Frank Richardson’s Napoleon: Bisexual Emperor (1973), the author, a British medical doctor, points out that Napoleon always surrounded himself with inordinately handsome young men, most of whom were given extraordinary military promotions.
Evangeline Bruce, whose biography is titled Napoleon and Josephine: An Improbable Marriage (1995), refers to a note written by the emperor during his exile on St. Helena, an island a thousand miles off the shore of Africa. Bruce relates that Napoleon confided that whenever he met a handsome man, his admiration was felt “first in the loins and then another place I will leave unnamed.”