Bernard Boursicot

Bernard Boursicot (born on 12 August 1944) is a French diplomat who was caught in a honeypot trap (seducing him to participate in Chinese espionage), by Shi Pei Pu, a male Peking opera singer who performed female roles, whom Boursicot believed to be female. This espionage case became something of a cause célèbre in France in 1986, as Boursicot and Shi were brought to trial, due to the nature of the unusual sexual subterfuge alleged.

The case was again back under a public spotlight when a play loosely based on this affair, M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, premiered in 1988 and yet again as the film adaptation of the play directed by David Cronenberg was released in 1993. Periodic re-stagings of the play and television airings of the film based on it continue to spark interest in the espionage case at the heart of the fictional works of art.

Boursicot was born in 1944. He attended boarding schools as a youth, where he engaged in multiple homosexual affairs with other students; upon graduation, Boursicot became determined to lose his virginity to a woman, believing that institutionalized homosexuality among boarding students was a rite of passage. He first met Shi Pei Pu in China while posted to the French Embassy in Peking as an accountant in 1964. He was 20 years old and Shi was 26. They met at an embassy reception and shortly began a relationship. Joyce Wadler would later attribute Boursicot's belief that Pei Pu was a woman to Pei Pu's unique ability to retract his own testicles, which, combined with the manipulation of his own penis, created the illusion of labial lips and a clitoris and allowed for shallow penetration.

In 1965, Shi claimed to be pregnant and was able to use a baby boy called Shi Du Du (later called Bertrand by Boursicot and his family) who had been bought from a doctor in the Xinjiang province of China. Over the next decade, they continued their on-again off-again affair as Boursicot moved from posting to posting in Southeast Asia. During this period Boursicot embraced his own bisexuality, having multiple liaisons with women while also engaged in a long term relationship with a Frenchman named Thierry, with whom he one day hoped to form a family including Pei Pu and Bertrand. Boursicot has stated that he began passing documents to Shi when the Chinese Cultural Revolution made it difficult for him to see her. He was approached by Kang Sheng, a member of the Chinese secret service who offered him access to Shi in exchange for his passing documents. He believed Shi's safety was at risk if he failed to participate.

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