Sometimes, ignorance is not blissful.
Sean Connery: I don’t even remember where I got the scarf–maybe London?–and I certainly hadn’t heard of homosexuals signaling to one another–their preferences or what have you–through their use of neck-wear. Cruising hadn’t come out yet.
It wasn’t particularly cold, and I wasn’t particularly enamored of the scarf. It was just one of those things. I put it on and walked out of the hotel–I was staying at a grotty place in the lower east side in preparation for a part in a film that didn’t come to pass–this would have been 1976, 1977, a couple of years after The Man Who Would Be King, in any case.
I found out later that the colors signified acts, preferences. Red for–I can’t remember now, let’s say red meant you liked oral, blue for say you’re a bottom, like that.
What I couldn’t have suspected–what it’s taken me years to come to terms with, the randomness with which the points of the universe align–is that the scarf I just happened to be wearing that brisk October, a brown, blue and yellow plaid, signified that the wearer liked to be forcibly abducted, chained up and blindfolded for about a week, and repeatedly sodomized by dozens of strangers.
That is, as they say, the kind of unintentional mistake I only had to make once.
