YIKES!: The New Legend of The Border Bandit Juan Cortina...

By REY BUCKINGHAM
Tribune Gay Affairs Writer

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - History records that the wildest Gay sex ever had here involved the border bandit Juan Cortina and a strapping Texas Ranger by the name of McKinney, son of a Waco-area family who eventually wrote graphically about it in his diary. According to the McKinney family, the Cortina trysts came often and were described in the diaries as wild, overly-physical affairs. As The Tribune's new Gay Affairs Writer, I have been looking into this over at the city library, which avails its computers free-of-charge.

Here's the skinny: Juan, The Bandit was not as well-endowed as his ethnic backers have asserted for all these years. Clint McKinney, his Anglo lover for several years, insisted in his writings that Cortina would take some weird weed concoction to get an erection. "And then, sadly, it wasn't much to crow about," wrote the Ranger. "Indeed, I fantasized about it for weeks, thinking this excitable Mexican man had to have a nice, bulbous peter. But no, that wasn't the case."

Cortina was known far & wide along the Texas-Mexico border as a man with a hot temper. He is said to have whipped even his own gang viciously when they disappointed him. As for women in his life, McKinney says there is a reason why no photos exist of Juan, the Bandit with any broads. The McKinney diary: "He would look at them like he wanted to ball them til they dropped, but he never acted on it. Juan was Gay as Gay could ever be."

South Texas historians like to play-up Cortina's banditry as something that helped the poor fend-off the Anglo invasion. Yet, anecdotal material indicates he was a man in the grips of his confused sexuality. McKinney writes that the two often went for long walks along the Rio Grande, with the forlorn Cortina bemoaning the fact that he had a certain unbridled desire for men. "Confessing to me one moonlit night, he admitted that had things been different, he would have slept with two-three of his men," McKinney wrote on a page he titled, "My Jealousy Whips Me. - Again."

Few know about this affliction here in this rough & tumble town, where sexuality is worn openly, yet only after midnight. There are many Gay people in town, something that at first glance goes against the grain of this being the third-toughest bordertown adjoining Mexico.

McKinney is both glib and incredibly forthcoming in his writing about his time with Juan Cortina.

"We walked into bars and cantinas like two guys looking for pussy, but it was all for show," he goes on. "I knew him, and I knew that when he looked at the women dancing, he was, well, wishing he could bed the portly, mustachioed Mexican barback."

It goes on for some 234 pages. There are now serpentine rumors that the actor Edward James Olmos is intrigued by the idea of making a movie about a Gay Juan Cortina. "Not like 'Zorro, The Gay Blade,' but more like 'The Bridges of Madison County,' you know a love that could never be," said a source familiar with the project.

It could go Big Time, absolutely...

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[Editor's Note: Writer Rey Buckingham has written extensively about the country's Gay lifestyle. In fact, he is Gay. The Tribune does not endorse his sexual preference, but wishes merely to avail its readers timely and useful information about being Gay in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas...]