Bernard Boursicot is the French diplomat who, in the early 1980s, preferred that the world view him as a fool rather than a homosexual. That’s my personal take on the true-crime espionage story that led David Henry Hwang to write his 1988 play, “M. Butterfly.”
Subsequently, journalist Joyce Wadler wrote a nonfiction book about the case, titled “Liaison,” as well as a New York magazine article, “The True Story of M. Butterfly,” published in 1993. Wadler went into very graphic detail about how the male Peking Opera singer Shi Pei Pu deceived Boursicot into believing that he was really female for the 18 years of their affair.