Was the Wild West outlaw bisexual? Butch Cassidy: The True Story of An American Outlaw by Charles Leerhsen (Simon & Schuster 2020) $28; 304 pp. Eight years before the 1969 release of the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the last of Cassidy’s Wild Bunch went into the ground.
Her name was Laura Bullion, and she was one of a small handful of female groupies who followed the outlaw gang. “It was easy,” Charles Leerhsen writes, “to be smitten by Cassidy.” Born Robert Parker in a tiny cabin in Beaver, Utah, Cassidy grew up uninterested in both his parents’ farm and his ancestors’ Mormon religion.
He was too fun-loving, too full of mischief and too appreciative of guns, horses and gambling to settle down. And yet, unlike many contemporary