🐀Larys Shampoo Era🐀

I think he had homo-something urges, if he lived today he might identify in some capacity as bisexual

but why he didn’t was that I don’t think he fundamentally saw himself as a man who did sexual activity with other men

There were a lot of cultural hangups around queerness in men - particularly around effeminacy and perceived weakness. Napoleon had his moments of tolerance towards sodomy and moments of harshness. Regardless his own possible desires, they would have been repressed and ignored and sublimated into other areas of his life.

He was also someone who had passionate and intense friendships with men that were just friendships - no queerness to them in That Sense. And that’s an important thing to carve out as separate from whatever else he had going on

I really cannot emphasise enough the cultural baggage and taboo around queerness of that time. This isn't a matter of a fear of rejection or not wanting things to be awkward, it is a matter of repression and denial, of fundamentally not understanding any possible desires he might have had through That Lens, it is a matter of the marriage between misogyny and homophobia wherein a man doesn't want to be seen as Lesser or Effeminate or Womanly because the worse thing in the world would be to be seen as Womanly, it is a matter of cultural baggage around sodomy as a mortal sin, it is a matter of cultural baggage around sodomy being illegal until the Revolution ...

all of that and more is what would have been informing Napoleon's response to any possible desires he might have felt towards men and how he would have chosen to interpret them.

he was so deep in the sauce of his cultural and time-period's view of homosexuality that I don't think he even understood or glimpsed that what he felt when he looked at men, or really (really) liked men (nudge, nudge), was in any way shape or form similar to that of what Cambaceres, for example, was feeling.