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Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Whatever happened to Joe Tiffenbach?, Part 3 - Making legal porn, mostly movies


The top photo above is the only one I was able to find of Joe Tiffenbach later in his life.  It was attached to a 1986 San Francisco Sentinel article detailing his experience making Song of the Loon (1970), the first feature length gay themed softcore movie made  in the USA.  That movie became an artistic and financial nightmare for Mr. Tiffenbach.  (By many accounts, the gay movie business hasn't changed much since then.)  Looking at Joe in that picture with an array of photos makes me wonder what happened to them after his untimely death from a heart attack in 1993 at age 68.
Here's a link to the article in the UC Berkeley archives:
Scroll down to page 16.

 

4 comments:

  1. Hi Jerry. What a terrific and well researched post. Thanks for the effort. Ever since you posted that black and white nude of Joe a while back he's been a favorite. But I wonder. Why wouldn't he mention his nude modeling if he was so open about everything else? And did he ever state equivocally that he was gay? Or was that still a "gray area" at his death? Or perhaps he didn't think of himself in those terms.

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    1. Joe was referred to in some circles as the "Granddaddy of Porn," so it mystifies me as to why he wouldn't mention his modeling. We might consider that it was a tiny portion of both his life span and his overall output of material. (I found at least 26 films credited to him, and there are likely more than that.) He was living in a clothing optional apartment complex the last year of his life, fwiw. As for the gay thing, he was from an era when it wasn't safe to talk about that openly. When the main interview was done in '86, things had loosened up a lot, but he just might have kept the long time habit of not directly mentioning it. In some other material I didn't mention here, it seemed like his being gay was just a "given."

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  2. Great stuff, Jerry, and nicely researched. I had no idea what kind of life he had lived and all the things he accomplished almost in the shadows of the movie business. I'm kind of surprised that he didn't get married like so many gay men did back then. It's kinda funny how his SC yearbook photo has him looking older than his nude photos with his then fashionable (and much younger looking) flattop.

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    1. I agree about the age appearances. I guess college men may have made an effort to look more mature, and some physique photographers liked to make their models look young.

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