French minor administrator who had a affair in China that was so romantic and so strange that it gave birth to the sensational New York play, M. Butterfly. The play won a Tony award and was later made into a film starring British actor Jeremy Irons. It told the story of a great love affair between the young accountant at the French Embassy in Peking and his Chinese mistress, Shi Peipu. They even parented a child whom they raised, before the strange truth came out, that Shi Peipu was not a woman.
Bernard Boursicot was the son of a merchant in a small town in Brittany, one of four brothers. In 1963, as a 19-year-old high-school dropout, he went to Algeria where he took a low-level administration job. The strictly brought-up Catholic boy had his first sexual experience in Morocco, with a prostitute. He said it had been cheap and fast, not something he enjoyed but did “to prove to myself that I was not a homosexual.”
He moved on to Peking in October 1964 where he became an Embassy bookkeeper, a great adventure in newly opened Red China. At a party two days before Christmas 1964, he met Shi Peipu, a witty young man who was a singer and actor, versed in playing both male and female roles. A fun-loving man who might be seen with one hand shackled to a diplomatic pouch and the other carrying a case of beer, he was not dissuaded by the fact that relationships between Chinese and foreigners were frowned upon. The 20-year-old youth began a clandestine affair with the 26-year-old Shi Peipu, thinking that he was a woman.
The question is inevitable of how can a man not know that his mistress is another man? Shi Peipu was delicate and small in stature, with small hands and no facial hair, and the Chinese women often were small busted. He taped his genitals close to his body and during love-making kept his legs closed and oiled so that the comparatively inexperienced Boursicot believed he was making sexual entry. Shi assumed a modest stance and never allowed Boursicot to see him nude or fondle him.
In 1965 Boursicot traveled to the Amazon for several years. Shi adopted a child in early 1966 and told Boursicot that the boy was their son. It is speculated that the baby was purchased in Chinese Turkestan, where many of the natives have Caucasian features. Their affair lasted sexually no more than a few months but they loved each other for 19 years, and both bonded with close attachments to the child, for whom they shared custody. Boursicot even took the boy at 16 to Brittany to meet his grandparents.
Boursicot began a homosexual affair in 1974 with Thierry Toulet, a long-term committed relationship. When he returned to Asia in 1977, Shi was more like an ex-wife for whom he still cared as the mother of his beloved child, he began to pass French documents to the Chinese in exchange for papers to get Shi and Bertrand admitted into France. He was finally able to arrange for his family to move to Paris, in 1979. Within months of Shi Peipu’s arrival, French counterespionage agents arrested them both, charging them with espionage.
Boursicot was sent to prison in July 1984 where he served a term of 49 months. He protested that his story was a love affair and not a spy thriller. Shi Peipu was sentenced to 19 months due to poor health, undergoing heart surgery. The true situation was exposed when Shi was examined by prison doctors. Boursicot, hearing the news in prison, refused for months to believe it. When he accepted the truth, feeling cheated, betrayed and humiliated, he cut his throat while in prison. He recovered and returned home to Toulet, an international laughingstock.
All four now live in Paris but are seldom in contact. Boursicot became an apprentice chef in 1989.
Link to Wikipedia biography