The FBI was probably tapping Edward Said's phone right up to the day he died in September of 2003. A year earlier, when he was already a very sick man, Said was scheduled to speak at an event at the Kopkind Colony summer session near Guilford, Vt. The morning of Friday, August 2, the day he was scheduled to arrive, John Scagliotti picked up the phone at the Colony's old farmhouse and found it was dead. He went to a neighbor to report the fault.
"Within half an hour," Scagliotti remembers, "there was a knock at the front door, and there was a man who said, 'I hear you have phone problems,' he said. Now I am a gay man. I know what a phone service repairman is meant to look like. In the Village, the phone man is a gay icon. Tool belt, jeans, work shirt, work boots. This man has a madras shirt, Dockers slacks, brown loafer shoes. He goes to an outside junction box, and a few minutes later, the phone is working. Off he goes."
