned and often persecuted, or at least forced to live double lives,” Tyrnauer told THR. “Scotty was a central figure in the gay underground of Hollywood and served as a trusted protector of his friends and associates lives when they had no alternative but to live in the shadows."

According to NewNowNext's Michael Musto, Bowers himself—who had sex with some of his male movie star clients back then, beginning with Walter Pidgeon—had a wife of 34 years named Lois, who passed away in 2018.

"Their dynamic is interesting because Lois says she wishes Bowers had told her about his past when they met," wrote Musto. "He responds that she didn’t tell him anything about her past either, and for all he knew, she might have been a hooker."

Last summer the City of West Hollywood presented Bowers with a citation for his role in local L.A. LGBTQ history.

“It’s been said with a wink that Scotty Bowers helped put the ‘wood’ in Hollywood from the 1940s to the 1980s,” said Mayor John D’Amico.